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Comment by NathanCH | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why Apple computers seemingly only have a 2-3 year lifespan? I've had the "opportunity" of owning three Macs in my life and none of them have lasted more than a couple years.

Sure, they work. I gave me Grandma my old iMac and she uses it to this day. But it's impossibly slow, as is my 2015 iMac that I'm writing this on.

Restarting this $2500 computer takes several minutes, opening applications takes similar period of time. The computer lags when you open ANY save dialog. Even opening finder takes about 1 second.

Meanwhile I also have a five year old Windows PC I built myself, restarts in under 15 seconds. As soon as I see my desktop I can launch any application instantly.

I like using OSX but it's fucking slow.

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Does the iMac possibly have a HDD rather than an SSD (which your custom PC probably has)?

The SSD makes a huge difference in response time. It’s the only reason I’m still using my 5 year old MacBook Pro which has a PCIe SSD and I have no plans to upgrade other than to maybe get TB3 support.

I actually do real development on it, running multiple applications, running Xcode builds, the lot. It does everything I throw at it like a champ.

I’m not sure where you’re getting the 2-3 but that’s definitely not what you should be getting from a modern PC/Mac, especially if they have an SSD.

Yeah that's correct, the Windows machine has a SSD and the iMac does not. Perhaps I've just forgotten how intolerable HDDs are.

I bought a 2011 mac mini used for $250. It's been great for ios dev. It ran xcode, simulator, visual code & safari with 50+ open tabs well. Sadly it started acting up last night during an update and I need to reinstall the OS, but for a 7 yr old hardware it's done fine and I'm no apple fan.

Probably because you don't have an SSD. It's a shame that entry level models of both the iMac and Mac Mini have hard disks rather than SSDs, because it gives a bad experience.

I have a 2012 MacBook Air, 8GB, 256GB SSD still works great, had to replace the battery, but that's all. I run virtual machines on it, edit photos and video, no major problems with it speed wise.

My experience is that macOS is similar to how Windows used to be. You have to wipe it out and reinstall it every year or two to get your performance back.

That is definitely not true.

In fact, performance has gotten slightly better for me on my 2013 MacBook Pro, especially after the Metal/APFS upgrade after High Sierra. And I’ve been upgrading since Mavericks now, not doing a clean install.

Have a used 2009 Mac Pro flashed to 2010 with 64GB RAM, x5680 3.33 Ghz hex core CPU and modern GPU works great.

Probably stuff you've installed.

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