Ars Technica:
Unlike phones and tablets, which can still post big performance gains from year to year, desktops age more slowly and gracefully. A typical replacement cycle in many businesses and schools is three or four years, and, as long as they don’t break, you can easily keep using them for years after that.
Apple has lent us its top-end 5K iMac to test, but instead of just sticking to year-over-year performance comparisons, we’ll be going all the way back to 2012 to compare it against some of the older iMacs that it might end up replacing (we’ve also included the 2011 iMac in a few cases, though it can’t run all of the benchmarks that newer iMacs can). A lot has changed in five years, but how much faster have things really gotten? We’ll also get into the handful of technological updates Apple has made since the last new iMacs came out in late 2015.
There are some really interesting and geeky stats in this story but the bottom line is, if your three years or older iMac feels “sluggish”, you’ll notice significant speed gains on the newest iMacs.
These are interesting in that they really illustrate how little performance gain PCs get year to year these days. The mania for getting component upgrades every year is far more psychological than performance-based.
I upgrade every 3-4 not for any accounting reason but because at that age MacBooks tend to resell for ~40-50% of the price of the comparable new model. So, if I pay $1500 for a MacBook new, in 3 years I can probably sell it for $6-700 or so, making the new one only cost, out of pocket, the difference.
I think the alternative is to really run them until they drop, ~7 years and just deal with larger but less frequent cash outlays. The issue there is that you delay the non-performance advantages (better screen, touchbar, whatever)
We do the latter. Older gear that hasn’t died generally gets assigned to secondary tasks or donated. I just Freecycled a 2007 Macbook that was still working.
Yep, both approaches work. It’s really less about performance now and more about whether you want other things like a 4k or 5k screen, etc.
I have been doing all my work on a 9 year old MacPro. It’s bean a very reliable computer, but I really needed to upgrade at this point. I know that I could have gotten SSD for it and maybe upgraded the GPU once again. I am not getting rid of it just yet. I think it can still provide value as I have the need for network rendering at times. My new iMac should be here Saturday.
Same hear. My iMac at home is a mid-2011 with 16GB of ram and a Core i5. Still works just fine for me. I could probably squeeze many more years out of it and most likely will.
Late 2009 iMac. 🙁
But still working well. 🙂
A similar article on the Mac Mini would show almost no improvement of any kind since 2012. A real shame and one of my personal sore spots with respect to Apple. A quad-core i7, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD make mine a very nice little unit that can’t be duplicated from Apple today without spending $2k+.
yep, i’m on the 2011 Core i7 variant with 20gb ram and 2gb vram and it’s still my main desktop. when i finally do upgrade it’s gonna be sweet
I know, it will be!
I actually use my iPad and iPhone so much now, that at home at least, I only use it when I need to. Usually work repeated stuff. But even for checking on things I connect remotely using my iPad. The Apple universe is so much bigger these days, it’s amazing!
I am looking at replacing my early-2009 iMac with the middle of the 2017 iMacs but with a 500GB SSD. I replaced my iMac’s hard disk with a 1TB SSD last year. Nice performance boost but I really like the I see with the new iMacs. Just need to find out a meaningful difference between the 3 models (I have the specs but that doesn’t tell me if going more expensive will mean a lot to me).