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Comment by imjoshdean | Hacker News Reader

From the looks of it, it feels like that couple of years could be 5-7 years.

I recently bought a new Macbook Air. My old Macbook Pro was 4 years old. Not that the old machine stopped working - it still works perfectly fine. The Core 2 Duo CPU was up to all tasks I threw at it (compiling C++ code). I just wanted longer battery life.

That's why I see no problem with the new Mac Pro being so "unmodular". Unless something revolutionary happens with CPUs that machine will be good enough for more than 5 years.

What tasks do you do? I have a 2010 MBPro running ML and it slow has hell for doing any kind of iOS dev work. It used to be pretty fast but Apple's software updates - OS + Xcode have slowed it down considerably.

How much RAM do you have? OS X is quite memory hungry and is terrible when it has to page. I'd recommend maxing out the RAM if you haven't already. I'm guessing you have a regular hard drive too. An SSD will make it feel like a new machine.

Also, Mavericks is much snappier than ML from what I've seen so far and makes much better use of RAM.

I have 4GB and yeah, my hdd is non-SSD. But it wasn't this bad back when I was working with snow leopard. Unfortunately Apple forces you to get their new OS to use the new Xcode and that has screwed my performance.

I've disabled a bunch of things, Spotlight indexing, dashboard, their notification stuff, etc and also moved swap to a new partition, its helped, but still not as snappy as when it was new.

At the moment, I'm weighing my choices .. do I upgrade RAM,SSD or do I get a new one - but then I have to buy apple's expensive ram and cant easily change the SSD in the future.

Apple added memory compression in Mavericks, so upgrading to the latest OS may improve your situation. Disclaimer: I don't actually know.

I upgraded my late-2008 iMac with Mavericks to see if it performed better than Mountain Lion given that my machine's maxed out at 4GB of RAM and my experience thus far has been that overall, the system is more responsive, but there's a lot more latency in doing things like restoring backgrounded applications that haven't been quit, but are still running. It may be that my machine is too old, but Mavericks has just shifted the latency around in this case.

If you max the RAM to 8GB and add a SSD it will be a completely new machine. Also not that hard to do, well worth it. I have the 2011 model and updated first from 4 to 8 and then 16GB of RAM and from a standard HDD to Crucial M4 500GB and the machine is a beast, must faster in 10.9 than when I originally bought it.

Just maxing it to 8GB will make a vast difference. You don't have to buy RAM from Apple. http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=5A1D576...

I had a 2009 MBP. Lion was slow as hell but swapping the HDD for a SSD did wonders. The RAM upgrade I tried before that didn't help as much as the SSD.

Tasks: OS X developer.

And to follow up, the E5 is an absolute beast of a processor. It's hard to imagine Intel having that kind of leap in the next 5-7 years (but here's hoping ;).

That's just the modern PC landscape for you. My Mac Pro is on the high end of that age range and it still does what it needs to do.

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