Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

When did you realize that your Mac just wasn't up to par anymore?

luminosity

luminosity

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 10, 2006
1,364
0
Arizona
I love my MacBook Pro. Its just a bit over two years old (October 2006 C2D revision) and has done a lot for me. I've taken it to work just about every day for the past couple school years (I work at a school), and has basically helped me earn some kind of living. I've also gotten into photography, and that's where its age is starting to show. It just can't handle RAW files from my D300 too well, and that's after doing an erase and install of Leopard (a new upgrade for me from Tiger).

I suppose I had to know this time would come, but I know my MBP isn't a very powerful laptop by today's standards. When did you first realize that your laptop or desktop was showing its age?
 
For Mac usage, never. I'd still be using my 2004 PowerBook if I could run XP on it (properly, not emulated). But I feel the pinch of Apples shortsighted GPU decisions every day when I play Left4Dead or Team Fortress 2.

So thats kind of odd.
 
Apart from pieces of my wristpad falling off and screen flickering of my 2006 Macbook Core Duo, I still find it in top working condition.
I'm going to wait and see what Snow Leopard holds, to decide if I buy a new mac or not. If Snow Leopard still functions, and provides me with many, if not all benefits it has to offer my Core Duo, then I'll stick with it stops working all together.
I'm going to get the wristpad fixed (I hear apple does it for free :D), and see where it takes me.


Now my old (2004) Dell Dimension 3000 has seen better days. 512mb RAM, 80gb HDD, 2.8GHz P4 running XP Pro SP3.
DVD drive wouldn't read DVDs anymore, and wouldn't eject CDs or DVDs for a long time. Replaced it with a DVD drive I got out of a scrapped PC at work. No AGP nor PCIe..sporting a PCI graphic card, which cost 60 euro, and can't even run WoW at more than 20 fps. Seriously!!!:mad:
We're moving to Vancouver (from Germany) in 6 weeks, and don't feel like buying one here, so get back to me in 6-8 weeks to see what kind of PC I'm getting. ;)
 
My 733MHz G4 Quicksilver is really beginning to show it's age (7 1/2 years) now. YouTube videos make it slow to a crawl... but it still copes with iTunes and Safari which is all that it's asked to do these days...
 
When the unibody MacBooks came out and I couldn't stop drooling. ;)

No, really, it was about four months ago when I started seeing that damned beachball more and more often while doing the same multitasking I'd always done. I've been maxed out on RAM and hard drive space for years, so I'm getting a new MacBook this summer.
 
When?

Well, my 2005 Revision A dual-core MacMini is on it's second HD and third :eek: optical drive. It really struggles with minor video encoding but it's served me well and I hope to get another couple of years out of it.
 
Doing more advanced photoshop on a ibook. The screen was too small as well.
 
The iTunes minimum spec is a definite give away. Haha

I can handle files on my 2.4 MBP just fine. Multiple ones at that. I still haven't touched the ram. I am a cheapskate. Everytime I go to newegg and put the ram in the basket I fail to checkout. I tell myself, "just wait another week or so and it will be cheaper." Well, I have done that for a year or so. I guess it is cheaper by now.

I am acutally sitting in front of my old 12" ibook right now. I miss it at times. I gave it to my mom for Christmas bc it became useless for me. She uses it for email, safari, iphoto, and that's pretty much it. I maxed out the ram and put a 7200rpm drive in it about 2 years ago. I rarely see the beach ball. Oh, and it runs leopard fine. It is not built as well as my 12" powerbook but it is still nice to have in the family.

I think I'll head to newegg to see what the price is on my ram. :D
 
Sometime around the time Apple replaced it. :p
But really, something must be wrong because I would say my PowerBook 1.67ghz doesn't handle my D300 files well but it does handle them. Takes close to 45-60 seconds to open each NEF file.
 
jessica. said:
Sometime around the time Apple replaced it. :p
But really, something must be wrong because I would say my PowerBook 1.67ghz doesn't handle my D300 files well but it does handle them. Takes close to 45-60 seconds to open each NEF file.
Click to expand...

That sounds just like mine. Took almost ten minutes to download about 25 14-bit NEF files yesterday. It doesn't take anything close to that long on my girlfriend's much newer PC.
 
Both my eMac and my iBook are doing just great for me, they are still very much up to par with my needs. :D

But I remember when I just had my 800 MHz iBook G3. I realized that thing couldn't handle my needs when the GPU started to freak out on me every 30 minutes. :rolleyes:
 
when i bought a G5 and watched it render video much faster than my G4 and then I bought my mac pro and it did the same to the G5.

and yes, I would LOVE to have a new MP, but not just yet.

other than that, the machines all work wonderfully still.
 
My original Lime G3 iMac started to really painfully show its age around its fourth year mark, when I had two external hard drives that were each 8 times the size of its stock hard drive...my laptops since then have either been stolen or destroyed before their time.
 
well, my dad's imac isn't showing its age yet, but we need 4gb of ram in there. its only got 2gb. and he does photoshop work and i work with HD vid files. so 4gb asap. but on the other hand, my P4 dell pc. its def showing its age. its pushing it when it 5+ yrs old. chnaces are, this thing is gonna diea natural death and by then, im gonna be in college. hopwfully w/ a macbook/ pro.
 
Today, when my airport card in my 15" PB stopped working properly and I can't get a good internet connection when I sit right by the modem. And my CD/DVD drive doesn't work anymore. Granted my PB is 4 years old, might be time to buy a new Mac.
 
Let's see, it was probably a couple of months ago that I started noticing that my Mac is going down the drain.

I think the GMA950 on my first-gen MacBook is going bad. Scrolling around with Safari 3 on the lightest of websites (i.e. MR, craigslist, Wikipedia), using Exposé or the Dashboard (with an okay amount of widgets) apparently heats up the computer to about 130-140F (51-60C) and that causes the screen to refresh itself only about twice a second while everything moves like molasses. It even does that on a clean install of Tiger on a separate HDD.

The weird thing is that it never beachballs on me. Everything still processes just fine, it's just that it apparently has trouble displaying what's going on. :(

And don't even get me started on any kind of video playback without the fans running on full blast.
 
Whenever Apple releases something new that makes it so you can't stop drooling!

My typical upgrade cycle is every 18/24 months which seems to work out well.

My next upgrade I'm looking forward to something that is a gen or two newer than Nehalem in notebook form, has SATA 3.0 and an SSD drive that can make use of it. I'll probably get a MBP instead of a MB as well.
 
Mine has started recently... Only 2 years old, but i think its time for more ram and maybe a re-install of (Snow) Leopard. I used to be able to run 10 things at a time, but since then my iTunes library has more than doubled, now iTunes, Coversutra, +1 makes it stutter when the song changes :(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back