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Comment by daviddever23box | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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