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Comment by Toutouxc | Hacker News Reader

> Apple is pretty good at the planned obsolescence game

Nah, they suck at it.

My GF is just finishing her bachelors thesis in the living room on my 2013 MBP with 4 GB RAM. First battery, updated all the way from Mavericks to Big Sur. Still supported, still useful and prettier than 80 % machines out there.

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Just out of interest, is she still using the same HDD? I find that the performance of older MacBooks are pretty awful under recent version of Mac OS if the storage hardware is the older non-SSD drives. My old $work MacBook with a HDD was thankfully swapped out for a SSD version -- the difference was night and day. Though this SSD machine is starting to slow down noticeably with Big Sur...

It's the Late 2013 retina model, with a 128 GB SSD.

Since 2012 the MacBook Pros switched to all Retina and all SSD so yeah it's got an SSD. Anecdotally my 2012 retina is still doing great, also on Big Sur. Battery is pretty shot though.

You're right. Macs have excellent build quality and are durable as hell. Planned obsolescence with Apple is seen more with iPhones. There was the recent story about Apple slowing down older iPhones via software updates [1]

[1]: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724]

This isn't a case of planned obsolescence. If anything it's exactly the opposite of that, trying to prolong the useful life of a phone as its battery degrades. This did of course lead to them offering a $29 battery replacement for affected phones (after they were caught doing this).

The lack of communication was a problem but "planned obsolescence" in this case is just tin-foil hat nonsense.

iPhones gets OS updates longer than any Android phones.

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