Unless you're gaming on your laptop your requirements probably aren't that much higher than they were half a decade ago.
Luckily it has a gigabit Ethernet port so it can take full advantage of my gig internet.
Perhaps you just haven't really used a windows laptop recently and only remember the old days when Windows laptops really did only have a life span of about 3 years.
Maybe one should take care about where to service them from?
My impression when it comes to Mac is that people don't want to pay ludicrous prices for repairs e.t.c.. anymore. Also that they can not upgrade because their current machine can't handle the new OS e.t.c..
I was looking at laptops about 3 years ago and it was extremely hard to find ones that didn't use that cursed 1366x768 resolution.
No, it's not.
A 15" _2011_ Macbook Pro with a quad core i7 is still more than usable today.
If you bought a Macbook Pro with a powerful CPU (i.e., CPU model not ending with a U), you should easily get 10 years out of it.*
[edit] * At least until Apple decides not to support it with OS upgrades, but you can always run the latest Windows on it. And Windows generally runs faster in Boot Camp on Macbook Pros than OSX does natively.
When did this happen? The last time I used Bootcamp, it seemed almost specifically designed to make Windows feel like a sub-par experience compared to OS X
Using a then-brand-new 2012 MBP with the latest version of OS X at the time (I believe Lion?) with Bootcamp. Some of the bizarre omissions I witnessed were
- A buggy BIOS implementation instead of EFI (rEFInd at least let me try and boot Linux under EFI)
- SSD set to run in IDE mode, instead of AHCI, resulting in utterly crippled performance (required issuing dd commands to the disk from within OS X to fix)
- No GPU switching. Only the Radeon card was enabled, leaving the system running insanely hot and guzzling battery
The final straw was when I ran some test VM's on it, and under a sustained load, had the CPU hit an eye watering 117 degrees celsius. Shutting it down almost immediately and then asking on tech oriented IRC channels I was in if this was a bug simply yielded dismissal from Apple acolytes at the time
"Oh it's DESIGNED to do that, the whole system is a huge heatsink!"
"Just make sure it's getting plenty of airflow, it's fine"
$1200 in parts total. When (if) GPU prices go down I'll throw a new one and be good for another few years.
I expect hardware failure of the CPU or Motherboard to do the machine in before it becomes obsolete.
Put all my money into RAM and SSD, upper mid range CPU, mid range GPU, life is good.
I said nothing about price. You don’t want to know the eye-watering numbers attached to that iMac I sold. And it’s great that you and I can get such life out of our machines. But in the context of the topic at hand, its not great that you and I sit on five year old machines because Apple makes nothing so compelling so as to make me say, “Shut up and take my money.” Because I own shares of AAPL, too.
The GPU is a GT200M with 1GB dedicated RAM, still pretty much in shape versus the toy Intel GPUs.
In those 10 years extended it to 8GB and replaced the HD with a SSD.
Original sales price, 1 000 euros.
I don't care about saving $1k or $2k when it comes to a device I use that much. We're talking about a dollar an hour here. I've literally spent more money on coffee over that time.