How long are you keeping your machines for?

[MacHeritage]

As long as they function and work without colossal failures. iMac G3 still running fine even though it isn't my daily driver anymore. Same with iMac G5 that was my daily driver until the Mac Pro 2010. Mac Pro is still king and it is almost 13 years old, but it does everything I currently need it to do work wise. Main laptop for everything and everyone else is 16 years old.

The only thing that is making want to upgrade is the 2019 Mac Pro and the M3 MBP. Not impressed by the M2 Mac Pro at all. It needs a lot more power and memory (extreme chip would have done it) in order to be worth an upgrade. I have hope for an M3 Mac Pro with something special but we shall see.

 

[scouser75]

Kept my 2009 Mac Pro till it broke. And gonna keep my Mac Book Pro till that too is broke.

 

[idreaus]

I am debating to buy the M3 pro (w/ 18 gpu cores variant) from M1 Pro (14 gpu core variant) but no one has a damn review on that version for me to justify the upgrade.

Sure it is "40%" faster in GPU but on what exactly?

I could care less about cpu benchmarks, all of the cpus are extremely powerful from M to Max series for like 90% of all apps anyway and gaming, I'm heavily focused on the GPU counterpart at a reasonable pricing at this point since it is the main culprit with these line ups.

So I may wait until they release the M4 I think

 

[jav6454]

Apple aren't interested in "keeping margins low" because they actually do R&D and provide after sales support. That costs money.

Your comment is hilarious. All companies want to keep margins low as that means more cash in their pockets (higher profits) and in turn more bonuses to CEOs.

R&D isn't a factor here.

 

[SteveManila1960]

Macbook - almost 10 years using a 2014 11 inch air
iPhone - change every 2 years currently 13 mini (I like a small phone)
iPad - nothing, could not find a good use case for one
Watch - considering a first purchase probably Gen 5 as it was the first with always on display and can be picked up quite cheap these days
TV - Have the first generation of the 4k model

Clearly not a power user! Just need a simple cheap Apple ecosystem.

I am considering a used M1 MacBook Air when the prices come down a little more.

 

[throAU]

Your comment is hilarious. All companies want to keep margins low as that means more cash in their pockets (higher profits) and in turn more bonuses to CEOs.

R&D isn't a factor here.

I don't think you know what margins are.

 

[SteveManila1960]

I don't think you know what margins are.

Have to agree. I worked in Tech for many decades and the target was always fifty percent gross margin or above to sustain growth for future product innovation. Thats just the way it is you pay through the nose for todays products so that you have the opportunity to buy next years products.

 

[SteveManila1960]

If there is no investment in the future the CEO’s are out of a job pretty quickly so no bonuses. Shareholders and boards of directors in public companies hold the management accountable for balancing the books and sustaining growth to say R&D is not a factor is nonsense

 

[Al Rukh]

Apple aren't interested in "keeping margins low" because they actually do R&D and provide after sales support. That costs money.

That is somewhat true, in my opinion. Many people are neglecting components like after-sales support, macOS upgrades for half a decade - just to list down a few.

I hope people will stop comparing Windows laptop against MacBooks - especially the prices because they are two different products, with totally different experiences, in my opinion.

 

[Melbourne Park]

2010 Classic twin cpu card mac pro. Still use it - it's a totally supreme computer. Shame its not longer supported by apple, but I will get a late OS onto. Using it for old videos, to get them in and then I intend to export, make family history, and then upscale to 4k.
200xx ?? "wind tunnel" G4. The screen card failed, I bought a replacement in QLD - and the seller sent me the Graphics card. The G4 was a beauty, with the famed copper heat sink. But it's still in QLD - Covid interrupted. It's his now! Boy is/was that machine - but I never replaced the noisy. Strange that Apple did not put in quiet fans like the Classic has.
iMac 24" - still the plastic one. its GPU has failed. Replaceable though. I should through it out.
Several notebooks. Including the titanium 15" one. Great machine except for the too thin titanium. G4 I think it is/was.
Sold a 20 MB hard disk SE30 Macintosh. I loved it.
Through out a Mac CX. I still have the Rocket accelerator card, which was ... well i forget that processor upgrade, which made the CX a heap faster. It was a lovely form factor.
Through out a Mac II X. Huge horizontal machine, with lots of gold in it.
Mid 2017 4 core i7 with a 4MB GPU and the Cpu was about 7% slower than the model above it. Sadly it did not have a processor for video export encoding. Apple replaced, the keyboard, and the motherboard when they did so. Along with the touchpad and the entire metal surrounds. Then the screen developed marks in it, and Apple put in a whole new screen and casing. It's essentially new I reckon. But sometimes slows down, I presume due to disk capacity, etc etc.
Just bought a MacBook Pro 16" max, can return it by January 8th. I'll see if it's worth it.

 

[WC7]

2010 Classic twin cpu card mac pro. Still use it - it's a totally supreme computer. Shame its not longer supported by apple, but I will get a late OS onto. Using it for old videos, to get them in and then I intend to export, make family history, and then upscale to 4k.
200xx ?? "wind tunnel" G4. The screen card failed, I bought a replacement in QLD - and the seller sent me the Graphics card. The G4 was a beauty, with the famed copper heat sink. But it's still in QLD - Covid interrupted. It's his now! Boy is/was that machine - but I never replaced the noisy. Strange that Apple did not put in quiet fans like the Classic has.
iMac 24" - still the plastic one. its GPU has failed. Replaceable though. I should through it out.
Several notebooks. Including the titanium 15" one. Great machine except for the too thin titanium. G4 I think it is/was.
Sold a 20 MB hard disk SE30 Macintosh. I loved it.
Through out a Mac CX. I still have the Rocket accelerator card, which was ... well i forget that processor upgrade, which made the CX a heap faster. It was a lovely form factor.
Through out a Mac II X. Huge horizontal machine, with lots of gold in it.
Mid 2017 4 core i7 with a 4MB GPU and the Cpu was about 7% slower than the model above it. Sadly it did not have a processor for video export encoding. Apple replaced, the keyboard, and the motherboard when they did so. Along with the touchpad and the entire metal surrounds. Then the screen developed marks in it, and Apple put in a whole new screen and casing. It's essentially new I reckon. But sometimes slows down, I presume due to disk capacity, etc etc.
Just bought a MacBook Pro 16" max, can return it by January 8th. I'll see if it's worth it.

AppleCare+ 🤣

 

[What's a computer?]

My long-term average, Apple laptops only: 8 years. All computers: 3 years, over the same time period, or 10 years overall.
1995 PowerBook 500 series: Still works fine, but I don't use it anymore because it can't easily exchange data with modern hardware.
2005 PowerBook G4: In rough shape, but I still use it once in a while because there's a lot of indispensible software that never made the transition to Intel chips. I'll be hanging onto this one for at least another 15-20 years.
2011 MacBook Pro: My daily driver. Cosmetically, it looks horribly beat up. But it still works great in every way. The computer I'm writing this on. Sadly, software support has lapsed for a lot of my everyday tasks. Planning to set up a bootable Linux instance on it.
2023 MBP M3 Pro: On the way, due to arrive in a couple of days.

 

[Appletoni]

With Apple silicone now available for three years, is it a feasible option to upgrade yearly or maybe every other year? The specs and design upgrades are minimal, so how long do you plan to stick with your current devices before considering an upgrade?

1.5 to 3 years.
I switched from M1 MAX MacBook Pro 16-inch maxed out to M3 MAX MacBook Pro 16-inch maxed out.

 

[jav6454]

I don't think you know what margins are.

You apparently don't... according to you, Apple is a charity not wanting to keep costs low and profit up.

 

[MacHeritage]

2005 PowerBook G4: In rough shape, but I still use it once in a while because there's a lot of indispensible software that never made the transition to Intel chips. I'll be hanging onto this one for at least another 15-20 years.

Do have some names of the software that is indispensable on the PPC Mac? I would love to know.

 

[What's a computer?]

Do have some names of the software that is indispensable on the PPC Mac? I would love to know.

The most indispensible to me – as an amateur photographer with a vast collecton of slides – is the software (Nikon Scan 4) to run a slide scanner of the same era, which still works fine. In theory, I could reverse-engineer drivers for the scanner, but life is short. There's also Vuescan and Silverlight, but why shell out hundreds of dollars when I already have something that works just as well? I _ought_ to buy one of those, but the path of least resistance is to just use what I already have.
The other software is also maybe more convenient than absolutely indispensible. DNA Strider, for example, is great at what it does, but at this point if I had a little bit of extra time I could write my own clone. It's not something I use very often anymore. But on rare occasions I still do. Oddly, given how many molecular biologists there are out there, nothing quite as user-friendly emerged after the Mac's transition to Intel.
And then of course there are multiple big proprietary apps that switched to a subscription model shortly before or shortly after the transition, especially for domain-specific stuff. Not absolutely indispensible, but there's no way I could afford to spend thousands of dollars a year on software subscriptions. Especially since it's not all that often anymore that I need to use them. There are free (as in freedom) alternatives for most of them, but there's some friction involved in switching to the free alternatives. For example, I use the last PowerPC-compatible version of MATLAB (which has in the meantime switched back to offering a perpetual license again – at quite a price!), but recommend GNU Octave to those friends who balk at MATLAB's prices. And everything I've done in MATLAB it's now possible, with some effort, to do in Python. And Python on Apple Silicon is probably significantly faster than MATLAB on PPC!
For decades, macOS has been only a tiny slice of a market that's dominated by Microsoft Windows. I think currently, maybe 90% of the desktop/laptop market is Windows, 9% macOS, and 1% the various Linuxes. Broadly speaking, the breakdown of effort by software companies is roughly the same. So yes, I didn't mean _absolutely_ indispensible – Anything is possible on a Turing-complete machine! I meant relatively indispensible given time and money constraints.

 

[throAU]

You apparently don't... according to you, Apple is a charity not wanting to keep costs low and profit up.

So to clarify: You literally just stated here that low costs and high profits are what type of margin? High margin or low margin?

Because you seem to be arguing that this (low cost and high profit) is a LOW MARGIN which is completely and utterly incorrect, hence my assertion that you have no idea what margins actually are and what they represent.

Thanks for proving my point by doubling down on your lack of understanding.

 

[ObsidianIce]

You apparently don't... according to you, Apple is a charity not wanting to keep costs low and profit up.

Sorry dude...you're wrong. Companies want high profit margins. The higher the percentage , the more profit the biz makes relative to its costs.

 

[WC7]

Buying every two years: Most of the time Apple introduces newer technology with improved computer efficiency and minimized energy use I like to buy and recycle the previous hardware. I am trying to follow Apple's 'green' initiative.

 

[flybass]

Buying every two years: Most of the time Apple introduces newer technology with improved computer efficiency and minimized energy use I like to buy and recycle the previous hardware. I am trying to follow Apple's 'green' initiative.

Not sure if you are joking at the end there.. highly doubtful that buying a machine every 2 years is "green".

 

[Mr. Dee]

As long as they function and work without colossal failures. iMac G3 still running fine even though it isn't my daily driver anymore. Same with iMac G5 that was my daily driver until the Mac Pro 2010. Mac Pro is still king and it is almost 13 years old, but it does everything I currently need it to do work wise. Main laptop for everything and everyone else is 16 years old.

The only thing that is making want to upgrade is the 2019 Mac Pro and the M3 MBP. Not impressed by the M2 Mac Pro at all. It needs a lot more power and memory (extreme chip would have done it) in order to be worth an upgrade. I have hope for an M3 Mac Pro with something special but we shall see.

A lot more power for what exactly? M2 Ultra and 192 GBs of RAM?
Again, a lot more power for what exactly?

 

[WC7]

Not sure if you are joking at the end there.. highly doubtful that buying a machine every 2 years is "green".

I understand what you mean maybe the difference of the energy 'saved' may not be positive within two years ... but I like to be on the 'cutting edge' of efficiency even if it is less than green right now to stay current. Also, I checked the increase in performance (CPU single core, multicore, and Metal) and it seemed like quite a good percentage increase even since the M1 ... at least it seems much better than the increases we were getting with the Intel chips. So this time I figured I'd try a two year update with the Trade-in.

 

[fa8362]

With Apple silicone now available for three years, is it a feasible option to upgrade yearly or maybe every other year? The specs and design upgrades are minimal, so how long do you plan to stick with your current devices before considering an upgrade?

I have an M1, so I'll probably update to an M7 or M8. So that's 4-5 years from now. Likely no need before then.

 

[trusso]

I have an M1 MacBook Air, 2TB, 16GB (maxed out version). It's perfect for email, web browsing, streaming, the occasional gaming session (native or console emulation) and Windows/Linux virtualization as well. While I wish I had a bit more RAM, most of the time it doesn't make a difference, and the large SSD means I can keep everything but my large media library on it. Most of the time I've got it plugged into a dock/monitor setup, but it's perfect for taking on the go as well.

As tempting as the M2 Pros are, I don't really have a pressing need for them. I usually keep my computers for 7-10 years, so at the very least I'm hoping by the time I upgrade, Apple will have removed that hideous notch from their laptop line.

 

[Al Rukh]

I have an M1, so I'll probably update to an M7 or M8. So that's 4-5 years from now. Likely no need before then.

Same here. My base M1 Pro MBP is still going strong so I’m guessing I won’t have to upgrade until 2027 or so.