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Comment by dpcx | Hacker News Reader

You have a (probably) $6k machine that is still giving you a workable system 10 years later - doesn't that tend to suggest something?

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Mine's a mid-2010 MBP, only paid $1600 new (later upgraded the memory and swapped to an SSD). It's still my main system eight years later. Unfortunately, I can't install newer versions of the OS. I'm stuck at no higher than 10.12(?), so now there's mainstream software I can't install because of OS version requirements.

Kind of a bummer since it's still a good machine. 8+ years is a pretty good run, but that doesn't mean I'm ready to replace it. I guess my point is, yeah, even if initially expensive, it's been a good value. I hope the new ones are similar...

You can definitely install a newer MacOS, they run fine. It's a 5 minute patch to the installer, and away you go. My 2008 has been running High Sierra without any issues.

http://dosdude1.com/software.html

Very interesting! I have looked for ways to fake what version MacOS reports to installers, but was unaware of methods to install the newer OSes. Thank you, I sincerely appreciate the link :D

The 2008 Mac Pro cost only $2299: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-qua...

Even accounting for inflation, that's under $2700 today.

And the only reason my 2008 is still "workable" is because I used a third-party tool to enable me to run a recent macOS installer. Apple's official macOS installer refuses to update a 2008 Mac Pro beyond OS 10.11 (El Cap, 2015), even though the hardware is perfectly capable of running newer versions.

I still have a $1.5K system doing the same. I'm pretty sure it suggests that after Moore's Law computers now last significantly longer than they used to.

Only major hardware improvement in that period is Nvidia's GTX 1060/1070/1080 series graphics cards and faster PCI based SSD storage. CPUs and memory have barely moved.

I think it's just as much Intel just not having competition/incentive to improve as it is Moore's Law.

Until Ryzen forced Intel to get off their asses there was very little performance improvement generation by generation in intel processors.

For example: Over 2011 - 2017 there was a ~18% (userbenchmark) improvement in the *700 i7 model.

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-2700K-vs...

But then Ryzen came out and the very next model (released in the same year) was already a ~23% improvement.

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-7700-vs-...

The "Ryzen forced Intel to get off their asses" portion is definitely in full effect here. It got Intel to move from 4 to 6 cores on the *700 i7 part.

However, both in the SC Mixed results on the benchmarks you linked, and in individual benchmarks at Anandtech ( https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2255?vs=2127), the single threaded results track previous generations.

Intel still had to go wide to increase performance due to competition from AMD. They didn't increase generational improvement on their individual cores.

The 2008 MacPro was $3000 at the time, and was actually an outrageously good deal. A pair of the Xeon CPU's were roughly the same cost retail, nevermind the rest of it. Judging by the existing trash can one, it will be ridiculously overpriced this time around.

A 10 year old desktop PC with similar specs would have lasted just as long. I just upgraded my PC from 2008 (original Intel Core i7) to a Ryzen system this year, and a Mac Pro had much more power to begin with.

That's apples to oranges. A laptop includes many pieces of hardware you probably don't understand as part of your desktop PC (think keyboard, screen, loudspeakers, ...), is carried around all day, and sometimes suffers some abuse :)

A Mac Pro is a desktop computer, not to be confused with a MacBook Pro. :-)

https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

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