Apple should stop selling four-year-old computers

Re:Apple should stop selling four-year-old computers by falcolas on Sunday August 07, 2016 @08:52PM (#12244722)

Having tried to use a 2012 Macbook Pro with the default spinning rust hard drive, no, it's not fast enough to run OSX. Sure, I can replace the hard drive when ordering it (for close to 5x the retail cost of that style of hard drive), but that doesn't change that the base model is not fast enough to run a modern OS.

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Re:Apple should stop selling four-year-old computers by rangibaby on Sunday August 07, 2016 @10:33PM (#12245124)

I upgraded my friend's 2008 13" MBP from an HDD and 2GB RAM to SSD + 4GB. It went from trash to adequate for everyday use.

I think an Ivy Bridge laptop would still be OK now with some upgrades. It would be hot and have bad battery life compared to Haswell, which was a big upgrade. I still think you would be crazy to spend 1000+ on such an old computer though.

TBH my next computer won't be an Apple laptop unless the next iteration is truly something special. They have gotten too expensive here in Japan.

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Re:Apple should stop selling four-year-old computers by elmigranto on Monday August 08, 2016 @12:21AM (#12245471)

How's cost of alternatives? Here in Russia, similar Lenovos and others are either unavailable or like $100-200 cheaper, if at all, which is not that much for $1.5k machine.

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Re:Apple should stop selling four-year-old computers by jasonkostempski on Monday August 08, 2016 @12:41AM (#12245548)

if it really can't run OSX then OSX is bloated. No OS should require that much.

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Re:Apple should stop selling four-year-old computers by cellularmitosis on Monday August 08, 2016 @01:14AM (#12245631)

Bloat may be part of the problem, but I don't believe it to be the whole picture.

As Apple started moving to SSD's, I believe they stopped caring about minimizing disk seeking when considering changes to their virtual memory implementation. I had a Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a spinning-rust hard drive, and was constantly getting beachballs when switching between applications (I had FREE RAM and was getting beachballs!!!).

(Apple's ~2012 virtual memory behavior was a strange beast -- it appears it would page an application's memory out to disk so that it could hang on to some disk cache. This was different than what I had become used to in Linux, which always prioritizes application memory needs above disk cache).

Disabling the pagefile solved the beachballs, but with the downside that when I did run out of RAM, the machine basically ground to a halt. I later upgraded that machine to use an SSD, re-enabled the pagefile, and was back to smooth running.

Is bloat the problem? Possibly. More likely it was shifting priorities (minimizing pagefile access probably just wasn't a priority anymore).

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Re:Apple should stop selling four-year-old computers by falcolas on Monday August 08, 2016 @09:49AM (#12247702)

My experience mirrors yours on this front. I have several macs, one of which is an older mac mini with a traditional hard drive, which has become less usable as OS updates come in. However, the moment you replace the traditional drive with an SSD, the OS becomes responsive again.

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Re:Apple should stop selling four-year-old computers by ksec on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:09AM (#12247056)

Thanks, exactly the same thing happen to me and I thought the performance characteristic is different.

But if that is true ( Which align with my own experience ) this would really annoy me. SSD or not, it should ALWAYS fill up the memory first.

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