Something that surprised me was that my MacBook that is pristine but 5 years old do not get any more OS updates.. and therefore no latest Xcode.. and therefore worthless to me. Are all iOS/Mac devs buying new machines every five years?
This has been really disappointing imo. I’m donating to the Asahi Linux project now so when my 2021 MacBook stops getting updates I’ll be able to run Linux on it.
One strategy is to check product lifespans before buying—you can usually get at least 7ish years of updates for a Mac if you don't accidentally buy a product that's just about to receive an update. I think macrumors has a chart for this with simple "buy / caution / do not buy" indicators and history of time between updates for various kinds of products. Buying early in a model's lifecycle can make a big difference.
Another is to just buy used every couple years. Buy a 1- or 2-year-old Macbook or iPad or whatever, sell a couple years later, repeat. Average annual spending can be surprisingly low this way, after an initial higher expenditure to buy your "ticket" to this train, of course, while still keeping you on recent devices just about all the time.
Some businesses simply lease their Macs, so don't really have that problem. They'll lease a new set of devices long before any go out of support.
Overall, any budget-conscious Apple strategy has to factor in the used market. Even if you're always buying new, if you time sales right you can recover a lot of your purchase price by selling your old devices. This can seem a little weird if you're used to the used market for consumer PCs—in that world, holding on to every device until it is totally worthless makes a lot more sense, because they lose used-market value much faster than Macs.
Good idea, thanks. Next purchase will be a Mac Mini for daily workstation and I'll keep my worthless MacBook and remote desktop whenever I need to be mobile.
In general if you’re a professional software engineer, the productivity upgrade of upgrading your tools at least every 5-6 years is worth the money.
If you bought high-end-ish laptops in
2021, 2016, 2011, 2006, you’d have gone through 3 different microarchitectures, and had a transformative experience change on each upgrade. If you upgrade every year, not so much.
I don’t like the XCode MacOS version requirements - I couldnt build the JVM a while back because my work hadnt yet approved Monterey but XCode required it. That was annoying.
But then the problem is that Devs are checking their snazzy webpage on a top of the line Mac, thinking it runs great, meanwhile pcs around the world are being brought to their knees.
So I would say, maintain your old computer and the one before that as testing laptops, so you know what the plebs have to put up with.
This project has given my 2015 MBP a breath of life. It'll probably last long enough for me to replace it with an M3 MBP. That's what I'm hoping for, anyways.
5 years seems like a low for Apple device longevity. I think that there’s an enormous difference between today’s Macs and Macs from 5 years ago and maybe the leap is accelerate deprecation, but there was a long period of stagnating macOS requirements. Hope we return to that for Apple Silicon Macs.
It depends when you buy vs. when it was first released. The 2014 Mac Mini for example was sold until late 2018 so it's perfectly possible for someone to have bought it Sept. 2018 which means only 3 years of new macOS versions as it didn't get Ventura. I think the model with the best supported OS track record from Apple is still the Mac Plus from 1986 which was supported all the way through 7.5.5 in 1996.
