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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

People talk about Apple prices being higher but the longevity of their devices really erases that price difference for me.

I still have an old iPhone 8 that I test with that runs well, I’ve had numerous Android devices die in that timeframe, slow to a crawl, or at best their performance is erratic.

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I am not so sure. I had a Pentium4 eMachine that made it all the way to around 2012. The same kind of life for my first Athlon64 machine from the same company. In both cases, the machines ran Linux, and they still work today. They were only retired because no meaningful software could run on them any longer. My PowerBook G4 got no where near that longevity, and owners of late era Intel MacBooks are probably going to have similar issues.

Those machines should have been retired long ago because modern machines use much less power. (the Pentium4 was really bad) Of course there is a difference between a machine that you turn on for an hour once a week and a machine you leave on 24x7. The later use would pay for a new computer in just a few years just from savings on the electric bill (assuming same workload, if you then load the new computer with more things to do you can't see that)

The non-trivial environmental damage of building the new computer AND disposing of the old one should not be ignored. There are plenty of us who would rather pay a few extra bucks on our power bill rather than send e-waste to the landfill before it needs to be.

You are instead sending CO2 into the atmosphere. (depending on how your get your power, but for most of us burning things is how we get our power. Renewables are coming online fast though)

Ewaste will create CO2 and physical environmental pollution. Much of it is just dumped on the third world where some parts will be burnt, some melted down, and some subjected to chemical baths for metals extraction. Those chemicals will then be dumped.

Longevity (and certainly not performance over time) is not something I've ever herd associated with an eMachine. I think that machine might be a outlier.

I still have an old iPhone 8 that I test with that runs well

I have an iPhone 3G from 2008 that is currently playing music as I work.

After 16 years, it still syncs perfectly with Apple Music on the current version of macOS.

Unfortunately, since it can't handle modern encryption, I can't get it to connect to any wifi access point.

I also point people to the Mac mini line whenever they talk about price. The new M4 at ~$700 is a steal, but they have been affordable since the m1 refresh. Real “bang for your buck” computer IMO

With soldered RAM and storage it seems quite risky to get the lowest spec version of any new Mac, so I don't see much point in discussing the entry-level price point. Do they still start at 8GB? I recall hearing that negatively impacted the SSD's performance significantly and people were recommending 16GB minimum for M1 stuff.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/10/30/apple-8gb-16gb-ram-mac/

I have an 8GB M1 MacBook Pro and it’s the perfect computer. I always have lots of tabs and Docker open etc. It works great. I want to upgrade at some point but probably don’t need to anytime soon.

8GB is fine (on macos anyways) for what you're doing, but like it or not more and more AI is being (unnecessarily) shoved into applications and it needs memory for the GPU.

Memory (both system and GPU) is usually best thing to future proof a computer at buy time, especially as it's not user-replaceable anymore.

You can get a 512g/24gb for $1104.00 USD. Still seems pretty great to me. If you’re disciplined with your internal/external storage you could also stay at a 256gb SSD and get 32gb of ram.

Base model is 16gb as of the M4 release.

You also don’t have to get the base model. You can stay under $1000 while increasing to 24gb of ram.

I still manage PC that are about 15 years old, working happily for what their users care about.

my mid 2012 MacBook air refuses to die.

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