I recently retired my 2010 MBA which had a C2D processor, 4GB ram and an SSD. It still worked and did what I "needed" it to do, but it didn't do it as fast as I wanted nor did it do some of the things I wanted it to do.
As someone stated here, the latest OS' are demanding. My CPU usage on that old C2D was often times 25-50% with me doing nothing at all, just background processes running. In fact, I had to disable my iCloud photo library because it was hogging up ALL the CPU time processing the photos, faces, etc.
The 2017 that replaced it doesn't even flinch. iCloud Photo's is enabled. Text message forwarding is enabled, WhatsApp loaded, Google Hangouts is running, taking calls, several tabs open it just blows through it. None of this is particularly demanding of modern CPU's, but caused the C2D to cry for mercy. Some of the load would have likely been alleviated if it had more RAM since I'm sure a lot of that processing time went towards memory compression, but over all, I think an upgrade to an entirely new machine is a better solution then dumping $$$ in one that's 7 years old.
As someone stated here, the latest OS' are demanding. My CPU usage on that old C2D was often times 25-50% with me doing nothing at all, just background processes running. In fact, I had to disable my iCloud photo library because it was hogging up ALL the CPU time processing the photos, faces, etc.
The 2017 that replaced it doesn't even flinch. iCloud Photo's is enabled. Text message forwarding is enabled, WhatsApp loaded, Google Hangouts is running, taking calls, several tabs open it just blows through it. None of this is particularly demanding of modern CPU's, but caused the C2D to cry for mercy. Some of the load would have likely been alleviated if it had more RAM since I'm sure a lot of that processing time went towards memory compression, but over all, I think an upgrade to an entirely new machine is a better solution then dumping $$$ in one that's 7 years old.
