I’m sorry. I am happy for those of you who can do everything with your intel. More power to you (no pun), I had a totally different experience. My 2016 MBP is pretty much useless. i suppose it depends on your use case. I needed more power and I LOVE the apple silicon . Never looking back.
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Other Starting to appreciate some bits of the Intel-Mac era.
- Thread starter TheLion01
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I'd love to tinker with an old Intel Mac. But when it comes down to how much I'd pay for one second-hand, the answer is probably $10 or less. Exposure to the cool and silent operation of an M1 made me appreciate Intel Macs way less than before. Do it yourself storage upgrades are cool, but Apple Silicon is way cooler.
Can you share a pic of your desktop? 8 monitors? :0
I have a MBP 2015 13" from my work that still runs fine but I use it on Catalina. Also have a personal Macbook 12" 2017 which I love how tiny and portable is.
Since I like the M1/M2 Macbooks, their price are just insane and just don't see a reason to buy so expensive device
What you're talking about isn't Intel—it's how Apple used to support upgrading storage and RAM, which faded out with Retina laptops, starting around 2013, and then got final with soldered components a few years.
I do miss tinkering and upgradability, but I don't miss Intel—I was around for PowerPC, and the fact that Intel ran hot THE ENTIRE TIME the Mac was on it was super clear—we could tell in 2006.
I do miss tinkering and upgradability, but I don't miss Intel—I was around for PowerPC, and the fact that Intel ran hot THE ENTIRE TIME the Mac was on it was super clear—we could tell in 2006.
The section of my signature where it says '8 displays' is a link to the image. But, this one is more recent (December 20, 2023).
Oh my. I started with the 512K Fat Mac, ImageWriter. Then Added 20mb Apple HD and External 400kb floppy! Upgrades from 1984 to today. My favorites is my 20th Anniversary Mac, and Titanium PowerBook G4 1GZ, all boxed away in Mint Condition. I have zero regrets that Apple has transitioned from Motorola, IBM PPC, INTEL to now the excellent M chips. There is nothing I miss from INTEL based Macs. For me the newest iMacs are close to what enjoyed with the TAM. I've always wanted an All in One computer that is just a screen, wireless keyboard and Mouse. The iMac 2021 brought that to us. I just marvel at the engineering and design that the iMac AIO industrial design. Just looking at from the side is just a marvel of engineering to me.
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I still have my 2016 15" MBP but have barely used it since I got my M1Max 14" beast. I do miss being able to run some Windows games using PlayOnMac, but I've got a desktop gaming PC that handles those just fine when I get the itch. I certainly don't miss the very loud fans and the poor battery life. The extra TB port was nice, though! I liked having a stand with a dock setup that left me with 3 TB ports still open after plugging in my keyboard/mouse/monitor/charger.
I still have a 2010 Mac Pro that I use, it's got more storage than any new Mac can offer and still works great. I work in IT so I'm issued new computers every 3 years or so (currently on an M2 14" MacBook Pro), but I really don't know what my next personal computer purchase will be. The prices that Apple charges for storage & memory upgrades are criminal, and I refuse to pay it. I might just go with a Mac Mini & add external storage. I can get 8TB of NVME SSD in a thunderbolt enclosure for less than $1000, Apple would charge $2,400...
I’ll chime in chorus with all who are welcoming you to the community of Early Intel Mac folks — where sincere power comes from knowing how to utilize everything on the equipment before you, not where illusions of “power” get marked by proof of currency and an eagerness to treat overpowered equipment as, dominantly, glorified internet appliances completely reliant on subscription services.
Although I haven’t been on here as much lately, I take some responsibility for clarifying what an “early Intel” Mac meant and why that matters. Features, form, interchangeability, and issues exclusive to the final half of Intel Macs bear little relationship to the crop of Intel Macs giving birth to this forum some two (or maybe three, I’m getting old) years ago this month.
I respect my old regular counterparts on here immensely (and I think they probably know I do), though I’m sort of on team, “There’s an Early Intel Mac and a Late Intel Mac, just as there’s an Early PowerPC Mac and a Late PowerPC Mac.” For the latter, the line was gestalt/Old World v. New World; pre-G3/post-G3; and to lesser degree, Mac OS v. Mac OS X (overlapping with OS 9/OS X 1.0). A review of the PPC Macs forum finds virtually all new topics, at any given time, are exclusively preoccupied by late PowerPC models and OSes, while the Collectible Macs forum being where talk of PPC 601s, 603s, and 604s get more care.
That said: for the former, the Early Intel Mac, there’s a pinned discussion on this forum wherein that debate continues.
Back to your post:
What you’ve come to realize with your 2013 MBP — that eureka moment to bring you here — is your laptop (despite incessant, perennial market hype about “latest” and “greatest”), is still powerful (remarkably so) and can hold its own in 2024 just fine. Hopefully, you’ll find so much more use out of it you never realized previously. Sometimes, it does necessitate one to step away from gear and to come back to it a bit later to realize how much utility was always right there in the very first place.
@TheShortTimer couldn’t have put it better with his analogy between what people now call “environmental e-waste” barely four years old, and what eminent engineers and scientists relied on to send humanity to the moon, the heliopause, and the first complete map of the human genome. Marketers have long been extremely effective at conditioning — brainwashing, gaslighting, “persuading”* — consumers to embrace a myth of disposability around digital tech. This routine of constant conditioning, notably one cycled on (the now-faded) Moore’s Law is how today’s tech industry became the juggernaut/monster/omnipresent force it now is.
Anyhow, tl;dr: welcome to the Early Intel Macs forum. Stick around for the coffee. ☕
[* As a marketing communications professional during a previous career, I accept my responsibility over this highly orchestrated, hyper-targeted, and deliberate conditioning: the creative brainstorming room can be a really creepy place to find oneself as two or even a half-dozen minds — “creatives” — wrack their brains to devise novel ways to sell their clients’ wares and services. It has to be novel: novelty is what the human mind gets drawn to foremost; this is the first base effective marketers have to know.]
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Real talk? 2014 to 2018… not Apple’s finest hour for Macs.
And for each time this argument gets rolled out, computing generation after generation, I’m down for it… so long as the person making the argument can stick to using the exact same device for, at least, a decade. If, however, they can’t, arising from irreparable hardware failure or being locked out by the manufacturer, then the argument isn’t worth much of anything meaningful than feeling awesome about having paid recently the sticker price for equipment which is probably not a (durable) good.
I am also a big fan of early intel. I leverage a cMP 1,1 in my garage, an aluminum unibody 08 mb and 09 mbp that I use daily almost in a terminal fashion, so for convenience between floors of my home and access to my NAS/server and the web. Funny to me side note - the 09 mbp's case bottom was such a step back from the 08 design. The ease at which one could replace a battery or upgrade cloned hdd was amazing on the 08 mb (why I own two of these actually) where as the 09 mbp was/is a complete PITA comparatively. The writing was on the wall even then.
I do have an 17" M2 mbp which is phenomenal on its own and I use it for all sorts of tasks & the 1% I need it for in the heavy lift of accessing remote environments in 2024, but I have no issue leveraging early intel for the other 99% of what we do as it was markedly similar to what we did 15 years ago (at least for me).
I do have an 17" M2 mbp which is phenomenal on its own and I use it for all sorts of tasks & the 1% I need it for in the heavy lift of accessing remote environments in 2024, but I have no issue leveraging early intel for the other 99% of what we do as it was markedly similar to what we did 15 years ago (at least for me).
And some here (not you) have in the past wondered about my reasoning for staying out of the main Mac forums. This general attitude is why.
I have an M2 Mac, work issued. Problems from day one. All solved at one point or another but I was not expecting to be dealing with issues for a month and a half once work handed me the Mac.
Also…silence and cool temps is really not relevant to me. I prefer desktops. The M2 Mac is sitting vertically in clamshell mode in a dual laptop holder five feet away. I touch the dang thing twice a day, to turn it on and turn it off. Other than that, it's ignored.
2023 M2 is great, but FWIW my 2009 MacPro has 8GB more ram and 15.5TB more space.
My only AS is an 12.9inch M2 ipad Pro. I have an imac pro with high gfx option. Serves me ok.
I think once the Mac Studio M3 Ultra pops into view I will leave Intel behind. Crossover/Wine is just probably faster than you imagine for all X86 software/games. And I already use it on intel.
I think once the Mac Studio M3 Ultra pops into view I will leave Intel behind. Crossover/Wine is just probably faster than you imagine for all X86 software/games. And I already use it on intel.
Are you suggesting Intel Macs or ARM Macs are more durable? And do you have evidence to back up that assumption? You'd probably have to go back to pre-Retina Macs to find true repairability. And those machineless are so old now that they're guaranteed to have aging problems.
Yes, the largest tech company in history would be dead, if they didn't invent the single most profitable consumer electronics product of all time. 📲 I'd like a larger iMac too, but lets not pretend Apple can't afford to ignore this market for half a decade or longer.
No, because most of the intel machines are no longer safe to use online, because they can't run a current, supported OS. The handful that are, are the late models, and those are going to lose support in the next few years. I've got one intel machine in that category, and I'm budgeting an upgrade to an ARM machine when the M4's come out.
IMHO the iMac makes the least sense of any apple product - I upgrade compute a lot more often than I upgrade screens. A mac mini with a nice external screen makes a ton more sense over the long haul.
I have a 2009 Mac Pro, a Late 2009 Mini, and early 2009 Mini, a 2008 MBP, three 2006 Mac Minis and a 2006 MBP. None showing age problems.
For that matter, I also have a PowerMac G4 500mhz that is not showing age problems either. And it fileshares a 6TB hard drive to my home network via two Gigabit Ethernet NICs. Has a PCI SATA card with a PCI SATA drive. I run it headless (VNC connection for control).
I'll leave out all the other PowerPC Macs I have since it's Intel that's the subject here.
I’m not suggesting. I’m stating early Intel Macs, in particular (and speaking overall), were solidly built systems. Retina MacBook Pros, with very noted exception, fall in the “Late” Intel Macs camp. Extensibility with tech products was once a powerful selling point — one of bona fide value to the end-user.
Their components were and are, broadly, replaceable, if not also upgradeable.
Their components weren’t paired cryptographically, needlessly so and to the consequential detriment of consumers stuck with them.
Vendors responsible for manufacturing the components, if in need of replacing, aren’t blocked contractually (by sheer force of Apple’s unchecked corporate might) from selling those to anyone, anywhere, anytime, other than to Apple.
And, much to Apple of the 2020s’ chagrin, many of those older Intel Macs can and do hold their own, quite remarkably, to the computing demands presented right now in the mid ’20s. The chagrin comes from knowing the cycle of product turnaround they stress, for their shareholders’ benefit, is entirely synthetic, if not also coercive.
We ought to talk again in, say, about eleven years when you‘re still using your current Silicon Mac daily driver as your daily driver in, say, 2035.
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Personally, I felt somewhat guilty because I technically could get by pretty well with my existing early Intel macs and my remote access needs work well on my custom win/lin box. I mean the money spent could have been put into a personal investment and grown or sheltered in a 529 or into property vs into a new machine that serves a purpose technically but I didn't really need and will technically be vintage in 8+ years. I could have just as easliy bought a M1 for less $$ yet very similar performance.
That said, it is very nice to have a truly fast machine in a portable format with an insane battery that will serve me well for the next decade. It is easy to talk ourselves out of such purchases especially when guilt, ethos or related rationale is in play. My rational self looks at these sort of purchases as not a compounding loss in value so much as a compounding value in saved time, ease of use and the frame work for future money making endeavors. So while my emotional self is absolutely leaking guilt about the purchase which I admit, my rational self sees this purchase as a tool to grow my wealth generation well beyond the cost of the machine not to mention the time I believe it will save as well, so a perceived solid return on my investment.
It will be interesting to see where Early Intel machines perform in 2030 comparative to say TOTC powermacs like my dual 1ghz Quick Silver today. How far apart will the EI mac experience be from the PPC mac today.