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How long can you expect an Apple product to last for nowadays?

E

eyron

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 1, 2012
26
0
I have a mid 2010 15" i5 MBP which is my first apple computer. I actually bought it a few months later as a refurb and was hoping, based on the high prices that older macs go for on eBay and the image I had of apple, that it would last a while before I felt the need to upgrade. I actually waited for the i5 to come out because I thought this would also increase the longevity.

Since upgrading to OS X Lion the graphics performance has been pretty appalling. It seems due to apple's stranglehold on all drivers including graphics I can do nothing about this except hope they are kind enough to sort it out in Mountain Lion, although the general view on here seems to be that as my laptop is two years old I should expect pretty much no improvement and think about upgrading.

I also own an iPad 2 and iPhone 3GS, both of which are showing signs of slowing, the latter pretty chronically as it is 3 years old. Did apple products always used to be crippled so quickly by new OSs? It seems the one worst side effect of Apple's closed system, and not one which is widely acknowledged. On a windows or android device I could rely on decent drivers from manufacturers, Windows 7 performs excellently on a 6 year old laptop and there are custom ROMs available for android to squeeze out decent performance from fairly low spec phones.
 
I don't buy that the products aren't usable after a couple of years. I used my 2007 MBP until 2011, and it was still going strong. Sold it to a Mac afficianado who was going to throw some more memory and an SSD in it and keep it until it died.

I just sold my first generation iPad a couple of months ago to someone at work, who is now thoroughly enjoying it.

My brother is still using his iPhone 3G.
 
eyron said:
Since upgrading to OS X Lion the graphics performance has been pretty appalling. It seems due to apple's stranglehold on all drivers including graphics I can do nothing about this except hope they are kind enough to sort it out in Mountain Lion, although the general view on here seems to be that as my laptop is two years old I should expect pretty much no improvement and think about upgrading.
Click to expand...

Interesting. And I was sure that Lion's drivers were actually quite a bit better than SL ones. How do you measure graphics performance in your case?
 
I used to be really happy with Apple for supporting products far into the future.

Dropping support for the iPad with iOS6 has made me doubt whether they will continue this. So sad.
 
eyron said:
I have a mid 2010 15" i5 MBP which is my first apple computer. I actually bought it a few months later as a refurb and was hoping, based on the high prices that older macs go for on eBay and the image I had of apple, that it would last a while before I felt the need to upgrade. I actually waited for the i5 to come out because I thought this would also increase the longevity.

Since upgrading to OS X Lion the graphics performance has been pretty appalling. It seems due to apple's stranglehold on all drivers including graphics I can do nothing about this except hope they are kind enough to sort it out in Mountain Lion, although the general view on here seems to be that as my laptop is two years old I should expect pretty much no improvement and think about upgrading.

I also own an iPad 2 and iPhone 3GS, both of which are showing signs of slowing, the latter pretty chronically as it is 3 years old. Did apple products always used to be crippled so quickly by new OSs? It seems the one worst side effect of Apple's closed system, and not one which is widely acknowledged. On a windows or android device I could rely on decent drivers from manufacturers, Windows 7 performs excellently on a 6 year old laptop and there are custom ROMs available for android to squeeze out decent performance from fairly low spec phones.
Click to expand...

My early 2009 MBP runs Lion just fine, and that's with a slow 9400 chip. I will be putting Mountain Lion on it too. I've definitely gotten my money's worth out of this machine.

Maybe something is wrong with yours?
 
I think perhaps usable but the experience is not what as "fluid" as I would expect from an apple device. I've added an SSD and 8gb RAM after reading they help and while apps launch faster, the smoothness of graphics performance impacts greatly on performance. Perhaps I shouldn't be linking my macbook issues with the iOS ones, with the macbook it really is just the graphics being jerky. I've seen a few other people with the same problem so I don't think I'm imagining things or it's a fault, but in my view unless significant improvements are made in future OSX updates it makes older macs a lot less desirable and will probably lead to them depreciating more. I think it's pronounced by the dual graphics cards in the MBP but with decent drivers the Intel card should be more than capable of smoothly rendering these UI animations - they aren't much compared to 3D gaming graphics.
 
Can't you lose the pretty animations? The post above saying "Windows 7 runs fine on a 6-year-old laptop" is only true because W7 recognises the ancient video card and ditches Aero and all the pretty animations automatically. I would also question "performs excellently" in this context.

If you removed all the pretty squeezy documents and shadow things surely almost any old video card would run a simple WIMP interface perfectly well?
 
tillsbury said:
Can't you lose the pretty animations? The post above saying "Windows 7 runs fine on a 6-year-old laptop" is only true because W7 recognises the ancient video card and ditches Aero and all the pretty animations automatically. I would also question "performs excellently" in this context.

If you removed all the pretty squeezy documents and shadow things surely almost any old video card would run a simple WIMP interface perfectly well?
Click to expand...

Yeah, this. Windows 7 by default is much less graphically intensive than OSX, especially without Aero effects or any of the little animations. If you turn that stuff off in OSX you'll get fine performance as well.
 
tillsbury said:
Can't you lose the pretty animations? The post above saying "Windows 7 runs fine on a 6-year-old laptop" is only true because W7 recognises the ancient video card and ditches Aero and all the pretty animations automatically. I would also question "performs excellently" in this context.

If you removed all the pretty squeezy documents and shadow things surely almost any old video card would run a simple WIMP interface perfectly well?
Click to expand...

I have seen this laptop http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=1729 (9 years old) run Aero on windows 7 by default, and it's not slow. While I could of course disable all the animations in Lion it would be pretty depressing to do so and would defeat the whole point of having a mac which reputedly "just works". I take it from the response of most of you that you don't think there's any trend of Apple not providing adequate support for older devices then.
 
eyron said:
I take it from the response of most of you that you don't think there's any trend of Apple not providing adequate support for older devices then.
Click to expand...

I upgrade my computer every 3 years. I've been doing that forever, even when I was a PC guy. Sticking to the same machine any longer than that and you will be facing slowdown, regardless of your chosen platform. That's just how technology works. Your Mac can still perform all of its functions without the flashy animations, those aren't needed at all and add nothing to the functionality of the device. It's still entirely serviceable even for modern applications. For a two year old machine I'd say that's pretty swell.
 
I can afford to upgrade every model update. But I pass my computers down to my Mom and she can get 3 or 4 years out of them in her businesses and at home. So, it's not an issue for me. But if I were to guess, I suppose I could get about 2 years of productive use out of my Apple products.

On the other hand, I get the same productivity out of our high end Dell systems too.
 
Windows 7 on a 30Gb Centrino with 512Mb? Your definition of "not slow" appears to be different from mine. I have a Sony Vaio laptop with the same processor, installed a 60Gb SSD and 2Gb RAM and it will run XP acceptably. Not quick by any means. In fact, slow.
 
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