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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

Hmm I'm sorry but this sounds like trying to rationalise blindly the fact that Apple sells old computers. It's irrelevant if they are "fast enough" or not. What about energy savings with each generation? What about graphics performance, where Moore's law is undoubtedly still alive as well (~2x gains in the last generation of GPUs)?

And no, PC sales are not declining because of the slowing down of Moore's law, but obviously because of smartphones and tablets.

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It really isn't irrelevant if a computer is fast enough for the user. Energy savings is great, and gpu performance is great too. But a lot of people just need a computer that is fast enough for what they use it for. And if the programs they use and the websites they frequent perform well on the hardware they have, then it's okay if the computer they have uses old hardware.

Having tried to use a 2012 Macbook Pro with the default spinning rust hard drive, no, it's not fast enough to run OSX. Sure, I can replace the hard drive when ordering it (for close to 5x the retail cost of that style of hard drive), but that doesn't change that the base model is not fast enough to run a modern OS.

I upgraded my friend's 2008 13" MBP from an HDD and 2GB RAM to SSD + 4GB. It went from trash to adequate for everyday use.

I think an Ivy Bridge laptop would still be OK now with some upgrades. It would be hot and have bad battery life compared to Haswell, which was a big upgrade. I still think you would be crazy to spend 1000+ on such an old computer though.

TBH my next computer won't be an Apple laptop unless the next iteration is truly something special. They have gotten too expensive here in Japan.

How's cost of alternatives? Here in Russia, similar Lenovos and others are either unavailable or like $100-200 cheaper, if at all, which is not that much for $1.5k machine.

if it really can't run OSX then OSX is bloated. No OS should require that much.

Bloat may be part of the problem, but I don't believe it to be the whole picture.

As Apple started moving to SSD's, I believe they stopped caring about minimizing disk seeking when considering changes to their virtual memory implementation. I had a Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a spinning-rust hard drive, and was constantly getting beachballs when switching between applications (I had FREE RAM and was getting beachballs!!!).

(Apple's ~2012 virtual memory behavior was a strange beast -- it appears it would page an application's memory out to disk so that it could hang on to some disk cache. This was different than what I had become used to in Linux, which always prioritizes application memory needs above disk cache).

Disabling the pagefile solved the beachballs, but with the downside that when I did run out of RAM, the machine basically ground to a halt. I later upgraded that machine to use an SSD, re-enabled the pagefile, and was back to smooth running.

Is bloat the problem? Possibly. More likely it was shifting priorities (minimizing pagefile access probably just wasn't a priority anymore).

Thanks, exactly the same thing happen to me and I thought the performance characteristic is different.

But if that is true ( Which align with my own experience ) this would really annoy me. SSD or not, it should ALWAYS fill up the memory first.

My experience mirrors yours on this front. I have several macs, one of which is an older mac mini with a traditional hard drive, which has become less usable as OS updates come in. However, the moment you replace the traditional drive with an SSD, the OS becomes responsive again.

"Fast enough" creates a lowest common denominator which then becomes the standard to cater to. If technology companies (Apple in this case) made an effort to push technology along, then it'd raise the standard and user experiences would be richer due to allowing programmers to increase computational complexity of their software.

Cost / Benefit ratios are a big part of economics. Historically the computer market has been a bit special because the payoffs of new technology were huge and simultaneously the cost of new technology sharply and steadily declined.

If Apple's customers are not still seeing those big payoffs from new technology then it becomes a game of costs. Changing a product mix every few years has its own costs - as demand for new PCs drops, these costs become harder to justify for an OEM.

It is totally possible that a 5- or 10- year refresh cycle keeps engineering and support costs down enough to be worthwhile if consumers accept the technology meets their needs. New technology will still make it to the end user here, but Apple is not going to do it at any cost - they are masters of profitability.

Of course it's fine to run on old hardware. But apple's brand is decidedly not "it's a few years old but it'll surf the web just fine". That's the core complaint here. Apple sells 4 year old computers in state of the art clothing.

How many people do you know that don't have a computer?

It's not "obviously" declining because of smartphones and tablets, at least not to me. Pretty much everyone has a computer (in the US), as it doesn't make sense to do many things on your cellphone (like write emails). They just aren't upgrading because they don't need to.

Or perhaps the market was first ally saturated, and what we see now is the normal upgrade cycle sans people buying their first computer.

Among my non tech friends? 80% don't have a computer anymore and solely uses their phone or maybe have an iPad.

I don't know the age range, but everyone over 40 I know has a computer, so does everyone in and a couple years out of college I know (my age group).

The only people I know who dont have computers are my friends working heavily blue collar jobs. Even most of them have laptop's, only a few don't have anything.

I'm in my late 30s.

Couple years outta college? People are still using the PC they bought for college probably. I don't know a whole ton of people who went to college anyways.

Agree with this. I live in Australia and work in the building industry. Most of the apprentices and tradesmen I work with, and their tradie friends, don't own computers at home. They'll have a TV, a smartphone, and a maybe games console.

I was absolutely amazed when this no-home-PC thing started catching on, because I just can't image, say, booking a flight on a smartphone. But there is a large cohort that a phone is good enough. We are the minority. I will always have a desktop at home.

> booking a flight on a smartphone

Hipmunk?

Well for me part of booking a flight is choosing which airport to leave from. The last 4 flights i took left from 4 different airports. There's also choosing a day to leave and come back which requires a few searches. I like to open several tabs and flip back and forth quickly to compare flights. I like having a screen where I can see more than a couple flights at a time. Having a keyboard and mouse makes all the difference in the world too.

The company I work for recently (~3 months ago) offered to send our payslips via email, I think I'm the only person on the workshop floor who has this, everyone else still receives theirs as paper copy.

Using a smartphone to do anything other than send short messages and read the web frustrates me to buggery, but for those people who find using a computer frustrating or tedious anyway a smartphone mustn't be much different or even probably a better user experience.

"to buggery" may not translate so well outside the antipodes :)

Works perfectly fine here in the UK

Funny thing about email. Chatted with some 18year old recently. She said she'd get pissed of if she had to check her email now. She probably wouldn't know how.

It's all social media/chat apps for them now.

I have a laptop for programming but otherwise I do pretty much everything else either on my phone or occasionally my iPad. The phone has the advantage of always being in my pocket so as soon as I think of something I can take out my phone and do it, without having to wait to get back to my laptop.

Booking flights is easy, I use Kayak.

I have a phone for when I don't have any option but to do something when I'm out, and to get notifications of e-mail (plus sms, voice, etc). I love that it's possible to use it for so many things, but I hate actually doing anything meaningful on it. Even on something like a 10" tablet, I feel like I'm limited by the small size and the input options. I usually pull the phone out of my pocket, think about doing something with it, make the decision that whatever needs done can wait, and put it away.

Home computers? Almost nobody. Just those who work from home.

And those who have, no upgrades, but shining new cell phones and tablets.

> How many people do you know...

That's not how it works.

I really want the GPU performance, my mid-2014 MBP can only output to a 4k monitor @30hz

You should look into thunderbolt external GPUs. The discrete GPUs in apple laptops have traditionally been out of date, out of the box.

Good enough for a lot of people, but if it matters to you, and you really want a mac, perhaps the external GPU is the option for you.

The technology is really not there yet. I have been considering changing my setup to a 13.3 light notebook with long battery life + an external GPU, but I'm still waiting on the technology to become mature.

Have you looked into Razor thing? They claim full PCI utilization, if I'm not mistaken.

You mean the Razer Core? It looks like it's announced on their website but not actually on sale.

EIT: It is actually on sale, but US-only (hence why I couldn't see it with UK settings).

There are no mass-market thunderbolt GPUs with fully-functional mac drivers at this point, are there? I've been looking and at best there are unsupported hacks.

An external Thunderbolt 2 GPU will only run at the equivalent of PCI x4, while Thunderbolt 3 eGPUs will do enough bandwidth to have full GPU performance. eGPU driver support was added to macOS Sierra, so hopefully the new Macbook Pros with USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 will support eGPUs nicely.

Use display port instead of HDMI. I have a Late-2013 and there's a huge difference between DP and HDMI.

This. I regularly drive my 4K monitor at 60hz from my personal rMBP (2013 with dGPU) and work rMBP (2015 without dGPU). Interestingly the first MBP to DP cable I used didn't work, but the second did.

Hijacking the thread to complain about DP!

Ports are way too wobbly unless you use your laptop as desktop. I love ability of using 2 external displays with MacBook keyboard and trackpad just right there in the center. But move the computer a centimeter and displays disconnect. Moderately painful!

If it's good enough, does it matter if it's old technology?

At what point the energy savings compensate recycling the computer and getting a new one? At what point does the reduced amount of materials warrant dropping a product line and scraping the tooling used to make it?

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