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Comment by bipson | Hacker News Reader

For Apple Laptops, more like 7-8, at least in the old days.

Typically you would only replace them when they (gradually) became annoyingly slow for daily use.

Agreed, I had to upgrade all of of my PowerBooks/MacBooks at some point with RAM and larger HDDs/SSDs.

And my last Apple Laptop is from 2012 and I learned that Apple now drops support by the OS considerably earlier than in the old days (i.e. unecesarily early, most 8-10 year old MacBooks would be perfectly fine for daily use, but now unsafe) - at least that was my impression.

And installing Linux on them is always a mixed bag (fans, trackpad, etc.), even though it sure is better with Intel Macs.

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I bought a macbook air in ~2012 and it was unusably slow after a year. bought a thinkpad to put linux on after that that I'm still using today (although admittedly it's a bit of a wreck now - still, it lasted for 8 years)

The MacBook Air was not really a "high performance" machine to start with though - you can't compare that with a ThinkPad :)

And it was seldomly updated, so you could get very aged specs.

If you bought a MacBook 2011/2012 you would typically get an HDD and between 4 and 8GB RAM. Software requirements/demands sky-rocketed shortly after that. On a non-Air you could at least upgrade this yourself, which gave the machine new life ("just like new")

it did have a 128gb ssd. The thinkpad was also an x1 carbon (also 4gb of ram), so it had a similar form factor, not sure about cpu specs, I probably should have mentioned that.

I bought the 2011 MacBook Air 11" and it still performs really well for everyday tasks, probably the best computer I've ever owned.

Interesting, I wonder why mine slowed down so much then. From what I remember it was after an OS upgrade, it was my first time trying a mac, and I ended up being disappointed and going back to linux, but I also didn't do a deep dive into figuring out the reasons for it.

I believe the 2011 era MacBook Air (EveryMac.com confirms only the 11”) had an entry level 2GB RAM variant. That one probably got pretty painful after just a couple OS updates.

Shouldn’t be unsafe. Security updates are still coming out for the older OS that runs on these machines.

That is not true AFAIK

Sorry. I guess I got the year wrong. I’ve got an MBP from ‘12 still getting security updates.

AFAIK other than the 32 bit devices and some with smaller vram, all Intel Macs are still supported

This is not true at all.

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