Other Starting to appreciate some bits of the Intel-Mac era.

[eyoungren]

Thats insane man! What use do you have for that monitor near the floor?

Mainly I have my music apps on it. Basically apps that don't really need my attention once I start them up.

It's going to change soon though as I will be moving another table in and get all the displays up. That's not really a desk you see there, it's actually a dinner table. I couldn't find a desk large enough and cheap enough.

 

[GMShadow]

I’m not suggesting. I’m stating early Intel Macs, in particular (and speaking overall), were solidly built systems.

Desktops, mostly, laptops, no. The bulk of the MacBook Pros suffered from GPU failures in those years, the plastic MacBooks were 'fine' but middling in specs and tended to scuff/crack/chip physically with ease, and the pre 2010 MacBook Air was an experiment more than an actual solid daily driver.

And I've had and used all of those, so I'm not just going off other peoples words here.

 

[MacFoxG4]

Lately I noticed myself that I am less exciting about Apple Silicon then I was about it at the release of the M1. Especially now with the absurdly high upgrade prices and the lack of upgradability in mind. My first Mac was a MacBook Pro 2013 which came with a 128 GB SSD. I was very happy when I discovered that the Mac was upgradable with a higher capacity NVMe SSD years ago. With this upgrade it was and still is a great Mac to date. In 2020 I was so hyped about AS that I replaced it with the M1 Mac mini and sure it is a amazing fast machine. 2 years ago I replaced it with a Windows computer because Windows 11 was a huge visual improvement imo. I still like my Windows ThinkPad and while it has 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD which suit my needs today, I love the fact that it can be upgraded with more RAM and more storage in the future.

The love for the Mac never faded away so I bought a 2nd hand 2013 MacBook Pro again to play with. I really like to tinker with this device and keeping it up and running for todays internet tasks. Also bought a 2nd hand 2013 21,5" iMac a few days ago. Really loving the idea that the Mac's (and ThinkPad) I have can be made better computers without buying a total new one and by getting more life out of them, they don't end up becoming e-Waste so quickly.

Really hoping there will be a late Intel Mac section in the MR forums.

Anyone else here returning to Intel Mac's or still using early/late Intel Mac's in 2024? What's your reason?

I also have to say that I am less excited about Apple Silicon too. I bought a M2 Mini because none of my 2012 MBP's supported macOSes get security updates anymore and patched Monterey kept giving me Wi-Fi issues (the Wi-Fi would go in and out quite a bit). I also didn't want to daily drive Windows 10 again. While the M2 is fast, there isn't much I can do on it that my 2012 MBP couldn't (running Pentium II VMs in 86Box is the only thing I can think of that the M2 is way better at). The M2 also has issues where the Wi-Fi will occasionally conk out even though I have it standing vertically instead of horizontally. So, newer isn't always better. The lack of upgradeability does bother me and does make me think about going back to buying PCs and Windows, as much as I hate to say it. If I wasn't so hung up on wanting to daily drive macOS, I probably would go back to using my 2012 MBP full time. Basically, when I need portability, or an old piece of software, or I'm just really in the mood for that particular Mac, I use my 2012 MBP (which I am currently using to type this post).

I have a 2006 MBP as well that I mainly use for digitizing vinyl and tapes. The analog to digital converter I use only works with USB 2.0 ports and my 2006 MBP is the only laptop I own in 2024 that has them. I still have my 2009 Minis, but they don't see much use.

 

[TheLion01]

Wow, a lot of responses in the past 24 hours after my topicstart. A lot of different opinions and I have to say: I agree with almost all of them.

Let me make this clear: I think Apple Silicon is amazing and it is one of the best things that happened to the Mac in a long time, especially after the 2016 - 2018 era MacBook (which we can all agree to) were afwull for several reasons. We gained very much with the transition to ARM and maybe the Mac lineup is in it’s best state ever right now, I do realise that, but I’m also sad that the things I really loved about the (early) Intel Mac’s have gone away, like the upgradability. It’s sad to think that for example the M1 Mac mini maybe in 2030 can’t be upgraded to fit the needs of that time, while a 2012 Mac mini still can be fit into todays standards for most people albeit slower than current gent Mac’s.

‘Read the headline only.

these M1 etc are better in every way, and what we wanted in 2020!

True, in 2020, after 4 years of a Mac line-up in a very bad state it was a clear sign that Apple had not giving up on the Mac.

I miss the compatibility x86 offered, but this statement is just bananas. Even the new parts of Windows are surprisingly painful on the eyes.

Agree, Windows 11 is definitely not nearly as polished as macOS. when you dive deeper beneath the surface, you see menu’s with a UI dating back to Win95. Tho the desktop and the newer built in apps are a huge improvement over Win10. Win10 had a weird mix of Fluent design apps, Aero Win7 style and Metro Win8 style apps and menu’s.

Nobody is gonna miss the 2016-2020 Intel MacBooks.

Very, very true.

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. ☕

You read my mind. Couldn’t agree more. I admit, it maybe is kinda weird to downgrade to an Intel Mac that’s 10 years old from a shiny M1 Mac. But I get much more joy out of this machine knowing I can tinker with it and change hardware and OS’s on it to get the most performance out of it. I finished school and I have a PC at work so in my free time I like to tinker with old Mac’s as a hobby. I also made the switch as a kind of statement to show people that maybe you don’t need the latest and shiniest tech to do your job. It’s sad to see the tech industry move to a business model similiar to fast fashion.
Thank you @B S Magnet, I feel very welcome in this section of the forum!

 

[TheShortTimer]

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.

My 2006 Mac Pro has no issues either. Testament to an era where Apple succeeded in creating products that were built to last instead of being built for short-term usage.

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.

We could go back even further than PowerPC Macs and list examples of Apple's 68K or 65xx machines that were manufactured around 40 years ago and still continue to work.

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.

Agreed. Apple were not beyond reproach and admittedly fell short with some of the EIM laptop models, as has already been mentioned but on the whole, the machines from that time period were built with longevity in mind as opposed to the later philosophy of fleetingness. Obviously we're no longer Apple's target demographic and they're pivoting to consumers who prioritise superficial considerations.

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.

Same here. I recall, as I'm sure you do, the people who'd visit the PPC forum in search of help with their early Intel Macs and that they would preface their requests for assistance with the context that they had no desire to be advised in the main forum to throw their computer away.

 

[mectojic]

2008-2015 Intel will always remain relevant, at least to some extent, through hardware upgrades and software hacks like OCLP.

However, after getting out my old 2015 Macbook Air, I had to say that I was given quite a shock when it started getting quite hot and the fans kicked in after playing a few HD videos – after using the M2 Air, I had totally forgotten what a fan sounds like! And it felt very quaint for it to get so hot like that.
Still, the build quality has held up, and the machine still does what it was built to do from the time. (PS the reason I got it out was to play some 32 bit games.)

 

[ric22]

I really miss the removable storage and RAM and think that's a terrible disadvantage of modern devices, though the modern devices are much faster. They could be 99.9% as fast and have removable storage and RAM, though, which is frustrating. If i didn't move home so often I'd be back to Windows desktops.

 

[Illinoisappleboy]

I have a 2014 Mac mini

 

[B S Magnet]

My 2006 Mac Pro has no issues either. Testament to an era where Apple succeeded in creating products that were built to last instead of being built for short-term usage.

i.e., Tim-Apple-term usage.

We could go back even further than PowerPC Macs and list examples of Apple's 68K or 65xx machines that were manufactured around 40 years ago and still continue to work.

It would be a delight to still have access to a Quadra 840AV. I absolutely adored that 68K box far more than anyone ought to. It’s kind of up there with, say, the SE/30 as far as a highlight of what a scrappier Apple could do. The first time I watched a QuickTime video clip was on the 840AV. My first foray (on a dial-up shell account) onto the internet was, ever-briefly, on one, just before our workplace kicked it out for an 8100. Even its start-up chime was in glorious stereo.

I never got to use a IIGS, but others in recent years have shown its ability to get on the world wide web.

Agreed. Apple were not beyond reproach and admittedly fell short with some of the EIM laptop models, as has already been mentioned but on the whole, the machines from that time period were built with longevity in mind as opposed to the later philosophy of fleetingness.

Odious, 32-bit EFI of the early Core 2 Duos notwithstanding, the Achilles heel of a whole class of Early Intel Macs was in the use of a lower-grade plastic for MacBook cases, in lieu of the preceding (and tougher) polycarbonate shell of the iBook G4s. Although polycarbonate tends to embrittle with time, it seems to do so a bit more slowly.

Obviously we're no longer Apple's target demographic and they're pivoting to consumers who prioritise superficial considerations.

It once did, but no longer does it strike me as ironic how Apple, equal parts woefully and wonderfully bloated as an entity, are constantly in search of other, highly-peripheral revenue streams — now that paradigmatic, core innovation no longer carries the brand.

They show no qualms with targeting a wide swathe of consumers, many of whom can barely scrape to afford a posh-priced iPhone, iPad, Watch, or Silly Mac M∞. This irony has withered the more I’ve observed, and with escalating frequency, how publicly-traded corporations (digital tech-related in particular) are disinterested with ethical bounds or substantive sustainability relating to the means of extracting capital from consumers by whatever means of persuasion legally permissible — even toward those just getting by at the margins the world over.

Maybe this is a part of getting older (and, periodically, wiser), idk.

I really miss the removable storage and RAM and think that's a terrible disadvantage of modern devices, though the modern devices are much faster. They could be 99.9% as fast and have removable storage and RAM, though, which is frustrating. If i didn't move home so often I'd be back to Windows desktops.

You might find framework laptops to be a refreshing change of pace.

 

[Kotsos81]

Apple Silicon Macs of any form and shape are much better machines in almost every aspect than their Intel equivalents. They are much faster and offer a smoother and more premium experience overall, for lack of other general term.

On the downside, memory and storage prices are utterly ridiculous and stink corporate greed. Also, the lack of upgradeability and in some cases of repairability is a major drawback.

That said, they are still, in general, much, much, super-duper-extra-ultra much better machines than their predecessors. The difference, in many cases, is day and night - it is another league, another experience.

Of course, if you enjoy your Intel Mac (which is the goal after all), it serves your needs and you have great user experience, that's fine, nothing wrong with that! More power to you!

In fact, Intel macs have some advantages over the M-series SoCs-equipped ones in terms of upgrades and repairs, as mentioned above. Yet, personally, I could not go back to Intel macs after my experience with the new ones.

 

[B S Magnet]

Apple Silicon Macs of any form and shape are much better machines in almost every aspect than their Intel equivalents. They are much faster and offer a smoother and more premium experience overall, for lack of other general term.

On the downside, memory and storage prices are utterly ridiculous and stink corporate greed. Also, the lack of upgradeability and in some cases of repairability is a major drawback.

That said, they are still, in general, much, much, super-duper-extra-ultra much better machines than their predecessors. The difference, in many cases, is day and night - it is another league, another experience.

Of course, if you enjoy your Intel Mac (which is the goal after all), it serves your needs and you have great user experience, that's fine, nothing wrong with that! More power to you!

In fact, Intel macs have some advantages over the M-series SoCs-equipped ones in terms of upgrades and repairs, as mentioned above. Yet, personally, I could not go back to Intel macs after my experience with the new ones.

Around these parts, I think you’d find more fans of Silicon Macs were they not part of such a paranoid, closed system which, cryptographically, mates/locks every internal component together; were they not sullied by soldered storage and memory (unified or not, whatever); were they not stiff-arming their parts vendors from selling replacement parts (to any party which isn’t Apple); and were they not hellbent on a three-year turnover cycle for not only the hardware, but also the operating environment (which, real talk, has never been a stable bedrock throughout Craig Federighi’s watch).

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Around these parts, I think you’d find more fans of Silicon Macs were they not part of such a paranoid, closed system which, cryptographically, mates/locks every internal component together; were they not sullied by soldered storage and memory (unified or not, whatever); were they not stiff-arming their parts vendors from selling replacement parts (to any party which isn’t Apple); and were they not hellbent on a three-year turnover cycle for not only the hardware, but also the operating environment (which, real talk, has never been a stable bedrock throughout Craig Federighi’s watch).

Does our own free will as consumers not play a role in this? Apple has its flaws but as a business, they are successfully directing their efforts based off what consumers do or think they want based off of their buying habits? Considering Apples growth, are they not in fact serving the desires of the market majority? Are they wrong for doing so? I don’t think so. Closed ecosystem, RTR, upgradable etc. whatever your concern might be, the vast majority of Apple consumers per their purchases seem to be ok with this. We are almost assuredly in the minority which I’m fine with but I don’t fault Apple at all for going after the market demands and trends bore out by Apple consumer base. It’s very competitive and they’re leading in many spaces that competition.

 

[eyoungren]

I never got to use a IIGS, but others in recent years have shown its ability to get on the world wide web.

There was a short period of time between my sophomore/junior year of high school (summer 1988 I think) where a user of my BBS started his own BBS as a satellite of mine. I was using a Commodore 128 and he was using an Apple IIGS. I had AABBS which gave me ANSI color graphics, but whatever he was using blew my BBS out of the water graphically. I've always wanted a IIGS since that time.

 

[eyoungren]

Does our own free will as consumers not play a role in this? Apple has its flaws but as a business, they are successfully directing their efforts based off what consumers do or think they want based off of their buying habits? Considering Apples growth, are they not in fact serving the desires of the market majority? Are they wrong for doing so? I don’t think so. Closed ecosystem, RTR, upgradable etc. whatever your concern might be, the vast majority of Apple consumers per their purchases seem to be ok with this. We are almost assuredly in the minority which I’m fine with but I don’t fault Apple at all for going after the market demands and trends bore out by Apple consumer base. It’s very competitive and they’re leading in many spaces that competition.

There is that.

But then there is also Apple history…we'll tell you what you want.

 

[tothemoonsands]

The only thing I miss is the ability to bootcamp Windows along side MacOS. Other than that, Apple Silicon stole my heart and I haven't looked back.

Parallels w/ Coherence Mode still works with Apple Silicon, it can install an official copy of Windows 11 (ARM) in one click.

It works great! Obviously there may be lots of apps that don't run without x86, but it's still a workable solution that is bound to get increasingly better over time.

I'm keeping both my 2020 loaded intel iMac + MacBook Pro for posterity sake, but there's really no reason to run either anymore. I specifically got loaded 2020 models even though I knew Apple Silicon was around the corner because I wanted the "definitive edition" of Intel Macs! No regrets whatsoever!

 

[ric22]

You might find framework laptops to be a refreshing change of pace.

Thanks. I first heard of them a couple of days ago. They seem like a nice idea, but pricey for what they are- like proper MacBook Pro pricey (not gimped MacBook Pro). They need to get that price lower.

 

[Siliconguy]

Anyone else here returning to Intel Mac's or still using early/late Intel Mac's in 2024? What's your reason?

I have an i5 2014 Mini in the stereo cabinet as a media server, and also back up for the laptop. I have an i7 mini as a file and backup server. It isn't normally on which is why "MyCloud" is on the stereo cabinet mini.

On that note I was browsing Ebay and noticed that the M1 mini's are going for less than the 2018 versions, and more worryingly, there were several M1 minis "for parts." Are the M1 chips dying early or was it the power supply? Has anyone heard anything? There are no parts to replace other than the power supply.

 

[GMShadow]

I have an i5 2014 Mini in the stereo cabinet as a media server, and also back up for the laptop. I have an i7 mini as a file and backup server. It isn't normally on which is why "MyCloud" is on the stereo cabinet mini.

On that note I was browsing Ebay and noticed that the M1 mini's are going for less than the 2018 versions, and more worryingly, there were several M1 minis "for parts." Are the M1 chips dying early or was it the power supply? Has anyone heard anything? There are no parts to replace other than the power supply.

There’s no endemic issues. The 2018 Minis are overpriced for what they are because of demand due to perceived “value” of being able to run Windows on them.

And I don’t mean dual boot - I get that - I mean exclusively boot Windows on them, which is, in my opinion, pointless when perfectly good business grade PCs can be had for a virtual pittance once they’re 3-5 years old.

 

[B S Magnet]

Thanks. I first heard of them a couple of days ago. They seem like a nice idea, but pricey for what they are- like proper MacBook Pro pricey (not gimped MacBook Pro). They need to get that price lower.

A couple of things to consider: one, the higher price point comes from the thoroughly modular nature of the Framework system. A good example: they have means to enable the prior Framework laptop purchaser/owner to keep using an old mainboard as, in effect, a counterpart of the Mac mini, by selling cases to house the removed, “old” board. This is perfect when there is still exceptional utility in doing do (i.e., an 11th or 12th-gen Intel board isn’t going to suck instantly just because you upgraded to a 13th-gen). They also have multiple, interchangeable sockets for whatever ports you might need on the laptop (as well as now being able to upgrade/change the internal video card).

That they’re also selling laptops with Ryzen chips is another step forward from when they were offering just Intel setups.

The second thing: several members of Apple’s industrial design team behind the unibody and retina MBP left Apple to join Framework’s initiative. Although the industrial design of, say, one of those era Macs might not be able to transfer over due to patents and the like, the aluminium case, thinness, and layout within could, reasonably speaking, speak to an evolutionary fork from that period of Mac laptops.

If there’s a good case to be made for “spendy up front, but well worth what you pay,” I think the case for Framework’s foresight on continued utility, re-use, and diversion from waste streams is a strong one in the bang-for-the-buck department.

Does our own free will as consumers not play a role in this?

This is, you know, why we don’t interact terribly often. I know you believe in a “free will”, which can to be expected from one in your station. From mine, bolstered by a laundry list of my own (and shared) experiences, I do not.

So whether in that sense — or exclusively from it — I know consumers have much less “free will” than they believe they do. Selling the illusion of “free will” is a touchstone of an advertising agency’s currency — or in Apple’s case, advertising department.

Apple has its flaws but as a business, they are successfully directing their efforts based off what consumers do or think they want based off of their buying habits? Considering Apples growth, are they not in fact serving the desires of the market majority?

They are serving the desires of shareholders who, in their infinite wisdom, believe growth, resources, and profit are infinite.

Are they wrong for doing so? I don’t think so.

This isn’t a morality play. Apple, the corporation, are devoid of morals. Righteousness in the form of a quarterly earnings statement is still borrowing from a future fast approaching all of us: the debt will, one way or another, be paid in full.

Closed ecosystem, RTR, upgradable etc. whatever your concern might be, the vast majority of Apple consumers per their purchases seem to be ok with this. We are almost assuredly in the minority which I’m fine with but I don’t fault Apple at all for going after the market demands and trends bore out by Apple consumer base. It’s very competitive and they’re leading in many spaces that competition.

Apple, as a strictly Mac or computing-focussed entity, weren’t so much the issue. Apple, having tapped out those markets, expanded into the far-flung — streaming networks, payment processing, credit cards, surveillance, cloud services, disposable wearables… even disposable timepieces. That, at least to me, an old bluehair in Canada, reads like an entity which got way too big for their breeches and had to find novel ways to rationalize irrational growth to insatiable (“insatiable” here being a kindly way to say greedful) shareholders.

But as with resources and with growth, a totalizing thirst for competition is not infinite, nor should anyone — including Apple — operate under the illusion that it can be.

But then there is also Apple history…we'll tell you what you want.

“Well, golly-jeepers, I never knew I needed ApplePay and iMessage until Apple told me I needed them!”

 

[Siliconguy]

pointless when perfectly good business grade PCs can be had for a virtual pittance once they’re 3-5 years old.

No argument there, last year I bought my daughter a used HP tower with an i7-8700, 16 GB and 512 NVME and a warrantee for a lofty $400. The magic but stinky smoke had departed from a large chip on the logic board of her previous PC. Her video card is so ancient that we had to disable secure boot or something in BIOS to get it running.

 

[0339327]

My main machine is a 2019 MP with 256 GB of ram and a 1 TB SSD and a second 2 TB drive partitioned for Time Machine and files.

We have several AS laptops for event and special use and an M2 Max for mobile editing. Despite this, my MacPro is generally faster for most things other than rendering and AS is still very buggy compared to the Mac Pro running Mojave.

Despite all the power efficiency, I actually wish Apple would just come out with another Intel MP and MBP even if it gets hot and has a shorter battery life. I know this will never happen but it seems like the Intel machines are less prone to bug infestations than AS.

 

[TheLunaPark]

My specced-up 2017 21.5” iMac still runs brilliantly. Sometimes my Logic projects can get pretty wild but it very rarely beachballs. At one point I would have gone out and bought an AS replacement on release day but nowadays:

• My current iMac simply does not need replacing at all. As long as security updates are provided it’s fine.
• Quite frankly, I can’t be arsed with all the faffing about switching over to a new machine, even with iCloud covering all my files.
• I also begrudge giving Apple anymore money than I have to. They’ve never been a cheap company, but their pathetic ‘nickel and diming’ over the last few years has put me off on principle.

 

[Kotsos81]

Around these parts, I think you’d find more fans of Silicon Macs were they not part of such a paranoid, closed system which, cryptographically, mates/locks every internal component together; were they not sullied by soldered storage and memory (unified or not, whatever); were they not stiff-arming their parts vendors from selling replacement parts (to any party which isn’t Apple); and were they not hellbent on a three-year turnover cycle for not only the hardware, but also the operating environment (which, real talk, has never been a stable bedrock throughout Craig Federighi’s watch).

Of course it would be better if we could upgrade memory and storage down the road and if repairability would be better (the latter, by the way, is a fundamental user right in my opinion).

IMHO, though, things are simple: Apple made both a business and technology choice of switching to its own silicon to control both HW and SW/OS as well as of adopting an ARM-based big.LITTLE architecture along with a SoC-based implementation to put emphasis on performance/Watt as its selling point. And it succeeded in that.

Now, this approach has some pros and some cons, there are trade-offs as it is commonly the case. You weight them and decide whether the provided products suit you or not, as per usual.

Still, even under this monstrosity of non-upgradeability and limited repairability, AS macs are better products than Intel macs - for me at least.

I will not go down the rabbit hole of "free will vs. evil company with strong marketing". The reason is the following: we take decisions under some context, and usually we are not fully-aware about that context! In relation to the above, we decide much more often with "heart", "gut" or whatever instead of pure logic than we admit to ourselves. Furthermore, the aforementioned context typically has some external influence from marketing, in a smaller or bigger extent (this applies to PC users as well - I know a few guys that want the latest 14th Gen Intel CPU with a gazillion P-cores, even though they just use a computer for YouTube, Skype, Chrome, Facebook, Word and PowerPoint!) On top of that, having a computer and Wi-Fi connection might be considered nowadays a somewhat fundamental human need (at least in cases where other issues such as shelter, food etc. have been addressed), but in specific decisions like PC or Mac, Intel Mac or AS Mac, M3 Pro or M3 Max etc. fake needs might be easily introduced, triggered by a multitude of reasons (incl. marketing/advertisement).

In my case, I switched to Mac because 2 Windows laptops of mine crashed in a course of 2 years. I got an 2014 MBA. I had Matlab, Mosek and CVX running optimization algorithms, 173 tabs open in Mozilla, and about 10 latex files, 30 pdf files, 5 word documents, and 5 ppt files open and it run smoothly as hell! Plus, the OS, the trackpad and the screen were a more than welcome change over my previous laptops. Next year, I got a used Mac mini from a colleague (he switched to the "trashcan" Mac Pro) with 4 GB of RAM! Fast forward today, I got a MBP 16" M3 Pro 12C with 36 GB/512 GB. Besides the amazing monitor, speakers, trackpad etc., a simulation that needed 10 hours in the MBA (and something similar in the Mac mini), it took 3.5 minutes for the MBP! On top of that, the machine "feels" premium in everything. And in contrast to Windows equivalents, its battery lasts forever, its performance does not drop a bit when on battery, its fans are noiseless and it doesn't get warm even under heavy parallel optimization in Matlab with all cores fully engaged and a vast volume of variables!

It is still overpriced, though, as excellent as it is.

To sum-up this very long reply (sorry about that): you simply weigh pros vs cons, as with any product. If non-upgradeability and limited repairability are a showstopper for you, it is completely understandable. For me, given the excellent durability and quality of Apple products, in general (with few exceptions, of course), I targeted the model that better suits my use cases (I have no need for M3 Max), I maxed out the memory, and I was good to go. The pricing was more of a concern, simply because it feels unreasonable and greedy. However, I wanted to avoid laptops that crash, get hot, can't be used unplugged for more than few hours etc. (I know, it is based on my limited experience from my "bubble", so it is just that: my experience, it doesn't generalize).

 

[CYB3RBYTE]

I had my 4,1 MP and 32GB of RAM with dual 500GB SSDs for Windows 10 / OpenCore Monterey with an RX580 8GB up (paired with a free 30" Cinema Display) until February of this year, when I noticed many of windows applications (primarily games) were depreciating CPU support for it. It also starting having some reliability issues, so I replaced it with a M2 Max MBP 14" with similar specs and a 38c GPU, paired with a custom dock setup integrated into the side of my desk.

I still love my older Intel machines, primarily my souped up 5,2 MB that runs 10.5.8 as a support machine / bridge Mac for my older Macs and iPods. As well as my 2008 MBP with a fixed GPU that runs the fans 24/7 but looks oh so beautiful because it's in otherwise pristine shape.

I also keep a 2012 MBP with 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD for a backup Mac incase my main one has to go in for service. I have no doubts 75% of what I do could be handled by it. I typically have it running Ventura via OpenCore. It somehow got erased and I have to go through and reset it back up. But again, for most people, that would be a perfectly fine machine!

 

[DouglasCarroll]

I'll keep with Apple Silicon. It is pretty much better in almost every single way than intel versio

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.

Eh? My 2015 Macbook Pro is fabulous. Not sure what there is to criticize about it..