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Dear Apple, there’s nothing ‘really sad’ about using a 5-year-old PC

378 points by Ph4nt0m 10y ago

imaffett 10y ago
I still use my 2009 MBP. I upgraded to an SSD drive and 8 gigs of ram. I don't game on it, but I can do almost all of my development on it. I'll admit it's slower then my 2013 MPB at work, but I see no reason to spend more money on a working computer. My second computer is a Chromebook. My oldest daughter uses it for school work and we couldn't be happier. It's much better then our iPad (which we don't use anymore).
sudosushi 10y ago
As someone sitting at a nearly 5 year old Macbook Pro, I took the comment as an off hand throwaway. I understand not liking the comment, but this isn't news. A company thinks everyone should be using the latest of their products. Oh no.
- TearsInTheRain 10y ago
  There are two articles about this non-story on the first page of HN. What a joke
  - bargl 10y ago
    I think this may be a consequence of HackerNews not having a downvote option for stories. I like the fact that they don't and I wouldn't suggest making the change but it tends to allow stories that have a higher dislike to like ratio to rise because the number of people who have an opinion are very high. This does tend to prevent some filtering of storied I do think should stay up on the top. It would be an interesting experiment to add a downvote to stories button to see what happened, even if that button didn't actually affect where the stories showed in the list at first.
    - jaimex2 10y ago
      or you know, we could use our internal filters. I am disappointed with myself for clicking this link. Sometimes the comments are too hard to pass up.
- onion2k 10y ago
  A company thinks everyone should be using the latest of their products. Oh no. An alternative way to read this is that Apple themselves don't believe their own products will be worth using after 5 years, and will therefore fail to support them properly in the long term. Anyone in the market for a computer to last longer than that (eg most home users, and many corporate users who don't lease) might have to look elsewhere. This is not an offhand throwaway comment. This speaks to the absolute heart of Apple's strategy.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    Apple makes no money on the OS. That is included with the hardware and upgrades are free. So aside from services such as App Store and iTunes, Apple has to sell hardware to make money. It's not in their interest to encourage people to hang on to older hardware as long as possible.
    - onion2k 10y ago
      It's not in their interest to encourage people to hang on to older hardware as long as possible. There's a difference between encouraging people to hang on to hardware for as long as possible and actively driving away your customers by laughing at them or suggesting that your own products will be obsolete before the customer is ready to update again. To maximise their profit on hardware Apple should be encouraging users to stay within the Apple ecosystem, even if those customers only upgrade every 10 years. This is especially true in today's climate of very powerful computers that will easily do most things a home user wants to do even after a decade. As someone who writes web software I am acutely aware that there are users who are still using old PCs with old software. For Apple to push their customers to abandon Apple products in favour of things that last longer is corporate suicide.
  - andremendes 10y ago
    >Apple themselves don't believe their own products will be worth using after 5 years I think you got the gist of this thread! It's not actually about the poor but about competing products lasting longer than their product planned lifespan, and that's a bad thing for them.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  That's an odd fact about markets. You have the high rate of progress phase where technological advances almost sell themselves. I didn't have to wonder for long to want a Pentium 200 MMX instead of my Pentium 75. Nowadays it's really tough to convince someone naturally and strongly. They have to push for new 'needs' (4K ?) or allow for crapware and subpar software to trigger the religious reflex newer = better = faster.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    4K monitors are a little marginal. 27" is really too small, most people need some DPI enlargement to feel comfortable. The bigger panels increase significantly in price, but I think 32-36" would probably be about right in terms of ppi. 27" 1440P monitors are fantastic though, they strike the perfect balance between resolution, size, and price. If you're used to 22-24" monitors I really encourage you to give it a try, it's very nice for productivity. You can get a cheap Korean VA/IPS monitor for $200 on eBay or a very nice one for $300 or so (the nicer ones have DC backlights which help prevent eyestrain from PWM flickering). Definitely worth it.
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      I never used something above 21/22 IIRC, but as a secondary monitor. I'll give it a shot, although nowadays I'm having a retro fetish, give me a 10" orange / black CRT and I'll be happy.
    - slantyyz 10y ago
      Here's my experience with 27" 4K monitors. I originally planned on getting a single 32" 4K IPS monitor, but got tired of waiting for it to come out in Canada. I test drove a few smaller 28 4K screens in the local computer store and realized that I could easily live with 1:1 on a 28". I ended up getting a Dell 27" 4K monitor because I wanted an IPS panel. I realize I'm in a very small minority of users who can use 4K with no scaling at 27" -- I use a standing desk and I have single vision computer glasses for the distance my monitors are away from my face. When I first got the 27" 4K monitor, I was in awe of the glorious real estate it afforded me. That awe didn't last long, however, because I ended up wanting even more real estate. So I bought a second, matching 4K monitor, and it's great. It's like having 8x1080p monitors. I would love the additional real estate from a third and fourth monitor (i.e., 8K equivalent) but things would get harder at that point because of neck movements, stand availability and the fact that I have a small form factor PC with no room for additional video cards.
- chasing 10y ago
  Also, the event was an hour long advertisement. Not a TED Talk or Nobel Prize acceptance speech. An ad. "The old products suck. Buy our shiny new products!" If advertising offends you, fine. But don't watch an hour-long ad and then get irritated because they try to sell you shit.
- jxy 10y ago
  As someone typing on a 2011 Macbook Air, I really don't like that comment. What's wrong with using a 5 year old computer? Fortunately their hardwares still last for you and me. I had to send in mine for repair twice. Once for the keyboard and the other for the touchpad. If the company is pushing people to dump their 5 year old hardware, I'm going to be a little nervous to buy their new product.
  - Tiktaalik 10y ago
    This was my immediate thought while watching the press conference to. It sounded more a simple tone deaf statement. I buy Apple hardware because I think it's really high quality and I can expect it to last. I was troubled that maybe Apple doesn't align with my beliefs.
po1nter 10y ago
I don't understand how the author went from the guy saying it's "really sad" to "Apple is insulting people". I mean even his first argument on why people don't upgrade IS actually sad since they can't afford to do that. I know it is because I'm one of those people who can't afford to upgrade my machine. /rant typed on a 5 year old Asus N53SV.
sz4kerto 10y ago
I think I have a rusty, almost 5 year old PC lying around. It has an Intel i7-2600K overclocked to 4.6 GHz, 24 GB RAM, 240G SSD and a Radeon 6950 GPU that can run most games well in fHD. Most of the machines Apple sells are actually slower than this PC.
- atonse 10y ago
  That's a great exception to the rule. The overwhelming majority of computers Apple is talking about, are probably shitty $400 PCs that were underpowered from day one, which are just barely chugging along. Because that is actually what most people buy.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    Thing is, OS bloat has finally ground to a halt. Win8.1 wasn't really any slower than 7, and Win10 is actually faster in my experience. So really, you don't need a stronger machine today than you did five years ago. Any perceived slowdown is just the result of malware, fragmentation, and DLL buildup - refresh the OS and maybe install an SSD and they're fine. I'm using a laptop from 2010 with an i7-720QM and an SSD, and it's perfectly snappy. I frequently let it do light encoding tasks while I'm using my desktop.
    - atonse 10y ago
      Partly. Yes, the operating systems feel faster, but they are all relying more on GPUs for their rendering. And one way cheap Windows PCs keep their costs down is by using cheap integrated GPUs that are quite underpowered. I use Windows 10 on in VMWare every day at 4k resolution on my retina macbook pro. It feels a bit sluggish, but I know I'm pushing the limits of VM graphics on a laptop with that resolution. But I can only imagine that a computer that's 6-7 years old would start to struggle graphically in Windows 10.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    I bought a 2008 Macbook as a refurb back in 2009. Apple didn't think it was worth making Mountain Lion running on it. Meanwhile, I installed the newest 64 bit version of Windows 10 on it as part of the Insider program, and it generally runs faster than my Lion install.
johansch 10y ago
I built a desktop PC almost exactly five years ago. - Intel Core i5 2500K, 3.3 GHz, quad-core (200 USD) - 8B (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz C9 (100 USD) - 120GB 2.5" SSD Intel X25-M G2 (200 USD) - GeForce GTX 460 1GB (200 USD) It's sad that a full five years later, CPU performance/USD has barely moved at all. RAM is half the cost now, SSDs a quarter the cost. Not sure about how GPUs have developed? (Edit: The GTX 960 which today also costs 200 USD seems to be about twice as fast as the GTX 460.)
- facepalm 10y ago
  GPUs have developed a lot. I had a high-end card a couple of years ago, and now I can barely run Elite: Dangerous. For the upcoming VR headsets I would definitely need a new GPU. Apple doesn't even have a computer on offer that would be powerful enough for the VR headsets (Oculus/Vive). 8GB RAM is also the bare minimum.
- piva00 10y ago
  GPUs are much better now since GTX 460 but that's all you'd need to upgrade in this computer (and some storage) if you wanted to play current AAA games in 1080p or even at 1440p.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  You represent the 5% of PC consumers. The average person goes to Walmart/Bestbuy/BJ's/Staples and spends $475 on some shitbox laptop. The 25th percentile user (ie. millions of people) probably spent $275-325. That average person who bought that average PC in 2011 has an aging HP/Dell/Asus laptop with a failing battery, $30 Celeron or AMD processor, 2GB memory, integrated graphics, a 500GB 5400rpm disk and integrated graphics.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    I still have my 2008 plastic Macbook refurb that I still use to browse the web. I had the pre-release Win 10/64 on it for a while, and it actually ran faster than OSX did on that machine (in my experience, Windows runs faster on Mac than OSX itself, but ymmv). And keep in mind that my Macbook pretty much got left behind by OSX after Lion.
danielvf 10y ago
This is classic trolling, plain and simple. The head of marketing thinks that using a competitor's product is "sad". In response, this article calls Apple: "Insensitive". Offensive. "Hypocritical". "Insulting". And worst of all, promoting inequality by building high quality, expensive products and forgetting the needs of the poor. It's an article designed to produce a response.
draw_down 10y ago
I agree that this was tone-deaf of them, I just find it fascinating that we picked this one instance of tech industry rich guy tone-deafness. Seems to be getting a lot of play for some reason. But it's everywhere if you look.
tombert 10y ago
Did nothing interesting happen in the tech world today? This is such a non-story, it's really weird that this is on the front-page twice.
- dublinben 10y ago
  Pornhub launched a new VR channel for 180 and 360 degree content. Tinder Adds “Swipe The Vote” so you can hook up with your candidate. You decide whether either of these are more deserving.
NikolaeVarius 10y ago
I swear, if a modern tech company went up and said 'We think you should buy our product", someone would start yelling about how its insulting how a company is endorising capitalism and materialism. We've gone from "Won't somebody think of the children" to "Won't somebody think of every single possible group that is possible to somehow offend in some way"
- praptak 10y ago
  It is intellectually dishonest to equate endorsing ones product with mocking people who are too poor to use it.
  - zepto 10y ago
    It's dishonest to assert that Apple mocked people who are too poor to use their products.
- wrong_variable 10y ago
  No. What apple is saying today is something that it has always said - but its only recently that people in america are too poor to buy american products. I grew up around windows and linux, and whenever I tell that in a job interview - people think I am not being serious since "real developers" use mac. In my first software job - I was told to abandon my personal cheap linux and use the company's brand new expensive apple - even though I was more productive on my cheap linux. Apple has always been like that, its just that most people who come from money do not hear it. Edit: Also you will notice this in poorer countries - a strong ecosystem for recycling exists everywhere outside of the US/UK. When I brought my first bike in the UK, I wanted to repair it and was told to just ditch it and get a new one ! It was extremely odd to me since I expected that bike to last at-least 20 years. When my 3 year old laptop stopped working - I had it repaired rather than buy a newer one - even though repairing was almost as expensive as getting a new one. It just fell really wrong ditching a laptop rather than repairing it. Maybe you are right - western societies do worship materialism.
  - kzrdude 10y ago
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
If anything its a fairly strong statement on the ruggedness of the PC platform. I have a 2500k i5 in my old desktop. With a new-ish videocard I play all the newest AAA games at high quality. Its incredible how the x86 world really hasn't had any huge performance bumps and how a Q1 2011 CPU is still competitive. Also, there's the larger narrative of people buying tablets and putting off PC upgrades, so the PC ages. Don't worry Apple, you're still getting their money. Its just people aren't ready to replace a general purpose computer that they control and can run pretty much everything with a walled garden mobile device designed to get ad impressions and consume media. If anything, this is Apple's frustration. They have all this success but people and businesses keep buying PCs. They'll never crack this market. They're too invested in the Jobsian "closed" ecosystem philosophy to be as agile as the PC platform. Mocking those who don't drink their kool-aid just makes them look like sore winners. edit: I'm aware I can buy a newer chip, but from a single core vs single core perspective its not that much faster. Very little consumer software is properly multi-threaded so this is why my expensive work computer with the newest i7 doesnt feel any faster than my 5 year old desktop at home. Most things are pegged to one core and at the end of the day single core performance is what's going to matter.
- acqq 10y ago
  > I have a 2500k i5 in my old desktop. > Its incredible how the x86 world really hasn't had any huge performance bumps and how a Q1 2011 CPU is still competitive. Actually you can have twice as fast desktop CPU today than your 2500k, and not for some number crunching you'll maybe never need (even though it's the most important thing for others) but for such common tasks like compiling the code: http://techreport.com/r.x/skylake/legacy1-qtbench.gif http://techreport.com/r.x/skylake/legacy1-qtbench.gif Not bad at all for the times when the hardware speedups are getting harder. But it's good that even the newest games don't expect only the latest CPU.
  - venomsnake 10y ago
    Where is the doubled single core performance? We have more cores now, but they are almost as fast as 3-4 years ago.
  - 10y ago
dcustodio 10y ago
Some people need to feel offended just as I need my morning coffee. I'm not even counting how old is my pc/laptop and that's the thing I like about PCs - there's hardly anything new that triggers my Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
snowwrestler 10y ago
Yes there are things that are sad about it. A 5-year-old PC is probably not running a recent version of Windows, and has a higher likelihood of being compromised. And if a person wants a new computer but can't afford it, that is sad too. That said, it was an obviously stupid stat for Schiller to cite. But now we're going to be subjected to a long series of Apple-bashing articles that overreach in the opposite direction. By the end of today we'll see multiple "actually, I'm proud to be running 5-year-old PC" posts. Why? Because when mining for pageviews, there are few veins as rich as bashing Apple. Edit to add: If we want to talk about the tech industry and poor people, let's do so. How many new companies are variations of "let us bring things to your door for you for an extra fee" or "let's give you personalized service so you don't have to go shopping/ride a bus/interact with a human"?
- elthran 10y ago
  > A 5-year-old PC is probably not running a recent version of Windows Windows 7 was released in 2009, and all official owners of Windows 7 were offered the Windows 10 upgrade. I'd be surprised if many PCs that are 5 years old aren't running one of these 2 OSs
- trey-jones 10y ago
  I'm proud to be running my almost-seven-year-old PC, though I think it is about time for an upgrade. I also have a 2013 Macbook Pro, which is more than adequate for work. I'm not exactly poor, and I abhor the way the media runs away with this kind of comment. But I also get a little peeved at overzealous marketing that takes advantage of people's ignorance. Convincing people that their 5 year old PC no longer meets their needs (when it probably does) is pretty similar to convincing some poor sucker to switch to your super duper maximum strength 4G Long Term Evolution wireless network because you can have 20G of data per month, when you actually only use 0.5G of data per month.
- Mikeb85 10y ago
  A 5 year old PC is likely running Windows 7, which still receives upgrades, is supported, and is quite secure. Of course, all Windows 7 PCs received a free upgrade path to Windows 10. So there's no reason they couldn't be running the most recent Windows, without spending a dime. Of course, they could also be running something like Ubuntu (Linux counter puts the number at 73 million, W3Counter at 2.58% of all devices, or just under half OSX's numbers in that counting method), in which case they'd also likely be running a recent OS, one which is arguably more secure than either Windows or OSX. I don't think it's 'offensive' what Schiller says. But it does speak to Apple's mentality, where planned obsolescence and profit trumps all, and the faithful buy into it...
apatters 10y ago
If there's something sad about that fact, it's that the industry has delivered so little value in the past 5 years that not many people feel compelled to upgrade!
- slantyyz 10y ago
  > If there's something sad about that fact, it's that the industry has delivered so little value in the past 5 years that not many people feel compelled to upgrade! The glass half-full response? The industry has delivered so much value in the past 5-8 years that not many people feel compelled to upgrade!
  - massysett 10y ago
    Exactly. I haven't upgraded my washing machine or refrigerator in the last 5 years either. The people Schiller was sneering at view PCs as appliances, and they don't watch Apple press conferences anyway.
facepalm 10y ago
I can be "not wrong" and sad at the same time. A newer PC would likely be much faster, resulting in less stress and less wasted time.
johnhattan 10y ago
Actually, my main development tower is about nine years old. And in that time, I've upgraded the processor, doubled the memory, upgraded the hard drive to an SSD, switched the video card twice, upped the number of connected monitors from one to three, and upgraded the OS from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 10. It was pretty leading edge when I built it, and it's still pretty leading edge today. What's sad is the expectation that I should throw my computer away every 18 months.
- optforfon 10y ago
  Once you replace the motherboard it'll be a true modern day Ship of Theseus
  - Caprinicus 10y ago
    Unless he's on AMD and the processor upgrade was very minor, he almost certainly did. It's odd when people say "my computer is a decade old and I've only had to replace every single part multiple times over look at how green I'm being". It's the exact same thing as buying a new computer a couple times, just in smaller increments and with parts that are less likely to be recycled on their own.
    - johnhattan 10y ago
      Yep, AMD. And the only thing I got rid of were the video cards, which I sold on ebay. I put the old drive in an external case and used it to archive old engineering projects. Kept the original monitor and added the other two. I did have to trash my keyboard after I spilled coffee on it, though :)
- slantyyz 10y ago
  I try to overspend on my computers to ensure that I have a computer that can last at least five years. I loved the Macbook Pro unibodies because they were expandable. My 2011 MBP had its memory upgraded and maxed out as prices came down, and its storage upgraded to larger and faster drives and SSDs as prices came down. If it weren't for one thing, it would have still been my main computer and delayed my switch to Windows. The infamous overheating problem with my model of MBP turned it into a brick a few months before Apple acknowledged the defect and announced a repair program. The replacement part was known to have the same defect (I already had my logic board replaced once), and being out of AppleCare, there was no way in hell I was paying >500 out of pocket for yet another defective board. So I just switched to a Windows machine since nothing I did was OS dependent anyways. Granted I would have switched when the Macbook Pro got unusable (unibodies are gone and don't like the new soldered on approach), but I think that wouldn't have happened until at least 2018.
busterarm 10y ago
Still running a desktop with a Q9650 and 8GB RAM. Runs fine.
fit2rule 10y ago
You know what makes me really happy? Any computer being used for fun/interesting/productive things, not just 'the latest ones'. As a die-hard retrocomputing enthusiast with far more old computers in my basement than new, I'm biased. But I sure think that the time has come for the compute industry to start highlighting the need for lesser computing power, but yet still more productive computing. 8-bit computers are awesome. 16-bit machines superb! Get yourself set up with these systems and you can entertain yourself for hours and hours. 8-bit is a great way to learn software development - 2 hours of 8-bit coding a week will keep you sharper than sharp when the time comes to go back to the hipstertools-de-jour. (I kid, I kid.) Point is this, folks: old computers never die - their users do.
colund 10y ago
In times of climate change debate I think Apple is doing the wrong thing here, encouraging buy and throw away mentality increasing waste.
- danielvf 10y ago
  We definitely need a strong reduction in the introduction of new technology that replaces old, still working hardware. This is so wasteful. Along with this, we need centrally planned production of consumer goods to control the pace of change and prevent overproduction, and these goods need to be have government set prices to insure that everyone can afford them.
  - wooter 10y ago
    Because the USSR had no pollution or poor people... /s
- zepto 10y ago
  You clearly didn't watch the keynote, since a significant part of it was about unprecedented programs to reuse and recycle their hardware.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    Recycling can be a net environmental negative, plus you still have the environmental impact of creating the replacement unit. Not replacing something that still works is way better than replacing it even if you recycle the old unit.
    - zepto 10y ago
      That's why Apple prioritizes reuse over recycling.
  - whitegrape 10y ago
    The phrase "reduce reuse recycle" is actually a pyramid of effectiveness. The best thing is to reduce your consumption entirely, which in this case translates to not producing or buying new hardware you don't need.
deleted 10y ago
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jaimex2 10y ago
There is however something sad about buying products to not look poor.
kps 10y ago
My main home machine is an 8-year-old Mac Pro running Snow Leopard. Apple today sells nothing that could replace it, let alone improve on it.
emp_ 10y ago
The only thing not lasting more than 5 years in my 20+ years owning computers are Macs, other iDevices and PCs are much, much stabler. Macbook Pro 2008 (died in 3 years), iMac 27 2010 (died in 4.8 years), Macbook Air 2013 (dying) and Mac Mini 2012 (dying) are the reason why I always end up coming back to my 2010 gaming PC and 2010 HTPC, the ones to break the 5+ year mark without a major hardware failure.
parenthesis 10y ago
Until earlier this year I was still making heavy use of a Powerbook from 2004. I only stopped using it because the graphics hardware started to go funny. I sold its battery, memory and power supply to someone still using a slightly older Powerbook.
mikehearn 10y ago
I interpreted that comment as a jab at the PC industry. The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a compelling reason to upgrade. Isn't that the correct interpretation, considering the whole point of bringing that up is because they're positioning a new device intended to replace the PC? I seriously doubt it's intended to mean (to quote the article) "LOL poor people". Granted, this interpretation would make for a boring thinkpiece and would not get me to #1 on HN.
- aetherson 10y ago
  I don't think that it means "LOL poor people" either. But I do think that it's bullshit marketing talk. Apple is perfectly happy to be proud (rightly, I think) of the enduring utility of older pieces of Apple hardware -- but if some other company's hardware continues to be perfectly serviceable for 5 years, that's sad? Also, if you have a 5 year old PC that's genuinely not serving your needs any more, sure, you could pay $600 for an iPad Pro that also probably won't serve your needs, or you could pay around $400 for a new PC that will serve your needs.
  - bitJericho 10y ago
    Bought a dual CPU workstation with 12gb ram and two quad core 12 mb cache xeons for under 400 bucks. It's about 5 year old tech and its awesome!
    - tdkl 10y ago
      Yep, eBay is booming with second hand workstations like this. Cousin bought a HP Z210 Quad Core E3-1270 3.40GHz with 16GB RAM for 320€. Added a SSD and cheap GPU and is an awesome 500€ machine that can last for years.
    - orbitingpluto 10y ago
      Totally there. If your electricity is cheap, it's an awesome deal. Since, oh about, 2009, there are a lot of choices that are akin to buying a '57 Chevy.
johndevor 10y ago
Holy crap the "politically correct" army has entered the tech world. We're not safe anywhere...
- deleted 10y ago
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yq 10y ago
semi-Related:iCar release date rumours, features and images: Apple CEO Tim Cook comments on Apple Car rumours http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/will-apple-make-icar-project-titan-rumour-roundup-bmw-tesla-tim-cook-3425394/ http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/will-apple-make-icar-pr... Reading related news is interesting. Imagine Apple applies its tactics on their cars: You probably need a new apple designed plugin other than the universal one, special tools to change flat tires and/or update the exterior slightly to market therefore driving a 5-year-old car is sad.
PaulHoule 10y ago
The main problem I see is Intel and Microsoft have given up on power users and it is all Apple envy and phone envy, no wonder people don't buy new PCs. Back in the 0s I had a policy of never rehabilitating an old PC because a new PC was better in every way. The other day a friend brought a Macbook from 2007 to me with a busted HDD and I put an ssd I had laying around in and we got Win10 running on it with no drama and no Apple malware (iTunes, boot camp, etc.) It feel faster than a skylake machine with one of those useless hybrid hard drives and after puffing some hcfc gas through the fan it is great. Any and or pre core 2 machine would go to the trash, I would not even donate it to the poor, but frankly broadwell and skylake are just an excuse to reduce the io slots to put manufacturers of gfx cards. They say customers get better battery life but software screws that up if they really tried it and the most you can get is spend a lot of money on a thin and light machine that the doorman can slide under the hotel or get a 2 in 1 machine just because you need a trackpad on a touchpad machine and have a fight over if and where you stow it with the stewardess just to have another reason to get arrested at your destination. I mean, even IBM sells 360 chips that clock over 5 that use water cooling. It is not that hard.
oldmanjay 10y ago
I'm not a fan of moralistic handwringing, particularly when it's brought about by uncharitable interpretations of what is clearly just marketing. This and the related articles are such poor quality that it makes me sad to see them get so much traction here. It's the sort of thing I'd expect at dailytech or slashdot.
atomical 10y ago
Is there anything sad about using a 5 year old mac? I'm hoping that eventually my mac book pro will last 5-10 years. With multi-core systems, SSDs, and 16 gigs of ram in MBP's do we really need to be upgrading so much? Also, clock speed advances have stalled.
agumonkey 10y ago
-- sent from my almost perfect 9yo laptop
ArenaSource 10y ago
Last Macbook Pro generation is from 2012... this is really sad, it really is.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  I may not be a fan of Apple any more, but I don't understand how this is sad. The innards have been upgraded regularly since 2012, and the CPUs and GPUs in the latest 15" models are pretty competitive to everything else on the market not counting machines for gamers.
c0achmcguirk 10y ago
"I want to be offended!" signed, people who take offense at a off-hand remark like this. Grow some thicker skin and stop wasting my screen real estate with irrelevant non-stories like this.
bliti 10y ago
I use a 4 year old MBP. Does that make me middle class then?
studentrob 10y ago
Schiller is marketing his product. This is no different from the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials. There are now two articles on the HN front page about this utterly pedantic topic which boils down to marketing. Unbelievable.
deleted 10y ago
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BWStearns 10y ago
Really this isn't terribly offensive. They're selling a product they think is superior, in their [marketing] minds the world would be a better place if you were pulled from the womb, slapped on the ass, and handed an iPad Pro, to be renewed every generation of gadget. The Apple presentation stage is not the Basilica of St Peter. These are marketing pronouncements, not moral ones and analyzing them as such is such intense naval gazing that it's actually bad for your neck. If Apple hates the poor it's for no reason other than that they're outside their customer base.
specialp 10y ago
It is ironic that Apple is mentioning this as I believe this is going to spell the end of their era of massive profits. Phones now are getting to the state where much like PCs, the older phone is good enough, and the new phone is not substantially better. There will always be people buying a phone for .2ghz more CPU or some slightly higher res screen, but the days of rapid evolution of mobile devices are over, and Apple is going to have problems selling someone a $6-800 phone every year or 2.
- cookiemonsta 10y ago
  But with new OS versions, older phones quickly start to show their age. An iphone 4 or iphone 4s on the latest version of iOS it supports is really sluggish and slow (and no easy way to put iOS6/7 back on it)
  - empressplay 10y ago
    this is by design, though, obviously. providing "upgrades" to previous models incapable of truly supporting them is kind of an Apple trademark
- 21 10y ago
  A large part of iPhone's market is as a status symbol. As the saying goes, the only thing worse than not having an iPhone is having last year's one.
sergiotapia 10y ago
Jesus christ, they are in the business of selling computers. This faux outrage over a salesman trying to sell his computers is gross - what's wrong with people? Now watch as every blog tries to scramble to see who has the most outrage and who is the largest victim.
tobeportable 10y ago
http://www.apple.com/environment/ http://www.apple.com/environment/
rsync 10y ago
You know what's really sad ? I am using a 2009 octo mac pro, which is now 7 years old and since that date, apple has not released a single product that is compelling enough to upgrade that system.
tfandango 10y ago
I'm a little sour on Apple. They say their products are rugged and "built to last", but an iPad is mostly glass which you need to encase in a giant rubber protective case if you don't want the screen shattered. Even then they are easy to break and very costly to fix, to the point now where it barely makes sense to fix it over replace it. Self-Repair is less expensive but so far I'm 50/50 on successes. I would say they are built to last, until the next one comes out.
- secstate 10y ago
  The killer part is that it's only expensive to repair because Apple has opted not to streamline a repair pipeline. There is absolutely no way a digitizer glued to a piece of glass costs $500 otherwise they'd never make another iPad. But if they price the part hideously expensively it makes buying a new one a no-brainer. Working in a school for a few years, I was amazed how easily and inexpensively I could replace screens and memory on 2008-era white macbooks when I had access to school channels for parts priced at cost (or close enough). I think we had access to those channels as a stipulation in a state contract to buy assloads of those machines for every kid in the state.
existencebox 10y ago
Perhaps I have some wires crossed from too much time as a sysadmin, but I take a 5 year old (+) PC (or any machine, really) as a mark of pride, not any bit of shame whatsoever. It speaks to a high degree of reliability which often speaks well of the operator (even if just "choosing robust hardware" is a component of this) Some stories to add some color to this: Ran a very primitive file sharing server for my university on a dual P(2 or 3, don't quite remember) machine that was probably around a decade old by the time they finally ended up retiring it. My home fileserver is a ~10 TB 4U monster, running on (conveniently) 5 year old hardware and very boring FBSD. Outside of moving apartments, it has not had unplanned downtime once, I will continue using it as long as this is true and would be sad if I didn't get another good few years out of it. I _WISH_ I could get the same lifetime out of desktop PCs but I tend to find assorted parts failing at an asymptotic rate around 3-5 years. The world in which we all use <5 year old hardware is a sad one, to be avoided, to my eyes. (To clarify, I don't mean this in any luddite sense, I don't believe tech should stop moving forward, but I long for more robust products with longer viable lifespans, such that one can make a choice to upgrade rather than waiting for the inevitable.)
- NEDM64 10y ago
  That's not a PC (Personal Computer), it's a server. You are thinking about hardware, Apple is talking about the whole computer.
  - existencebox 10y ago
    You're right, but I was not trying to make a 1:1 comparison, but saying that properties servers seem to have in spades I'd really appreciate seeing in other markets, but that segment seems rarely catered to. (Let me gesture as well to my 2.5 year old phone whose irreplaceable battery is currently ballooning) My statement addressed the "whole computer" as well, although the FS example was very much a special niche tool, I'd go so far as to say 90% of novel software features that have necessitated hardware refreshes in the last... decade? I could probably live without. This may be mildly hyperbole, but I hope the spirit of my statement comes across. I want to spend less time replacing/fixing my platforms and more time with them "just working".
chasing 10y ago
I, too, am shocked that a computer company would communicate that their new computing devices are better than the old ones people already own. Shocked.
compactmani 10y ago
600 million PC users discovered that running a lightweight unix distribution/DE and not allowing javascript made the life expectancy of their computers triple. Or so I dream.
flyinghamster 10y ago
As someone who just picked up a reconditioned six-year-old, i7-equipped ThinkPad for a hell of a lot less money than what it would have cost brand-new, I have to laugh. It may not be the Latest and Greatest, but it's still speedy enough to handle anything I'm going to throw at it. The CPU performance curve has flattened out in the last few years, to the point that it's not worth spending lots of money for a modest performance gain. I'll let someone else take the depreciation hit.
- basch 10y ago
  considering cpu speed has been "good enough since around core 2 duos (late 2006?) the only major improvements since then have been battery life and ssd cost. anyone with a computer from the last 10 years that can support an ssd and 8+gb ram, is probably fine. travel being the exception.
- NEDM64 10y ago
  You probably did a very bad deal.
programminggeek 10y ago
What Phil said worked.
mrbill 10y ago
I said this in the other thread.. I just bought a "new to me" laptop. Refurb Thinkpad T420s from 2011. I added 16G RAM, two Intel SSDs, an Ultrabay battery, and an 802.12ac wifi card. Grand total: less than $325. This will be my primary portable for at least 2-3 years, and it's already four years old. Just because I can afford Apple doesn't mean I can justify the 2x price premium, or that "old" hardware isn't capable.
- kamaal 10y ago
  May I ask from where you bought it and how did you upgrade it. Looks like a very interested configuration.
  - e15ctr0n 10y ago
    There's a lot of good stuff on eBay and Craigslist.
  - mrbill 10y ago
    I tend to get my refurb Thinkpads from arrowdirect.com. You can use the code ARROW for 20% off. I ordered this one as 4G/128SSD but already had the RAM on hand to upgrade it to 16G. Part sources: (if you want to upgrade from the 128G) Intel Pro 1500 180G: $55 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pro-1500-180-GB-2-5-SSD-Internal-Solid-State-Drive-SSDSC2BF180A4H-/191728007943 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pro-1500-180-GB-2-5-SSD-Intern... (optional) Intel 310 80G mSATA SSD: $30 http://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-310-Series-80GB-mSATA-SSD-SSDMAEMC080G2-/231812886235 http://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-310-Series-80GB-mSATA-SSD-SSDM... Ultrabay battery: $28 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Thinkpad-Battery-43-3-Cell-Bay-Lenovo-Genuine-FRU-0A36310-NIB-/141898955475 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Thinkpad-Battery-43-3-Cell-Ba... Intel 7260 802.11ac MiniPCIe wifi card: $28 http://www.amazon.com/Intel-7260-HMWG-R-Wireless-AC-Bluetooth-Mounting/dp/B00MY9S692 http://www.amazon.com/Intel-7260-HMWG-R-Wireless-AC-Bluetoot... An external USB3 enclosure for the Ultrabay DVDRW drive will run around $30 on Amazon. To install the Intel 7260 card, you will need to install a modified "whitelist removed" BIOS, as Lenovo restricts what MiniPCIe cards can go in their systems by default. The system comes with an 802.11n card (mine was an Intel Centrino 6205). My only complaint about ArrowDirect is that if they have a system model that could have different screen resolutions, you have no way of specifying / requesting certain specs; you get what they pull and send. Every system I've ordered from them (close to ten now) has arrived in near-mint condition; this t420s would be amazingly perfect if not for a scuff of the rubberized paint/coating on the top lid (which doesn't matter to me one bit).
reacweb 10y ago
I have a HP Pavilion Elite m9458fr bought in july 2009 for 416€ (on eBay hp_marketplace_fr). I only need a silent reliable computer with a reasonably fast CPU for web development on Linux. I have no need for beefy GPU, I just need to connect 2 displays (23" and 19"). I would like to replace it in order to have USB3 connectors and SATA III HD. I do not find anything on the market for reasonable price. Should I buy a ultra-HD laptop with a magnifying lens ?
justinholmes 10y ago
My 5 year old PC has a dual socket Xeon I think that beats any iPad rubbish.
- NEDM64 10y ago
  How much battery life dos your PC have?
craigmccaskill 10y ago
I'm using a ~5 year old PC I built myself and it still outperforms the hardware in any available mac product (desktop, tablet or laptop) that isn't a Mac Pro (starting price $2999,00). I don't have a compelling reason to upgrade until the launch of VR headsets.
- balls187 10y ago
  I am also using a phone that outperforms the hardware of any available PC that wasn't built in this century. Putting aside the hyperbole, I'm willing to bet the USB 3.0 and TB2 ports on my MBP out perform the ports on your 5-year old PC.
  - craigmccaskill 10y ago
    I actually have 2 USB 3.0 ports. USB 3.0 was first available on ASUS motherboards in late 2009 [1]. Thunderbolt wasn't available at that point but it was unveiled with the Thunderbolt Display, which was July 20th 2011, so coming up fast on 5 years old tech at this point. I personally have no use for 20Gbps transfers so TB2 has zero draw for me to upgrade. Talking about hyperbole, you're comparing brand new hardware vs something that was released in 1999 (so 16 years of moore's law) against the point that the hardware apple uses in it's cutting edge desktops/laptops is pretty comparable to the stuff commercially available 5 years ago, which is a valid point. If Apple wants to shame the market for not upgrading in the last 5 years, maybe they should offer a valid reason to upgrade outside of a marketing campaign appealing to 'want' and additional software features which a recent change actually made free anyway. The idea that I could replace my PC with an iPad pro is just plain wrong. [1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/174672/Asus_Debut_First_USB_30_Motherboard.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/174672/Asus_Debut_First_USB_3...
    - balls187 10y ago
      My hyperbole was making fun of your silly statement that your 5 year old computer out performs all the hardware that Apple makes[1] My phone is more powerful than any PC[2] I am the richest man in Seattle[3] > The idea that I could replace my PC with an iPad pro is just plain wrong. I'll take your word on that. But that isn't true for all PC users. I have a pretty beefy machine, not the latest and greatest, but a hex-core, 12gb, 960gtx and dual 30" monitors, which I use wholly for gaming. Youtubing, videoing, etc, have all moved to my ipad+appletv, and with my PS4, I finally feel like I have a console that provides a real crisp gaming experience. So I'm ready to no longer maintain my $2k PC, and switch to something like a SteamMachine. [1] if you exclude the MacPro. [2] made before the year 2000 [3] if you exclude the people that have more money than I do.
agentgt 10y ago
I interpreted it as "it's sad that those Window users having been using just Windows for 5 or more years and not Mac". IMO He's catering to the audience of Apple enthusiasts (who are the ones that watch Apple events generally) and not making fun of poor people. Its sort of analogous to when Jobs said: "It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell" -- about iTunes on Windows computers Oh so Jobs thinks Windows users are Evil since they are in hell right?
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Methinks Jobs had an overly high opinion of iTunes. Giving iTunes to a Windows user is more like giving a massive, ugly, wooden horse to a Trojan, and it is so incredibly unwieldy that the lintel has to be removed from the city gate to even get it inside. Then a bunch of bearded maniacs come out of it and kill everybody. I can't even tell you how many times I have been murdered in my sleep by iTunes. Okay, well, yes I can--zero. But that doesn't stop me from thinking it might happen one day.
  - agentgt 10y ago
    Yes I agree. Even on my Mac I have seen it take more memory than Spotify and Spotify these days is basically running a Chrome instance. I use VLC for most quicktime/itunes things these days.
holri 10y ago
Maybe user of old computers are not poor but: * Do not suffer from avarice? * They do not need the newest shiny toy for their ego and to win recognition? * They don't touch a good running working system? * They want to save CO2 emissions and noble earths? * They have a frugal live? * The know what Eco-sufficiency means? * They know that consumerism does not make happy?
shanselman 10y ago
Yikes...My primary PC is 5 years old. Works great.
SeanDav 10y ago
I miss my "Turbo" switch that used to be on older PC's. Just press "Turbo" and your PC is good for another couple of years.
islane 10y ago
Echoing the comments from others, My "main" pc is about 7 years old running the x58 platform (socket 1366) - it easily outperforms my work-supplied development laptop. For the uninitiated, the ebay workstations mentioned are typically these ancient x58's. Most support hex core xeons, 24gb ram (or 48gb unofficially, more on server boards and some workstations), and a pile of PCI-express lanes. As such, you can easily add in PCI-express m.2 SSDs, USB 3/3.1, and GPU's to your heart's content. The takeaway is that old pc tech can be had at a fraction the cost of new hardware with comparable performance. I understand the marketing nonsense from Apple, the "PC does what" consortium, and hardware vendors on the whole - but there is nothing sad about owning an old pc. The reality is that the best performance for the price lies in "obsolete" platforms.
scarface74 10y ago
Thinking of all of the computers I've had since 2007, all of them are usable and still in use at least once a week. 2006 era Mac Mini Core Duo 1.66Ghz. Run Windows 7 gave it to my mom. She still uses it. 2009 era Sony Viao - Core Duo 1.66Ghz, 2Gb RAM. Windows 7. My son uses it for Office and MineCraft 2009 Dell Pentium Dusl Core 2Ghz, 4Gb of RAM. It's still my only laptop. The display is 1600x900 and is still better than many cheap laptops. The battery is crap though. 2011 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop. My wife's computer. It's still feels fast. My workhouse is a 3Ghz I3 with 6Gb of RAM. Bought in 2012.
gd2 10y ago
It seems a somewhat strained interpretation to view this as Apple is anti-poor people. But it does point out that Apple is losing touch with what people do with personal computing power. Phone are much better then five years ago, computers not so much. I'd much rather spend my dollars where the major improvement in computing technology is, then spending to upgrade a desktop to view thing almost the same as before.
ayb 10y ago
I'm using a MacBook Pro from late 2011. Most of the actual machine specs (i.e. processor and max RAM) have barely changed in 5 years. I put 16 Gb in my laptop 5 years ago and it's still the most you can squeeze into a 13" MacBook Pro. It's sad (and somewhat telling) that Apple has not packed more power into this form factor over the past 5 years.
jvagner 10y ago
If your child's school only had 5 year old computers, you'd probably think, "Huh, it'd be better if this school had newer computers."
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trollingineeer 10y ago
Only took 3 days to publish a piece like this? SOCIAL JUSTICE is slowing down it seems.
balls187 10y ago
Apple v PC flame war still lives on.
balls187 10y ago
I believe that an iPad (or comparable Android Tablet) is better for most computer users than any low/mid-tier 5-year old PC. With PC's you can upgrade them, and make tweaks to squeeze out every bit of performance, but by and large for most people, when taking into account that mobile content consumption is on the rise, a tablet is a better upgrade than a new PC. Tasks like email, text, video, music, photography, facebook, are pretty much now done via mobile phone. For these people, PCs are anachronistic.
Overtonwindow 10y ago
I agree with this piece. I have long been upset at Apple's forced obsolesce policy, and creating the notion that devices are disposable. I still have a Macbook from 2009, and another from 2012, that I am doing everything in my power to upgrade and avoid the forced slow down. Likewise with my iPad and phone. I resist the persistent upgrade requests to the OS. Not because I am blase about security issues, or not wanting bugs to be fixed, but because those fixes and upgrades come with a cost: premature, forced obsolescence.
rabboRubble 10y ago
Hahahahahhahahahahah... my main machine is a Macbook Pro, Mid-2009. Going on 7 years old. Hahahahahahah.
jitendrac 10y ago
I am using 7 year old pc with single upgrade(motherboard),I have no reason to buy new!!!! I have no reason to buy any expensive apple laptop or ipad.
wedesoft 10y ago
The e-waste stream and the throwaway consumer culture is what's really sad.

378 points by Ph4nt0m 10y ago

I still use my 2009 MBP. I upgraded to an SSD drive and 8 gigs of ram. I don't game on it, but I can do almost all of my development on it. I'll admit it's slower then my 2013 MPB at work, but I see no reason to spend more money on a working computer. My second computer is a Chromebook. My oldest daughter uses it for school work and we couldn't be happier. It's much better then our iPad (which we don't use anymore).

sudosushi 10y ago

As someone sitting at a nearly 5 year old Macbook Pro, I took the comment as an off hand throwaway. I understand not liking the comment, but this isn't news. A company thinks everyone should be using the latest of their products. Oh no.

TearsInTheRain 10y ago
There are two articles about this non-story on the first page of HN. What a joke
- bargl 10y ago
  I think this may be a consequence of HackerNews not having a downvote option for stories. I like the fact that they don't and I wouldn't suggest making the change but it tends to allow stories that have a higher dislike to like ratio to rise because the number of people who have an opinion are very high. This does tend to prevent some filtering of storied I do think should stay up on the top. It would be an interesting experiment to add a downvote to stories button to see what happened, even if that button didn't actually affect where the stories showed in the list at first.
  - jaimex2 10y ago
    or you know, we could use our internal filters. I am disappointed with myself for clicking this link. Sometimes the comments are too hard to pass up.
onion2k 10y ago
A company thinks everyone should be using the latest of their products. Oh no. An alternative way to read this is that Apple themselves don't believe their own products will be worth using after 5 years, and will therefore fail to support them properly in the long term. Anyone in the market for a computer to last longer than that (eg most home users, and many corporate users who don't lease) might have to look elsewhere. This is not an offhand throwaway comment. This speaks to the absolute heart of Apple's strategy.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Apple makes no money on the OS. That is included with the hardware and upgrades are free. So aside from services such as App Store and iTunes, Apple has to sell hardware to make money. It's not in their interest to encourage people to hang on to older hardware as long as possible.
  - onion2k 10y ago
    It's not in their interest to encourage people to hang on to older hardware as long as possible. There's a difference between encouraging people to hang on to hardware for as long as possible and actively driving away your customers by laughing at them or suggesting that your own products will be obsolete before the customer is ready to update again. To maximise their profit on hardware Apple should be encouraging users to stay within the Apple ecosystem, even if those customers only upgrade every 10 years. This is especially true in today's climate of very powerful computers that will easily do most things a home user wants to do even after a decade. As someone who writes web software I am acutely aware that there are users who are still using old PCs with old software. For Apple to push their customers to abandon Apple products in favour of things that last longer is corporate suicide.
- andremendes 10y ago
  >Apple themselves don't believe their own products will be worth using after 5 years I think you got the gist of this thread! It's not actually about the poor but about competing products lasting longer than their product planned lifespan, and that's a bad thing for them.
agumonkey 10y ago
That's an odd fact about markets. You have the high rate of progress phase where technological advances almost sell themselves. I didn't have to wonder for long to want a Pentium 200 MMX instead of my Pentium 75. Nowadays it's really tough to convince someone naturally and strongly. They have to push for new 'needs' (4K ?) or allow for crapware and subpar software to trigger the religious reflex newer = better = faster.
- paulmd 10y ago
  4K monitors are a little marginal. 27" is really too small, most people need some DPI enlargement to feel comfortable. The bigger panels increase significantly in price, but I think 32-36" would probably be about right in terms of ppi. 27" 1440P monitors are fantastic though, they strike the perfect balance between resolution, size, and price. If you're used to 22-24" monitors I really encourage you to give it a try, it's very nice for productivity. You can get a cheap Korean VA/IPS monitor for $200 on eBay or a very nice one for $300 or so (the nicer ones have DC backlights which help prevent eyestrain from PWM flickering). Definitely worth it.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    I never used something above 21/22 IIRC, but as a secondary monitor. I'll give it a shot, although nowadays I'm having a retro fetish, give me a 10" orange / black CRT and I'll be happy.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    Here's my experience with 27" 4K monitors. I originally planned on getting a single 32" 4K IPS monitor, but got tired of waiting for it to come out in Canada. I test drove a few smaller 28 4K screens in the local computer store and realized that I could easily live with 1:1 on a 28". I ended up getting a Dell 27" 4K monitor because I wanted an IPS panel. I realize I'm in a very small minority of users who can use 4K with no scaling at 27" -- I use a standing desk and I have single vision computer glasses for the distance my monitors are away from my face. When I first got the 27" 4K monitor, I was in awe of the glorious real estate it afforded me. That awe didn't last long, however, because I ended up wanting even more real estate. So I bought a second, matching 4K monitor, and it's great. It's like having 8x1080p monitors. I would love the additional real estate from a third and fourth monitor (i.e., 8K equivalent) but things would get harder at that point because of neck movements, stand availability and the fact that I have a small form factor PC with no room for additional video cards.
chasing 10y ago
Also, the event was an hour long advertisement. Not a TED Talk or Nobel Prize acceptance speech. An ad. "The old products suck. Buy our shiny new products!" If advertising offends you, fine. But don't watch an hour-long ad and then get irritated because they try to sell you shit.
jxy 10y ago
As someone typing on a 2011 Macbook Air, I really don't like that comment. What's wrong with using a 5 year old computer? Fortunately their hardwares still last for you and me. I had to send in mine for repair twice. Once for the keyboard and the other for the touchpad. If the company is pushing people to dump their 5 year old hardware, I'm going to be a little nervous to buy their new product.
- Tiktaalik 10y ago
  This was my immediate thought while watching the press conference to. It sounded more a simple tone deaf statement. I buy Apple hardware because I think it's really high quality and I can expect it to last. I was troubled that maybe Apple doesn't align with my beliefs.

po1nter 10y ago

I don't understand how the author went from the guy saying it's "really sad" to "Apple is insulting people". I mean even his first argument on why people don't upgrade IS actually sad since they can't afford to do that. I know it is because I'm one of those people who can't afford to upgrade my machine. /rant typed on a 5 year old Asus N53SV.

sz4kerto 10y ago

I think I have a rusty, almost 5 year old PC lying around. It has an Intel i7-2600K overclocked to 4.6 GHz, 24 GB RAM, 240G SSD and a Radeon 6950 GPU that can run most games well in fHD. Most of the machines Apple sells are actually slower than this PC.

atonse 10y ago
That's a great exception to the rule. The overwhelming majority of computers Apple is talking about, are probably shitty $400 PCs that were underpowered from day one, which are just barely chugging along. Because that is actually what most people buy.
- paulmd 10y ago
  Thing is, OS bloat has finally ground to a halt. Win8.1 wasn't really any slower than 7, and Win10 is actually faster in my experience. So really, you don't need a stronger machine today than you did five years ago. Any perceived slowdown is just the result of malware, fragmentation, and DLL buildup - refresh the OS and maybe install an SSD and they're fine. I'm using a laptop from 2010 with an i7-720QM and an SSD, and it's perfectly snappy. I frequently let it do light encoding tasks while I'm using my desktop.
  - atonse 10y ago
    Partly. Yes, the operating systems feel faster, but they are all relying more on GPUs for their rendering. And one way cheap Windows PCs keep their costs down is by using cheap integrated GPUs that are quite underpowered. I use Windows 10 on in VMWare every day at 4k resolution on my retina macbook pro. It feels a bit sluggish, but I know I'm pushing the limits of VM graphics on a laptop with that resolution. But I can only imagine that a computer that's 6-7 years old would start to struggle graphically in Windows 10.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  I bought a 2008 Macbook as a refurb back in 2009. Apple didn't think it was worth making Mountain Lion running on it. Meanwhile, I installed the newest 64 bit version of Windows 10 on it as part of the Insider program, and it generally runs faster than my Lion install.

johansch 10y ago

I built a desktop PC almost exactly five years ago. - Intel Core i5 2500K, 3.3 GHz, quad-core (200 USD) - 8B (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz C9 (100 USD) - 120GB 2.5" SSD Intel X25-M G2 (200 USD) - GeForce GTX 460 1GB (200 USD) It's sad that a full five years later, CPU performance/USD has barely moved at all. RAM is half the cost now, SSDs a quarter the cost. Not sure about how GPUs have developed? (Edit: The GTX 960 which today also costs 200 USD seems to be about twice as fast as the GTX 460.)

facepalm 10y ago
GPUs have developed a lot. I had a high-end card a couple of years ago, and now I can barely run Elite: Dangerous. For the upcoming VR headsets I would definitely need a new GPU. Apple doesn't even have a computer on offer that would be powerful enough for the VR headsets (Oculus/Vive). 8GB RAM is also the bare minimum.
piva00 10y ago
GPUs are much better now since GTX 460 but that's all you'd need to upgrade in this computer (and some storage) if you wanted to play current AAA games in 1080p or even at 1440p.
Spooky23 10y ago
You represent the 5% of PC consumers. The average person goes to Walmart/Bestbuy/BJ's/Staples and spends $475 on some shitbox laptop. The 25th percentile user (ie. millions of people) probably spent $275-325. That average person who bought that average PC in 2011 has an aging HP/Dell/Asus laptop with a failing battery, $30 Celeron or AMD processor, 2GB memory, integrated graphics, a 500GB 5400rpm disk and integrated graphics.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  I still have my 2008 plastic Macbook refurb that I still use to browse the web. I had the pre-release Win 10/64 on it for a while, and it actually ran faster than OSX did on that machine (in my experience, Windows runs faster on Mac than OSX itself, but ymmv). And keep in mind that my Macbook pretty much got left behind by OSX after Lion.

danielvf 10y ago

This is classic trolling, plain and simple. The head of marketing thinks that using a competitor's product is "sad". In response, this article calls Apple: "Insensitive". Offensive. "Hypocritical". "Insulting". And worst of all, promoting inequality by building high quality, expensive products and forgetting the needs of the poor. It's an article designed to produce a response.

draw_down 10y ago

I agree that this was tone-deaf of them, I just find it fascinating that we picked this one instance of tech industry rich guy tone-deafness. Seems to be getting a lot of play for some reason. But it's everywhere if you look.

tombert 10y ago

Did nothing interesting happen in the tech world today? This is such a non-story, it's really weird that this is on the front-page twice.

dublinben 10y ago
Pornhub launched a new VR channel for 180 and 360 degree content. Tinder Adds “Swipe The Vote” so you can hook up with your candidate. You decide whether either of these are more deserving.

NikolaeVarius 10y ago

I swear, if a modern tech company went up and said 'We think you should buy our product", someone would start yelling about how its insulting how a company is endorising capitalism and materialism. We've gone from "Won't somebody think of the children" to "Won't somebody think of every single possible group that is possible to somehow offend in some way"

praptak 10y ago
It is intellectually dishonest to equate endorsing ones product with mocking people who are too poor to use it.
- zepto 10y ago
  It's dishonest to assert that Apple mocked people who are too poor to use their products.
wrong_variable 10y ago
No. What apple is saying today is something that it has always said - but its only recently that people in america are too poor to buy american products. I grew up around windows and linux, and whenever I tell that in a job interview - people think I am not being serious since "real developers" use mac. In my first software job - I was told to abandon my personal cheap linux and use the company's brand new expensive apple - even though I was more productive on my cheap linux. Apple has always been like that, its just that most people who come from money do not hear it. Edit: Also you will notice this in poorer countries - a strong ecosystem for recycling exists everywhere outside of the US/UK. When I brought my first bike in the UK, I wanted to repair it and was told to just ditch it and get a new one ! It was extremely odd to me since I expected that bike to last at-least 20 years. When my 3 year old laptop stopped working - I had it repaired rather than buy a newer one - even though repairing was almost as expensive as getting a new one. It just fell really wrong ditching a laptop rather than repairing it. Maybe you are right - western societies do worship materialism.
- kzrdude 10y ago

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

If anything its a fairly strong statement on the ruggedness of the PC platform. I have a 2500k i5 in my old desktop. With a new-ish videocard I play all the newest AAA games at high quality. Its incredible how the x86 world really hasn't had any huge performance bumps and how a Q1 2011 CPU is still competitive. Also, there's the larger narrative of people buying tablets and putting off PC upgrades, so the PC ages. Don't worry Apple, you're still getting their money. Its just people aren't ready to replace a general purpose computer that they control and can run pretty much everything with a walled garden mobile device designed to get ad impressions and consume media. If anything, this is Apple's frustration. They have all this success but people and businesses keep buying PCs. They'll never crack this market. They're too invested in the Jobsian "closed" ecosystem philosophy to be as agile as the PC platform. Mocking those who don't drink their kool-aid just makes them look like sore winners. edit: I'm aware I can buy a newer chip, but from a single core vs single core perspective its not that much faster. Very little consumer software is properly multi-threaded so this is why my expensive work computer with the newest i7 doesnt feel any faster than my 5 year old desktop at home. Most things are pegged to one core and at the end of the day single core performance is what's going to matter.

acqq 10y ago
> I have a 2500k i5 in my old desktop. > Its incredible how the x86 world really hasn't had any huge performance bumps and how a Q1 2011 CPU is still competitive. Actually you can have twice as fast desktop CPU today than your 2500k, and not for some number crunching you'll maybe never need (even though it's the most important thing for others) but for such common tasks like compiling the code: http://techreport.com/r.x/skylake/legacy1-qtbench.gif http://techreport.com/r.x/skylake/legacy1-qtbench.gif Not bad at all for the times when the hardware speedups are getting harder. But it's good that even the newest games don't expect only the latest CPU.
- venomsnake 10y ago
  Where is the doubled single core performance? We have more cores now, but they are almost as fast as 3-4 years ago.
- 10y ago

dcustodio 10y ago

Some people need to feel offended just as I need my morning coffee. I'm not even counting how old is my pc/laptop and that's the thing I like about PCs - there's hardly anything new that triggers my Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

snowwrestler 10y ago

Yes there are things that are sad about it. A 5-year-old PC is probably not running a recent version of Windows, and has a higher likelihood of being compromised. And if a person wants a new computer but can't afford it, that is sad too. That said, it was an obviously stupid stat for Schiller to cite. But now we're going to be subjected to a long series of Apple-bashing articles that overreach in the opposite direction. By the end of today we'll see multiple "actually, I'm proud to be running 5-year-old PC" posts. Why? Because when mining for pageviews, there are few veins as rich as bashing Apple. Edit to add: If we want to talk about the tech industry and poor people, let's do so. How many new companies are variations of "let us bring things to your door for you for an extra fee" or "let's give you personalized service so you don't have to go shopping/ride a bus/interact with a human"?

elthran 10y ago
> A 5-year-old PC is probably not running a recent version of Windows Windows 7 was released in 2009, and all official owners of Windows 7 were offered the Windows 10 upgrade. I'd be surprised if many PCs that are 5 years old aren't running one of these 2 OSs
trey-jones 10y ago
I'm proud to be running my almost-seven-year-old PC, though I think it is about time for an upgrade. I also have a 2013 Macbook Pro, which is more than adequate for work. I'm not exactly poor, and I abhor the way the media runs away with this kind of comment. But I also get a little peeved at overzealous marketing that takes advantage of people's ignorance. Convincing people that their 5 year old PC no longer meets their needs (when it probably does) is pretty similar to convincing some poor sucker to switch to your super duper maximum strength 4G Long Term Evolution wireless network because you can have 20G of data per month, when you actually only use 0.5G of data per month.
Mikeb85 10y ago
A 5 year old PC is likely running Windows 7, which still receives upgrades, is supported, and is quite secure. Of course, all Windows 7 PCs received a free upgrade path to Windows 10. So there's no reason they couldn't be running the most recent Windows, without spending a dime. Of course, they could also be running something like Ubuntu (Linux counter puts the number at 73 million, W3Counter at 2.58% of all devices, or just under half OSX's numbers in that counting method), in which case they'd also likely be running a recent OS, one which is arguably more secure than either Windows or OSX. I don't think it's 'offensive' what Schiller says. But it does speak to Apple's mentality, where planned obsolescence and profit trumps all, and the faithful buy into it...

apatters 10y ago

If there's something sad about that fact, it's that the industry has delivered so little value in the past 5 years that not many people feel compelled to upgrade!

slantyyz 10y ago
> If there's something sad about that fact, it's that the industry has delivered so little value in the past 5 years that not many people feel compelled to upgrade! The glass half-full response? The industry has delivered so much value in the past 5-8 years that not many people feel compelled to upgrade!
- massysett 10y ago
  Exactly. I haven't upgraded my washing machine or refrigerator in the last 5 years either. The people Schiller was sneering at view PCs as appliances, and they don't watch Apple press conferences anyway.

facepalm 10y ago

I can be "not wrong" and sad at the same time. A newer PC would likely be much faster, resulting in less stress and less wasted time.

johnhattan 10y ago

Actually, my main development tower is about nine years old. And in that time, I've upgraded the processor, doubled the memory, upgraded the hard drive to an SSD, switched the video card twice, upped the number of connected monitors from one to three, and upgraded the OS from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 10. It was pretty leading edge when I built it, and it's still pretty leading edge today. What's sad is the expectation that I should throw my computer away every 18 months.

optforfon 10y ago
Once you replace the motherboard it'll be a true modern day Ship of Theseus
- Caprinicus 10y ago
  Unless he's on AMD and the processor upgrade was very minor, he almost certainly did. It's odd when people say "my computer is a decade old and I've only had to replace every single part multiple times over look at how green I'm being". It's the exact same thing as buying a new computer a couple times, just in smaller increments and with parts that are less likely to be recycled on their own.
  - johnhattan 10y ago
    Yep, AMD. And the only thing I got rid of were the video cards, which I sold on ebay. I put the old drive in an external case and used it to archive old engineering projects. Kept the original monitor and added the other two. I did have to trash my keyboard after I spilled coffee on it, though :)
slantyyz 10y ago
I try to overspend on my computers to ensure that I have a computer that can last at least five years. I loved the Macbook Pro unibodies because they were expandable. My 2011 MBP had its memory upgraded and maxed out as prices came down, and its storage upgraded to larger and faster drives and SSDs as prices came down. If it weren't for one thing, it would have still been my main computer and delayed my switch to Windows. The infamous overheating problem with my model of MBP turned it into a brick a few months before Apple acknowledged the defect and announced a repair program. The replacement part was known to have the same defect (I already had my logic board replaced once), and being out of AppleCare, there was no way in hell I was paying >500 out of pocket for yet another defective board. So I just switched to a Windows machine since nothing I did was OS dependent anyways. Granted I would have switched when the Macbook Pro got unusable (unibodies are gone and don't like the new soldered on approach), but I think that wouldn't have happened until at least 2018.

busterarm 10y ago

Still running a desktop with a Q9650 and 8GB RAM. Runs fine.

fit2rule 10y ago

You know what makes me really happy? Any computer being used for fun/interesting/productive things, not just 'the latest ones'. As a die-hard retrocomputing enthusiast with far more old computers in my basement than new, I'm biased. But I sure think that the time has come for the compute industry to start highlighting the need for lesser computing power, but yet still more productive computing. 8-bit computers are awesome. 16-bit machines superb! Get yourself set up with these systems and you can entertain yourself for hours and hours. 8-bit is a great way to learn software development - 2 hours of 8-bit coding a week will keep you sharper than sharp when the time comes to go back to the hipstertools-de-jour. (I kid, I kid.) Point is this, folks: old computers never die - their users do.

colund 10y ago

In times of climate change debate I think Apple is doing the wrong thing here, encouraging buy and throw away mentality increasing waste.

danielvf 10y ago
We definitely need a strong reduction in the introduction of new technology that replaces old, still working hardware. This is so wasteful. Along with this, we need centrally planned production of consumer goods to control the pace of change and prevent overproduction, and these goods need to be have government set prices to insure that everyone can afford them.
- wooter 10y ago
  Because the USSR had no pollution or poor people... /s
zepto 10y ago
You clearly didn't watch the keynote, since a significant part of it was about unprecedented programs to reuse and recycle their hardware.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Recycling can be a net environmental negative, plus you still have the environmental impact of creating the replacement unit. Not replacing something that still works is way better than replacing it even if you recycle the old unit.
  - zepto 10y ago
    That's why Apple prioritizes reuse over recycling.
- whitegrape 10y ago
  The phrase "reduce reuse recycle" is actually a pyramid of effectiveness. The best thing is to reduce your consumption entirely, which in this case translates to not producing or buying new hardware you don't need.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jaimex2 10y ago

There is however something sad about buying products to not look poor.

kps 10y ago

My main home machine is an 8-year-old Mac Pro running Snow Leopard. Apple today sells nothing that could replace it, let alone improve on it.

emp_ 10y ago

The only thing not lasting more than 5 years in my 20+ years owning computers are Macs, other iDevices and PCs are much, much stabler. Macbook Pro 2008 (died in 3 years), iMac 27 2010 (died in 4.8 years), Macbook Air 2013 (dying) and Mac Mini 2012 (dying) are the reason why I always end up coming back to my 2010 gaming PC and 2010 HTPC, the ones to break the 5+ year mark without a major hardware failure.

parenthesis 10y ago

Until earlier this year I was still making heavy use of a Powerbook from 2004. I only stopped using it because the graphics hardware started to go funny. I sold its battery, memory and power supply to someone still using a slightly older Powerbook.

mikehearn 10y ago

I interpreted that comment as a jab at the PC industry. The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a compelling reason to upgrade. Isn't that the correct interpretation, considering the whole point of bringing that up is because they're positioning a new device intended to replace the PC? I seriously doubt it's intended to mean (to quote the article) "LOL poor people". Granted, this interpretation would make for a boring thinkpiece and would not get me to #1 on HN.

aetherson 10y ago
I don't think that it means "LOL poor people" either. But I do think that it's bullshit marketing talk. Apple is perfectly happy to be proud (rightly, I think) of the enduring utility of older pieces of Apple hardware -- but if some other company's hardware continues to be perfectly serviceable for 5 years, that's sad? Also, if you have a 5 year old PC that's genuinely not serving your needs any more, sure, you could pay $600 for an iPad Pro that also probably won't serve your needs, or you could pay around $400 for a new PC that will serve your needs.
- bitJericho 10y ago
  Bought a dual CPU workstation with 12gb ram and two quad core 12 mb cache xeons for under 400 bucks. It's about 5 year old tech and its awesome!
  - tdkl 10y ago
    Yep, eBay is booming with second hand workstations like this. Cousin bought a HP Z210 Quad Core E3-1270 3.40GHz with 16GB RAM for 320€. Added a SSD and cheap GPU and is an awesome 500€ machine that can last for years.
  - orbitingpluto 10y ago
    Totally there. If your electricity is cheap, it's an awesome deal. Since, oh about, 2009, there are a lot of choices that are akin to buying a '57 Chevy.

johndevor 10y ago

Holy crap the "politically correct" army has entered the tech world. We're not safe anywhere...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

yq 10y ago

semi-Related:iCar release date rumours, features and images: Apple CEO Tim Cook comments on Apple Car rumours http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/will-apple-make-icar-project-titan-rumour-roundup-bmw-tesla-tim-cook-3425394/ http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/will-apple-make-icar-pr... Reading related news is interesting. Imagine Apple applies its tactics on their cars: You probably need a new apple designed plugin other than the universal one, special tools to change flat tires and/or update the exterior slightly to market therefore driving a 5-year-old car is sad.

PaulHoule 10y ago

The main problem I see is Intel and Microsoft have given up on power users and it is all Apple envy and phone envy, no wonder people don't buy new PCs. Back in the 0s I had a policy of never rehabilitating an old PC because a new PC was better in every way. The other day a friend brought a Macbook from 2007 to me with a busted HDD and I put an ssd I had laying around in and we got Win10 running on it with no drama and no Apple malware (iTunes, boot camp, etc.) It feel faster than a skylake machine with one of those useless hybrid hard drives and after puffing some hcfc gas through the fan it is great. Any and or pre core 2 machine would go to the trash, I would not even donate it to the poor, but frankly broadwell and skylake are just an excuse to reduce the io slots to put manufacturers of gfx cards. They say customers get better battery life but software screws that up if they really tried it and the most you can get is spend a lot of money on a thin and light machine that the doorman can slide under the hotel or get a 2 in 1 machine just because you need a trackpad on a touchpad machine and have a fight over if and where you stow it with the stewardess just to have another reason to get arrested at your destination. I mean, even IBM sells 360 chips that clock over 5 that use water cooling. It is not that hard.

oldmanjay 10y ago

I'm not a fan of moralistic handwringing, particularly when it's brought about by uncharitable interpretations of what is clearly just marketing. This and the related articles are such poor quality that it makes me sad to see them get so much traction here. It's the sort of thing I'd expect at dailytech or slashdot.

atomical 10y ago

Is there anything sad about using a 5 year old mac? I'm hoping that eventually my mac book pro will last 5-10 years. With multi-core systems, SSDs, and 16 gigs of ram in MBP's do we really need to be upgrading so much? Also, clock speed advances have stalled.

agumonkey 10y ago

-- sent from my almost perfect 9yo laptop

ArenaSource 10y ago

Last Macbook Pro generation is from 2012... this is really sad, it really is.

slantyyz 10y ago
I may not be a fan of Apple any more, but I don't understand how this is sad. The innards have been upgraded regularly since 2012, and the CPUs and GPUs in the latest 15" models are pretty competitive to everything else on the market not counting machines for gamers.

c0achmcguirk 10y ago

"I want to be offended!" signed, people who take offense at a off-hand remark like this. Grow some thicker skin and stop wasting my screen real estate with irrelevant non-stories like this.

bliti 10y ago

I use a 4 year old MBP. Does that make me middle class then?

studentrob 10y ago

Schiller is marketing his product. This is no different from the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials. There are now two articles on the HN front page about this utterly pedantic topic which boils down to marketing. Unbelievable.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

BWStearns 10y ago

Really this isn't terribly offensive. They're selling a product they think is superior, in their [marketing] minds the world would be a better place if you were pulled from the womb, slapped on the ass, and handed an iPad Pro, to be renewed every generation of gadget. The Apple presentation stage is not the Basilica of St Peter. These are marketing pronouncements, not moral ones and analyzing them as such is such intense naval gazing that it's actually bad for your neck. If Apple hates the poor it's for no reason other than that they're outside their customer base.

specialp 10y ago

It is ironic that Apple is mentioning this as I believe this is going to spell the end of their era of massive profits. Phones now are getting to the state where much like PCs, the older phone is good enough, and the new phone is not substantially better. There will always be people buying a phone for .2ghz more CPU or some slightly higher res screen, but the days of rapid evolution of mobile devices are over, and Apple is going to have problems selling someone a $6-800 phone every year or 2.

cookiemonsta 10y ago
But with new OS versions, older phones quickly start to show their age. An iphone 4 or iphone 4s on the latest version of iOS it supports is really sluggish and slow (and no easy way to put iOS6/7 back on it)
- empressplay 10y ago
  this is by design, though, obviously. providing "upgrades" to previous models incapable of truly supporting them is kind of an Apple trademark
21 10y ago
A large part of iPhone's market is as a status symbol. As the saying goes, the only thing worse than not having an iPhone is having last year's one.

sergiotapia 10y ago

Jesus christ, they are in the business of selling computers. This faux outrage over a salesman trying to sell his computers is gross - what's wrong with people? Now watch as every blog tries to scramble to see who has the most outrage and who is the largest victim.

tobeportable 10y ago

http://www.apple.com/environment/ http://www.apple.com/environment/

rsync 10y ago

You know what's really sad ? I am using a 2009 octo mac pro, which is now 7 years old and since that date, apple has not released a single product that is compelling enough to upgrade that system.

tfandango 10y ago

I'm a little sour on Apple. They say their products are rugged and "built to last", but an iPad is mostly glass which you need to encase in a giant rubber protective case if you don't want the screen shattered. Even then they are easy to break and very costly to fix, to the point now where it barely makes sense to fix it over replace it. Self-Repair is less expensive but so far I'm 50/50 on successes. I would say they are built to last, until the next one comes out.

secstate 10y ago
The killer part is that it's only expensive to repair because Apple has opted not to streamline a repair pipeline. There is absolutely no way a digitizer glued to a piece of glass costs $500 otherwise they'd never make another iPad. But if they price the part hideously expensively it makes buying a new one a no-brainer. Working in a school for a few years, I was amazed how easily and inexpensively I could replace screens and memory on 2008-era white macbooks when I had access to school channels for parts priced at cost (or close enough). I think we had access to those channels as a stipulation in a state contract to buy assloads of those machines for every kid in the state.

existencebox 10y ago

Perhaps I have some wires crossed from too much time as a sysadmin, but I take a 5 year old (+) PC (or any machine, really) as a mark of pride, not any bit of shame whatsoever. It speaks to a high degree of reliability which often speaks well of the operator (even if just "choosing robust hardware" is a component of this) Some stories to add some color to this: Ran a very primitive file sharing server for my university on a dual P(2 or 3, don't quite remember) machine that was probably around a decade old by the time they finally ended up retiring it. My home fileserver is a ~10 TB 4U monster, running on (conveniently) 5 year old hardware and very boring FBSD. Outside of moving apartments, it has not had unplanned downtime once, I will continue using it as long as this is true and would be sad if I didn't get another good few years out of it. I _WISH_ I could get the same lifetime out of desktop PCs but I tend to find assorted parts failing at an asymptotic rate around 3-5 years. The world in which we all use <5 year old hardware is a sad one, to be avoided, to my eyes. (To clarify, I don't mean this in any luddite sense, I don't believe tech should stop moving forward, but I long for more robust products with longer viable lifespans, such that one can make a choice to upgrade rather than waiting for the inevitable.)

NEDM64 10y ago
That's not a PC (Personal Computer), it's a server. You are thinking about hardware, Apple is talking about the whole computer.
- existencebox 10y ago
  You're right, but I was not trying to make a 1:1 comparison, but saying that properties servers seem to have in spades I'd really appreciate seeing in other markets, but that segment seems rarely catered to. (Let me gesture as well to my 2.5 year old phone whose irreplaceable battery is currently ballooning) My statement addressed the "whole computer" as well, although the FS example was very much a special niche tool, I'd go so far as to say 90% of novel software features that have necessitated hardware refreshes in the last... decade? I could probably live without. This may be mildly hyperbole, but I hope the spirit of my statement comes across. I want to spend less time replacing/fixing my platforms and more time with them "just working".

chasing 10y ago

I, too, am shocked that a computer company would communicate that their new computing devices are better than the old ones people already own. Shocked.

compactmani 10y ago

600 million PC users discovered that running a lightweight unix distribution/DE and not allowing javascript made the life expectancy of their computers triple. Or so I dream.

flyinghamster 10y ago

As someone who just picked up a reconditioned six-year-old, i7-equipped ThinkPad for a hell of a lot less money than what it would have cost brand-new, I have to laugh. It may not be the Latest and Greatest, but it's still speedy enough to handle anything I'm going to throw at it. The CPU performance curve has flattened out in the last few years, to the point that it's not worth spending lots of money for a modest performance gain. I'll let someone else take the depreciation hit.

basch 10y ago
considering cpu speed has been "good enough since around core 2 duos (late 2006?) the only major improvements since then have been battery life and ssd cost. anyone with a computer from the last 10 years that can support an ssd and 8+gb ram, is probably fine. travel being the exception.
NEDM64 10y ago
You probably did a very bad deal.

programminggeek 10y ago

What Phil said worked.

mrbill 10y ago

I said this in the other thread.. I just bought a "new to me" laptop. Refurb Thinkpad T420s from 2011. I added 16G RAM, two Intel SSDs, an Ultrabay battery, and an 802.12ac wifi card. Grand total: less than $325. This will be my primary portable for at least 2-3 years, and it's already four years old. Just because I can afford Apple doesn't mean I can justify the 2x price premium, or that "old" hardware isn't capable.

kamaal 10y ago
May I ask from where you bought it and how did you upgrade it. Looks like a very interested configuration.
- e15ctr0n 10y ago
  There's a lot of good stuff on eBay and Craigslist.
- mrbill 10y ago
  I tend to get my refurb Thinkpads from arrowdirect.com. You can use the code ARROW for 20% off. I ordered this one as 4G/128SSD but already had the RAM on hand to upgrade it to 16G. Part sources: (if you want to upgrade from the 128G) Intel Pro 1500 180G: $55 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pro-1500-180-GB-2-5-SSD-Internal-Solid-State-Drive-SSDSC2BF180A4H-/191728007943 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pro-1500-180-GB-2-5-SSD-Intern... (optional) Intel 310 80G mSATA SSD: $30 http://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-310-Series-80GB-mSATA-SSD-SSDMAEMC080G2-/231812886235 http://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-310-Series-80GB-mSATA-SSD-SSDM... Ultrabay battery: $28 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Thinkpad-Battery-43-3-Cell-Bay-Lenovo-Genuine-FRU-0A36310-NIB-/141898955475 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Thinkpad-Battery-43-3-Cell-Ba... Intel 7260 802.11ac MiniPCIe wifi card: $28 http://www.amazon.com/Intel-7260-HMWG-R-Wireless-AC-Bluetooth-Mounting/dp/B00MY9S692 http://www.amazon.com/Intel-7260-HMWG-R-Wireless-AC-Bluetoot... An external USB3 enclosure for the Ultrabay DVDRW drive will run around $30 on Amazon. To install the Intel 7260 card, you will need to install a modified "whitelist removed" BIOS, as Lenovo restricts what MiniPCIe cards can go in their systems by default. The system comes with an 802.11n card (mine was an Intel Centrino 6205). My only complaint about ArrowDirect is that if they have a system model that could have different screen resolutions, you have no way of specifying / requesting certain specs; you get what they pull and send. Every system I've ordered from them (close to ten now) has arrived in near-mint condition; this t420s would be amazingly perfect if not for a scuff of the rubberized paint/coating on the top lid (which doesn't matter to me one bit).

reacweb 10y ago

I have a HP Pavilion Elite m9458fr bought in july 2009 for 416€ (on eBay hp_marketplace_fr). I only need a silent reliable computer with a reasonably fast CPU for web development on Linux. I have no need for beefy GPU, I just need to connect 2 displays (23" and 19"). I would like to replace it in order to have USB3 connectors and SATA III HD. I do not find anything on the market for reasonable price. Should I buy a ultra-HD laptop with a magnifying lens ?

justinholmes 10y ago

My 5 year old PC has a dual socket Xeon I think that beats any iPad rubbish.

NEDM64 10y ago
How much battery life dos your PC have?

craigmccaskill 10y ago

I'm using a ~5 year old PC I built myself and it still outperforms the hardware in any available mac product (desktop, tablet or laptop) that isn't a Mac Pro (starting price $2999,00). I don't have a compelling reason to upgrade until the launch of VR headsets.

balls187 10y ago
I am also using a phone that outperforms the hardware of any available PC that wasn't built in this century. Putting aside the hyperbole, I'm willing to bet the USB 3.0 and TB2 ports on my MBP out perform the ports on your 5-year old PC.
- craigmccaskill 10y ago
  I actually have 2 USB 3.0 ports. USB 3.0 was first available on ASUS motherboards in late 2009 [1]. Thunderbolt wasn't available at that point but it was unveiled with the Thunderbolt Display, which was July 20th 2011, so coming up fast on 5 years old tech at this point. I personally have no use for 20Gbps transfers so TB2 has zero draw for me to upgrade. Talking about hyperbole, you're comparing brand new hardware vs something that was released in 1999 (so 16 years of moore's law) against the point that the hardware apple uses in it's cutting edge desktops/laptops is pretty comparable to the stuff commercially available 5 years ago, which is a valid point. If Apple wants to shame the market for not upgrading in the last 5 years, maybe they should offer a valid reason to upgrade outside of a marketing campaign appealing to 'want' and additional software features which a recent change actually made free anyway. The idea that I could replace my PC with an iPad pro is just plain wrong. [1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/174672/Asus_Debut_First_USB_30_Motherboard.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/174672/Asus_Debut_First_USB_3...
  - balls187 10y ago
    My hyperbole was making fun of your silly statement that your 5 year old computer out performs all the hardware that Apple makes[1] My phone is more powerful than any PC[2] I am the richest man in Seattle[3] > The idea that I could replace my PC with an iPad pro is just plain wrong. I'll take your word on that. But that isn't true for all PC users. I have a pretty beefy machine, not the latest and greatest, but a hex-core, 12gb, 960gtx and dual 30" monitors, which I use wholly for gaming. Youtubing, videoing, etc, have all moved to my ipad+appletv, and with my PS4, I finally feel like I have a console that provides a real crisp gaming experience. So I'm ready to no longer maintain my $2k PC, and switch to something like a SteamMachine. [1] if you exclude the MacPro. [2] made before the year 2000 [3] if you exclude the people that have more money than I do.

agentgt 10y ago

I interpreted it as "it's sad that those Window users having been using just Windows for 5 or more years and not Mac". IMO He's catering to the audience of Apple enthusiasts (who are the ones that watch Apple events generally) and not making fun of poor people. Its sort of analogous to when Jobs said: "It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell" -- about iTunes on Windows computers Oh so Jobs thinks Windows users are Evil since they are in hell right?

logfromblammo 10y ago
Methinks Jobs had an overly high opinion of iTunes. Giving iTunes to a Windows user is more like giving a massive, ugly, wooden horse to a Trojan, and it is so incredibly unwieldy that the lintel has to be removed from the city gate to even get it inside. Then a bunch of bearded maniacs come out of it and kill everybody. I can't even tell you how many times I have been murdered in my sleep by iTunes. Okay, well, yes I can--zero. But that doesn't stop me from thinking it might happen one day.
- agentgt 10y ago
  Yes I agree. Even on my Mac I have seen it take more memory than Spotify and Spotify these days is basically running a Chrome instance. I use VLC for most quicktime/itunes things these days.

holri 10y ago

Maybe user of old computers are not poor but: * Do not suffer from avarice? * They do not need the newest shiny toy for their ego and to win recognition? * They don't touch a good running working system? * They want to save CO2 emissions and noble earths? * They have a frugal live? * The know what Eco-sufficiency means? * They know that consumerism does not make happy?

shanselman 10y ago

Yikes...My primary PC is 5 years old. Works great.

SeanDav 10y ago

I miss my "Turbo" switch that used to be on older PC's. Just press "Turbo" and your PC is good for another couple of years.

islane 10y ago

Echoing the comments from others, My "main" pc is about 7 years old running the x58 platform (socket 1366) - it easily outperforms my work-supplied development laptop. For the uninitiated, the ebay workstations mentioned are typically these ancient x58's. Most support hex core xeons, 24gb ram (or 48gb unofficially, more on server boards and some workstations), and a pile of PCI-express lanes. As such, you can easily add in PCI-express m.2 SSDs, USB 3/3.1, and GPU's to your heart's content. The takeaway is that old pc tech can be had at a fraction the cost of new hardware with comparable performance. I understand the marketing nonsense from Apple, the "PC does what" consortium, and hardware vendors on the whole - but there is nothing sad about owning an old pc. The reality is that the best performance for the price lies in "obsolete" platforms.

scarface74 10y ago

Thinking of all of the computers I've had since 2007, all of them are usable and still in use at least once a week. 2006 era Mac Mini Core Duo 1.66Ghz. Run Windows 7 gave it to my mom. She still uses it. 2009 era Sony Viao - Core Duo 1.66Ghz, 2Gb RAM. Windows 7. My son uses it for Office and MineCraft 2009 Dell Pentium Dusl Core 2Ghz, 4Gb of RAM. It's still my only laptop. The display is 1600x900 and is still better than many cheap laptops. The battery is crap though. 2011 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop. My wife's computer. It's still feels fast. My workhouse is a 3Ghz I3 with 6Gb of RAM. Bought in 2012.

gd2 10y ago

It seems a somewhat strained interpretation to view this as Apple is anti-poor people. But it does point out that Apple is losing touch with what people do with personal computing power. Phone are much better then five years ago, computers not so much. I'd much rather spend my dollars where the major improvement in computing technology is, then spending to upgrade a desktop to view thing almost the same as before.

ayb 10y ago

I'm using a MacBook Pro from late 2011. Most of the actual machine specs (i.e. processor and max RAM) have barely changed in 5 years. I put 16 Gb in my laptop 5 years ago and it's still the most you can squeeze into a 13" MacBook Pro. It's sad (and somewhat telling) that Apple has not packed more power into this form factor over the past 5 years.

jvagner 10y ago

If your child's school only had 5 year old computers, you'd probably think, "Huh, it'd be better if this school had newer computers."

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trollingineeer 10y ago

Only took 3 days to publish a piece like this? SOCIAL JUSTICE is slowing down it seems.

balls187 10y ago

Apple v PC flame war still lives on.

balls187 10y ago

I believe that an iPad (or comparable Android Tablet) is better for most computer users than any low/mid-tier 5-year old PC. With PC's you can upgrade them, and make tweaks to squeeze out every bit of performance, but by and large for most people, when taking into account that mobile content consumption is on the rise, a tablet is a better upgrade than a new PC. Tasks like email, text, video, music, photography, facebook, are pretty much now done via mobile phone. For these people, PCs are anachronistic.

Overtonwindow 10y ago

I agree with this piece. I have long been upset at Apple's forced obsolesce policy, and creating the notion that devices are disposable. I still have a Macbook from 2009, and another from 2012, that I am doing everything in my power to upgrade and avoid the forced slow down. Likewise with my iPad and phone. I resist the persistent upgrade requests to the OS. Not because I am blase about security issues, or not wanting bugs to be fixed, but because those fixes and upgrades come with a cost: premature, forced obsolescence.

rabboRubble 10y ago

Hahahahahhahahahahah... my main machine is a Macbook Pro, Mid-2009. Going on 7 years old. Hahahahahahah.

jitendrac 10y ago

I am using 7 year old pc with single upgrade(motherboard),I have no reason to buy new!!!! I have no reason to buy any expensive apple laptop or ipad.

wedesoft 10y ago

The e-waste stream and the throwaway consumer culture is what's really sad.