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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

I had one of these white plastic iBook G4s. My next laptop was the very first “unibody” MacBook Pro 15”, bought from a Thanksgiving sale in 2008. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and the HD to an SSD and it still runs great today. I stopped trying to upgrade the OS so the biggest challenge now is security. Thankfully Firefox has a long-term-stable version that still runs and gets current root certs for TLS.

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> I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and the HD to an SSD

And you still meet the specs of the current Macbook 16 years later.

Until you start comparing the bandwidth/speed of that RAM and SSD, at least…

Indeed, you fill it up even quicker nowadays.

I don't know. The iBook G4 had DDR 333 MHz PC2700 at best. The modern SSD of a Macbook M3 is about twice as fast in GB/s (2.5GB/s vs 5GB/s). The latency is likely worse, but at the same time the M3 has much bigger L1 and L2 caches (192KB*8 vs 64KB, and 16MB vs 512KB).

If you think about how a lot of people use their Macbooks all they really need is a 13” iPhone. And the 15 Pro has 8 GB of RAM.

Those things are tanks. It really frustrates me that Apple stops updating the OS after 5 to 7 years.

Linux runs great on them, at least.

You’ll either need to give up GPU acceleration on the unsupported upgrade to post-Mojave, or lose the Firefox support later this year on the next LTS. I’m not happy about it.

I used OpenCore Legacy Patcher to put Monterey on my early 2009 unibody (speed bump from the late 2008 model) and it runs alright still.

Just install a modern Linux, that's what I did with my 2012 unibody MBP (which I'm typing this reply on).

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