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Re:The increasingly long lives of old Macs by leviathant on Monday August 17, 2015 @12:16PM (#10074037)
Adorable! I've got a Dell E1505 laptop that I bought refurbished in mid-2006 for $650 that is currently running Windows 10. The biggest bottleneck was the hard drive, which I'd swap out to an SSD if I really intended to give it any heavy use. The Dell came with XP, I upgraded to the Windows 7 preview and let it sit, upgraded to the Windows 8 preview and let it sit, upgraded to the Windows 10 preview, and now it has full-fledged Windows 10 - so I ended up with a completely free OS upgrade path, too.

You can't run new Mac operating systems on old hardware, and for a few iterations now, you can't upgrade Mac laptop hardware. That's great that the writer thinks functioning computer hardware from 2008 is old, and that Apple hardware is that much better than alternatives. Working for a company where everyone's on Macbook pros (myself included since last August), the reality of Apple hardware reliability is quite different than what articles like this project.

Re:The increasingly long lives of old Macs by gambiter on Monday August 17, 2015 @03:19PM (#10075427)
> You can't run new Mac operating systems on old hardware

Uhm.. aside from when OSX began requiring a 64bit CPU, what are you talking about? I have a 2008 Macbook Pro and it's happily running Yosemite with no issues. Sure, it's slower than modern hardware, but not overly so.

Re:The increasingly long lives of old Macs by leviathant on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @06:21PM (#10082606)
I apologize, I should have been more specific - OS X operates on post-PowerPC Apple hardware just fine up until the 64-bit requirement, but Windows 10 runs on hardware dating as far back as 2003 - see http://www.techradar.com/us/news/software/operating-systems/... for specs.
Re:The increasingly long lives of old Macs by gambiter on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @09:13PM (#10083189)
So then, to extend your original comment... "You also can't run new Windows operating systems on old hardware."

There's going to be some point where old hardware will cease to run the latest OS... wherever the OS makers decide to draw the line, the line WILL exist, so it's not a valid argument for or against, it's just... a fact.