same was true about desks in the iMac days, I was shocked that even crippled iMacs could run the latest OS X years after the fact without being unusable (slow but usable).
I have a 2007 iMac and it is still a better computer than any other desktop I've ever had. It can't run the latest OS X releases but it got more releases than I expected.
You can't magically make older devices support newer features, especially in a market that has evolved as much as mobile.
At my last workplace, the OSX laptops were all 2-3+ years old... and were all incredibly slow. I was always surprised that people could get any work done on them. One woman had an OSX laptop that would boot up with the entire 4GB of memory in use, with no applications or agents loaded except maybe spotify. All the shiny UI in the world doesn't make you more productive when you have to wait for a mouse click to register.
The linux machines were whiteboxes of the same age, and while there was a curl or two in setting them up, were still just as speedy and usable when aged as they were when new.
At my last office we had older macs, a mix of laptops and desktops. They all ran slow, with one user's mac pro using all 4GB RAM on a fresh boot with nothing loaded. These folks were normal users, not power users. When a new OSX release would come out, a few people would upgrade, have a ton of problems, and warn everyone else.
I ran linux myself, and was occasionally called over to help with an OSX problem, and I could never understand how my colleagues could stand to work on such slow computers. In my experience, older macs do not usually run well on newer OSX.
In 20 years, my Macs have proven to be as well-built, hardwarewise, as the best Windows machines I had in the 90s (so, IBM-era Thinkpads). I have one in the house in use as a server that's 12 years old. Runs fine. It's slower than the M1 I'm typing on now (& obviously battery life would be awful) but if I had to I could do work on it.
Your anecdotal experience is opposite of mine: at my place, we still use 4-5 year old computers, and frequently upgrade hard drives, memory, video cards even when needed. We have a few rooms dedicated to spare parts, and when we can't find what we need, new ones are bought. And honestly, my 4yo PC doesn't really need upgrading just so I can open my IDE or browser 20 seconds faster.
Granted, we are an enterprise shop with a few dozen devs - exactly two people have a mac. So we're not exactly Apple's target (enterprise never was)
I never owned one of these while they were contemporary (though did own a somewhat comparable iMac) but picked a 500Mhz model up a couple years ago.
Running OS 9 on modern storage (SSD), it's surprising how responsive it is for most tasks with a single core sub-gigahertz CPU and RAM capacity below the on-disk size of many apps these days. Much of any impression of slowness in day-to-day use when it was current was almost certainly a result of its mechanical HDD.
I still have a 2007 (or 08?) iMac in my office that I use to watch Netflix. I just replaced the HDD with a SSD some years ago. The machine still runs great on OS X 10.10.
The only thing that's a little off-putting is the screen's CFL backlight.
No joke. I still daily use a 2008 MacBook Pro(with a Core2Duo CPU), with an SSD and 8GB of ram and that machine is perfectly fine for what I need it for - browsing the web, replying to emails, listening to Spotify, watching YouTube/Netlix. And people have bought a 2019 iMac with a normal 1TB 5400rpm HDD(!!!!!) And complain that it's slow. Yeah, of course it is, but it has nothing to do with the CPU in there.
At my webdev gig last year I used a 2008 24" iMac with a Core2 Duo and 4gb of RAM and it worked perfectly once I put in a request for a 250gb SSD. The only time it choked up was using ImageOptim on a ton of images, and that could always be offloaded to a server. I think computers are lasting a lot longer than they used to.
Yes old PCs can be unusable too, but I can still use desktop PCs released in the same era as the first smartphones, and with upgraded graphics, memory and SSD they last even longer.
As a counter point I recently got a 12 year old MacPro to fix up and it is almost impossible to make usable even though the specs are better than some old PCs I've given away. So it's an design issue and Apple is a real crook in this regard.
That hardware was obsolete within about 3 years (couldn't update to the latest OSX or XCode
I call shenanigans - latest OSX and XCode running on a 2008 Macbook right here on my desk. I plan to get 10 years usage out of this machine - that's value for money right there.
My wife bought a 2008 iMac for $50 but never used it. One day my laptop broke and I put Manjaro Linux on the iMac, hoping I could use it for a few days knowing it would suck. The screen was nice but it only had 6 GB of RAM, a spinning hard drive, and a Core Duo processor.
Thing is, I still use it all the time. It is the computer I use most often for Zoom and Teams. Web browsing is very good. I use the latest releases of Firefox, Brave, and Edge. Much of my earlier learning around Docker and Podman was on that iMac. It worked great.
I find that older computers work better than underpowered but current stuff, at least with regards to price performance.
The one way that old hardware is worse I suppose is in power usage.
It used to be you basically had to upgrade your computer and smartphone to do anything at all with it in a few years. Not just run the latest programs, but to just browse the web at all. Now a days, we've plateaued on compute for basic consumer purposes at least.
I use a 2012 mac. It only shows its age when I try and run a game on it. Other than that, for writing code, for watching things, reading, browsing, emails, zoom, etc, its no slower than anything modern I could buy. I hear the fans and it gets hot but there's no lag or anything, and it boots in a minute with the ssd I put in a few years ago. I did have a new mac for a bit recently, but I went back to this one because it was clear there wasn't much of a point with my usage for how much it cost. No withdraw from retina either, because at the distance you use a laptop you can't see the pixels on the 2012 anyhow. Maybe I can get another 11 years out of it at this rate.
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