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Comment by acranox | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

"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.

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