How well do Macs age?

I'm currently in the process of switching out my heavy duty gaming PC for a nice light laptop. I'm on my somewhat ancient XP laptop which at this point is burnt out entirely, barely handling youtube videos.

I'm thinking about getting a Macbook Air or some other similar ultrabook, but how well will these age after say 3-5 years?

Again the laptop I'm on now was new but it was budget, do the higher spec machines have a longer lifespan. I don't like changing my hardware frequently but I like things to run smoothly.

 

It will have the same lifespan as a windows notebook with the same specs. The resale value is however higher.

Moved to the Apple forums.

 

Well I was talking more about Ultrabooks in general, but I'm mostly thinking about the Macbook Air.

I thought Mac price points crashed after about 2 years, that's just my impression not based on research.

edit: wow they seem to hold price really well, I'm impressed.

 

Yah, they do, as do almost all Apple products, it's honestly baffling. They don't actually manufacture or design much of anything core to the actual product, just exterior aesthetics, so their life spans aren't really tied to apple at all, but 3rd parties, and aside from the OS, you're getting a similar laptop made by the same asian manufactures and assembly plants as everyone else. So it's up to you, they're pretty and shiny, and do sell for more than a comparative speced device from someone else would down the road, but they also initially will cost more upfront than a similar spec device, so the actually cost depreciation difference over time is hard to say.

 

have you saw a mobo from apple? They are just drop dead gorgeous. To argue that hey we produce the same thing in the same country so all things are equal since that and the specs are the same is a bit naive.

actually you can pretty much calculate the cost of depreciation. Just get a high end consumer pc notebook and compare it to the macs of the same time. Simple as that

 

Yup and the mac depreciates slower, hardware obsolescence will happen pretty much at the same time as it would for a Windows laptop. However, for normal use a core 2 duo (circa 2008-2009) still does the job. I still use the N50Vn in my sig for viewing movies and videos when i'm in bed. Oh and for browsing NBR at 2 am when i should be sleeping.

 

I've never personally seen a motherboard from an apple computer, I doubt most people have or that it's a selling point. From a computer world perspective it's not naive at all though, just the truth. Let's say you need a computer, that means you have a purpose and spec target requirement in mind. If you find two computers that meet the specs, to software, they'll perform equally well, precisely as if they were the same computer. Then you move on, maybe you have an enterprise target or you're a savvy consumer, and you're interested in reliability. Well, bad news, but it's the exact same companies and people pressing silicon, cutting cards, and assembling parts, meaning they'll have the same flaws and issues and reliability.

So if they have the same performance and same reliability, what are you really paying for but exterior plastic?

 

sure have I even had 2 of them complete with the ASUS silkscreen still intact under the CPU once it was removed. although I believe Foxconn populates them.

 

How well do macs age you ask? Well that depends what you compare them too. But for someone like me (software developer, loads of travel, heavy handed typing and generally being quite uncareful with my hardware) I have to say I haven't found ANYTHING that comes close to holding up as well as the Macs do. Up until summer '09 I had spent the last 8 years in DELL/ASUS/Sony-land. I can't even begin to remember how many laptops I've utterly thrashed in that time. And I'm not even going to include the ones that didn't have SSD and suffered from disk related issues. Just broken screens and chassis etc. The MBP I got in 2009 has a dent and a couple of scratches but when I clean it up the chassi looks great. The keyboard quality is ridiculous. Seriously. I break keyboards in no time at all. This one has had two years of me using it more or less full time and the only noticeable thing is that one of the arrow keys is a bit loose. A little bit. Not a lot.

I'm actually amazed. And people who know me and my laptop (ab)use are even more so. So now I have that MBP (which is getting close to retirement now, eyeing a 2.7/16/768 rMBP) as well as an Air which has 18 months on it now and still looks great.

Macs age well. Really well. Like really really ridiculously well. Now maybe I have been lucky but given the way I use my laptops I really don't think so. YMMV.

 

I dont think that you are familiar with how a factory works, there are different lines of production and they produce different things, each line has a specific Q&A for it, and so forth. A single factory can produce different levels of quality for a single product. So going back to mobos, you can take a look at how varied is the price for each mobo from a same line up from the same manufacturer, yes there are added ports and other functions, but the quality change for the caps and other stuff change as well. Surely if I slap the same cpu they will perform similarly, just dont say that there is a difference in quality or that there isnt a good amount of research in there.

Lovely, I have always liked asus boards, though I do prefer tyan.

 

Generally they contract an entire board, or system design to one outsourcer. ASUS/Pegatron make some things and Foxconn others. Truthfully ASUS products tend to be good and Foxconn isn't bad either.

The more powerful Apple products tend to suffer from heat-related issues because they push the cooling a bit too far sometimes. The Macbook Air should last the normal 5 years unless you get a real lemon.

 

if your metric of quality is how likely something is to fail, then there would be a variation among parts, brands, and assembly lines.

if you are measuring how fast a certain CPU will perform at a certain clock rate, then there wont be variation among motherboards

 

same, I used this board for my render station
TYAN - Server Motherboards : S8812 (S8812WGM3NR), AMD 45nm 8-Core/12-Core Opteron 6100 Series Processors (Magny-Cours) / HT3.0 support ; 12MB L3 per socket / AMD 32nm 8-Core/12-Core/16-Core Opteron 6200 Series Processors (Interlagos), G34

 

TYAN - Server Motherboards : S8232-LE (S8232WAG2NRF-LE), AMD 45nm 8-Core/12-Core Opteron 6100 Series Processors (Magny-Cours) / HT3.0 support ; 12MB L3 per socket / AMD 32nm 8-Core/12-Core/16-Core Opteron 6200 Series Processors (Interlagos), G34

thats the one I use, the cost difference was so high for a 4 socket board that I couldnt justify, I already bought 128gb of ram, now just bought another 128gb

 

I have a late 2008 MacBook Pro that still handles HD YouTube videos and Netflix streaming smoothly. I also skipped Lion and moved to Mountain Lion from Snow Leopard without a hitch. My ancient PowerBook G4 is still used for light web surfing (i.e. no videos), and it's been running for nearly a year without a reboot on 1 GB of RAM.