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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Because the computers get slower with each OS upgrade. At some point this catches up and the machine feels slow. CPU's might not be improving at the same rate but GPU's are. iMacs, for example, use a mobile gpu on the desktop. i've goto a 2010 iMac and it's slow because i didn't opt for an ssd at the time and got a painfully slow 5400 rpm drive.

People buy because they don't know any better. Wait until every new Mac in the fall has USB C connectors.

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> Because the computers get slower with each OS upgrade.

It seemed was a time in the history of OS X (up through Snow Leopard) where the reverse was true, and it's certainly not true that the OS must become less efficient with each iteration.

It's not a necessity that the machine must slow down with each OS update. Boot an XFCE on Linux image to establish a baseline level of performance. Make that your OS and you can _buy_ from guys selling 2012 computers.

No one said that it was a necessity. The fact is that Apple software needs more performance over time so they shouldn't skimp on the hardware, or sell "old" hardware.

Why are you introducing an irrelevant tangent into the conversation? I have an old Dell in my closest that has Linux on it. But once again, that's irrelevant to this conversation.

Absolutely not true. If anything, El Capitan improves performance.

El Capitan improves performance compared to Yosemite, just as Snow leopard improved on Leopard, but if you look into more than two generations of the OS the trend goes the other way.

I currently have two apple laptops, an old macbook that came with Tiger and use it to test beta versions of OSX. It's running El Capitan right now but is almost unusable.

My main computer is a rMBP that came with Lion. It worked better (faster, snappier) with Mountain Lion than it does with El Capitan.

My main computer is the original 2012 rMBP, and it's way faster on El Cap than the original OS it came with. Throughout the first couple versions, I was hankering for a new laptop due to the graphics chipset not keeping up with the HiDPI display. But somewhere along the way Apple really nailed the graphics performance to the point I never even think about it.

There was just one dud of an OS in there (Mavericks? I think) where the machine would just bog down over the week and I had to reboot it every 2 weeks just to regain performance. That was improved with the next release, and now on El Cap I only ever reboot for security updates (two months or so of uptime)

OS X does tend to get more RAM-hungry with each version though, so I recommend everyone to max out the RAM when they can.

I used an old 12" PowerBook G4 running Tiger for years past end of support. I just loved the size and the keyboard. It was also user-maintainable. Battery, memory, hard drive all easily accessed. I still have it and it still works. I tried running OpenBSD on it and while that worked, performance was a lot worse than Tiger.

Especially if dual booting.

I dual boot Windows 10 even Windows 8/8.1 my 17 inch Macbook Pro 8,3 even with 2.3GHz i7 CPU 8GB RAM and 512 SSD is like a hair dryer fans on constantly never stopping but not when using OS X.

It's fine with Yosemite 10.10.5 but I am hesitant to upgrade to El Capitan 10.11.6 anytime soon. I may even downgrade to Win 7 if I can but I hear MS is insistent on people using Win 10 even if they will not push it out you can still get it.

Sounds like you should take ownership of a poor decision when spec'ing out your iMac. SSDs have been around for plenty of time to know their value.

That you are knowledgeable about hard drive speeds, solid state technology, and the virtues (or pitfalls) of OS upgrades means your needs far outstrip the average consumer.

The computer you're running is 6 years old. Apple doesn't sell it anymore. It's also possible to replace the HDD with a new SSD.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+EMC+2389+H...

Even so, most people would use your 2010 iMac with much satisfaction.

No one wants to wait 60 seconds for Safari to launch. Apple sells high-end computers. People expect high-end performance. They should never have sold computers with 5400 rpm drives, for example.

Oculus won't support any Macs because the hardware isn't that good:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/4/11159700/oculus-rift-mac-su...

> Apple sells high-end computers.

Apparently not:

>Oculus won't support any Macs because the hardware isn't that good

Apple sells expensive computers. Customers are not buying cutting edge hardware, they're buying middling hardware that is designed to work with the specific operating system.

The GPUs in Apple computers may not be to Palmer Luckey's liking, but you can't deny that Macs have a high quality construction. For most people, this is what matters over the graphics performance: form factor, weight, battery life, screen brightness and color reproduction, quality of the keyboard and trackpad.

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