Apple, These Macs Aren't 'Obsolete' | Hacker News Reader

Apple, These Macs Aren't 'Obsolete'

forbes.com

21 pointsjosephcsible32 comments

There is a reason for "obsoleting" these Intel-based Macs - they're simply too slow for the average user with Apple and other services enabled. Disable iCloud, Spotlight, MS Office auto-update and other cloud storage services and one has a chance at a (mostly) useful machine, up to a point.

With some hardware skills, one can upgrade / replace the internal storage, though this only goes so far.

Problem is, there are newer, cheaper and better devices with faster storage and higher memory bandwidth, so the market on more recent (non-obsolete or non-vintage) Intel Macs holds steady (for legacy compatibility purposes), while anything that lacks Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C ports becomes a liability.

The last time I saw this was during the transition to Intel chips: PPC G5-based devices fell off the face of the earth within a couple of years, with older G4s holding up the rear for legacy (Mac OS 8.x/9) compatibility. It's a plateau.

I still have exclusively Intel-based Macs, and they continue to work fine. Except upgrading to the latest Ventura or Sonoma, or whatever N-1 currently is, introduced new sources of slowness due to laziness on part of Apple engineering.

For example, the lock screen is animated and takes a little while to become responsive after opening the lid. This is 100% due to stupid and lazy, not because the hardware is incapable of displaying a simple animation movie.

I’ve got an i9 10th gen Mac with 128GB of RAM and a 1TD SSD and I’ve got an m2 pro MacBook with 32GB of RAM

The m2 absolutely destroys the performance of the i9

Undoubtedly, but what the previous poster said was "they continue to work fine". Not "they are of equal performance".

Right, but that's not the point. A 10th-gen i9 is still a very capable processor (ignoring the thermal issues).

The i9's were quite awful. I had one for a work laptop. The fans ran constantly and it still felt like a hot plate. And ran slow due to a combination of throttling and corporate security software that added tons of overhead.

The i9 destroys the performance of itself. It's very well-known that Apple undervolted their i9 models and even still couldn't engineer proper cooling for them. You can still get a sizable increase in performance running the same chip in a properly-cooled laptop instead of a Macbook. Everyone knows the i9 Mac is not some impressive Intel benchmark but instead the lowest point the Macbook has been at in a decade.

It's not a strict limitation of the hardware as much as a product of changes in High Sierra. Namely, apfs being optimized for flash storage and the mitigations to critical Intel vulnerabilities that reduced syscall performance by 30% or more.

The tl;dr is that if you want to breathe new life into those Macs, install Linux and run with mitigation=off or format to HFS+ and roll back to El Capitan or Sierra.

I've got a macbook2,1 with an SSD on Snow Leopard, and it's still the most responsive, user-experience focused Mac I own.

I've bought 11" macbook airs (2013 ish) for a couple of average users and they were very pleased with the speed having come from sluggish Windows machines. I used one myself for years. I'm not sure what the problem is? They respond to clicking stuff in like a second when Windows takes 10.

>The T2 security chip, for example, makes it more difficult for customers to install alternative, more lightweight Linux operating systems that can make old Macs run more nimbly than macOS

As a Mac and Linux user this is my concern, my old Macs have always been repurposed as Linux computers once Apple drop support for them, extending their lifepsan but it's getting harder now especially with Apple silicon. Asahi is an option but it's also easy for Apple to block if they wanted to in the future.

Apple stopped sales of these models over seven years ago. It’s hard to be mad at them for ending support.

Even when there is nothing wrong with the still-perfectly-capable machines? Capitalism offers strong incentives to force these functional and well-built computers into landfills.

Why should Apple be obligated to support these machines indefinitely? I think a 7 year lifespan for a computer is actually pretty decent from the original manufacturer. Much better than the most of the competition.

Additionally these machines do not cease to work once Apple declares them obsolete and there is nothing stopping someone from installing Linux on them and continuing to use them with a supported operating system that way.

What obligations does Apple have after designing, manufacturing, distributing, and wildly profiting from what they are now arbitrarily classifying as e-waste?

Currently Apple is reaping all the financial rewards and taking responsibility for very few of the externalities. Does this mean it's what's best? It might seem like a stretch today, but in the medium to long-term, true sustainability is important.

Apple could at least (1) not cripple the devices software and (2) coordinate with a generic manufacturer or supplier to provide replacement parts and competent service and/or updates.

Apple could surely dig around the couch for some spare change and locate the resources to make this happen.

Putting aside whatever "true sustainability" means, it's unlikely that it's a money thing. It's probably more related to the efficiency of individuals in organizations as they grow, and Apple is already quite large.

It is absolutely a money thing. If Apple didn't have to worry about the commercialization of MacOS, then they could publish the driver code so Windows and Linux clients could offer support theoretically "forever".

They do not publish the drivers though, which means groups like Asahi have to waste their life-hours reverse-engineering for sustainability purposes.

Its like asking how long a car can last. Apple makes it difficult to continue using them

We're not talking about cars, we're talking about computers. What computer manufacturer provides Apple's level of support for 7 year old hardware?

Apple just has the decency to communicate what hardware it considers to be officially obsolete.

The relevant difference between cars and computers in this case is what, exactly? They are both high-tech, require a lot of resources to manufacture, and can remain useful over a long period of time.

They are dramatically different industries.

Let me reiterate, what computer manufacturer provides Apple’s level of support for more than 7 years?

Plenty, when you pay enterprise support contracts, but Apple doesn't do enterprise actually.

Please provide some examples, because the few programs I’ve found (enterprise-level and not cheap, example: Dell ProSupport Plus) all end at a max of 5 years after purchase date.

That would be breaking NDAs.

Google is out of the Chromebook hardware market, but they provides ChromeOS updates for 10 years on current machines.

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en

The problem is that Apple doesn't open-source their drivers and firmware, so those things won't get security updates even if you're using a third-party OS that otherwise does. If I were in charge, companies would be obligated to keep providing security updates for all hardware they sold until they either did open-source everything, or provided full refunds to everyone who ever bought one.

Obsolete doesn't mean that the computer needs to be thrown away immediately. It means that Apple will no long allocate a portion of its finite software resources towards this machine.

Also, keep in mind that even if Apple did continue to invest software resources into the older machine, the application vendors probably wouldn't as it costs them money too. And applications can have security holes and breakages just like everything else.

I realize Apple makes its money from hardware sales and that testing new software on old hardware is expensive, but I would love to see Apple commit to ten years of security updates for every Mac, to bring the software lifespan more in line with the hardware.

Good thing the author isn't "mad at them for ending support" then. The complaint is over the usage of "obsolete", not that they are ending support. A second related complaint is that Apple makes it hard to refurbish the hardware.

2019 MacBook Airs are not supported by Sequoia

I wont cling to older hardware if apple gives me a new mac for free or just invests money in supporting it for longer. The hardware is “fine” and should keep getting updates.

It’s hard to say my 2013 Mac Pro with a 14,000 PassMark score and more RAM than you can even get in new Macs is obsolete.

You can’t even get a Mac Mini with 64 gigs of even -unified- RAM much less program ram. Upgrading this thing feels like such a scam.

The Mac Studio supports up to 192 GB of RAM.

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