Uhh.... really?

Those tweets mentioned in the article are something I can agree with.

My main PC was built in 2010 so it's coming up on 6 years old now. I still feel like it's a powerful machine, but I'm not Pixar.
I still have no urge to upgrade it. The only possible purpose would be to play whatever stupidly demanding new movie-game came out in the last 6 months and I really don't care about that.

If this PC had been built in 1990 and we were living in 1996, things would be very different. But we're not living in 1996.

It's past time for this industry to mature, but it won't happen without a lot of kicking and screaming. Nobody in the hardware or software industries want the public to become comfortable running older hardware or older software releases or anything that doesn't bring customers back to re-buy their stuff every couple years, so the industry players will continue to wage war against legacy.
5 year old open architecture desktop PCs represent a group of customers that Apple would love to convert to the iThing universe.

I have been running an EVGA SR-2 system since the summer 2010, thats almost 6 years ago. I guess I soon will have to replace it with an Ipad or something...

Perhaps Apple computers are built to so low quality standards that they start to fall apart before they are 5 years old?

I have an almost identical setup to skyscraper. More than enough power to play the latest and greatest games. That said, GPU performance can never be enough if you play games on today's monitors.

My 486 is still giving me maximum enjoyment...and I'm happy. 😁

What a turd.
It's "sad" that 600 million people don't consign something perfectly useful to the trash, to be "recycled" by children working in shocking dystopian conditions in the 3rd world.
It's "sad" that 600 million people aren't going further into credit card debt spending thousands on junk they don't need.

This "upgrade mantra" really sickens me.

I can't think of a single damn thing I'd want to do on a computer that I couldn't do with a 2011 PC. They're hardly even getting faster anymore. In 2011 you could buy a 3 GHz quad-core i7 with hyperthreading, which is pretty much the same thing that my work ordered for me last year. Yeah mobiles have seen some development since then, but is the extra power even getting used for anything useful?

Leaving aside the deliberately retro gear, my smartphone was made in 2011 - it's on its last legs but it still works. No plan to replace it unless it dies completely. I'm posting this on my G5 PowerMac that someone tried to throw away. My "new build" is all 2009-era parts and I think I'll just keep my 2012 Macbook which is still in mint condition forever. Suck it, Schiller (what an appropriate name.)

Ludicrous, if it wasn't for the 2GB memory requirement of Win7 and newer many people would still be running Intel socket 478 and AMD 754/939 systems, but most these use DDR and few came with that or it required people to buy all new memory just to get the minimum RAM requirements, at least I have gotten a hold of very few that had 2GB in it so I don't think many people did upgrade their old systems.

My current system is a MSI 990FX-GD65 V3.0 released 2010/12 with a FX8120 CPU and 16GB of DDR3 can't imagine it running out of processing power anytime soon, and it could still be upgraded.

Yeah, read about this somewhere else. Pretty flippant statement. Steve wouldn't have allowed something like that, I don't think.

Tim Cook was never going to fill Steve's shoes, but it feels like the company is getting a bit off-the-rails lately.

Perhaps Apple computers are built to so low quality standards that they start to fall apart before they are 5 years old?

Swing and a miss.

It's the opposite usually, heaps of people are still using polycarbonate MacBooks, and they haven't made those since 2009!

Does anyone have a video link of this?

5 years... I see people are selling P4 computers still in quantity. I suppose they changed them recently on newer ones. You may do almost everything you need at home or office on such hardware from the beginning of 2000s, except new games, video editing, etc not so important stuff for most ones.
There is no much change in computers industry from the middle of 2000s. While I see artificial attempts to force people to buy newer hardware for every 3 years like it was in past when it really had some sense. But not now.
While computers of 2011 year have very small difference with today modern uber PCs. They are 4 cores, 8 Gb and with cheap video card upgrade may run ok even today games.

Crikey, 2011, that's Sandy Bridge stuff. A Core i5 2400 with 4 GB and a SSD will still give you an amazing Internet / Office / Media experience. Upgrade to 8 GB and a decent GPU and you can run any game on it.

EDIT: Found a video and put in the time marker: https://youtu.be/rTQDGAEFQzs?t=52m3s

Some of the reactions in the crowd 😊

Ludicrous, if it wasn't for the 2GB memory requirement of Win7 and newer

I don't know what is the official requirement, but I'm pretty sure Win7 can be installed with 512 MB RAM, and after that you can remove some and still boot with as low as 160 MB.

Of course it won't be very useful. But there were computers sold with 1 GB of RAM with Windows 7 preinstalled.

You may do almost everything you need at home or office on such hardware from the beginning of 2000s, except new games, video editing, etc not so important stuff for most ones.

Recently I did video editing on a 2003 (or so) P4 machine. The only problem was that x264 encoding is slow (and x265 ridiculously slow). But it works.

Who really cares what some Apple dude says? Really the best course of action is to ignore cr*p like this and go on using your 5-years-old pc 🤣 🤣 🤣

It's an event by a tech company that wants to be kept talked about *besides* the new products. Tech companies say stuff exactly to that effect. And... obviously it works. Congrats for feeding the troll... 😉

Azarien wrote:

Recently I did video editing on a 2003 (or so) P4 machine. The only problem was that x264 encoding is slow (and x265 ridiculously slow). But it works.

I meant it's not reasonable to be used in video editing as it's too slow compared to modern CPUs and GPU, especially for common today fullhd+h264.

keropi wrote:

Really the best course of action is to ignore cr*p like this and go on using your 5-years-old pc

Or to buy 2nd handed one. For example, C2D PCs costs start from $150. When P4 is ok for casual home/study using, C2D are even better and also allow good gaming up to ~2011.

Over here in Australia, the recyclers are already selling Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i7 workstations from Dell and HP. Some even come with SSD. They costs A$ 300 to 400 and are not far off the latest and greatest.

I have 15+ year old Macs that are far less useful than a 25 year old PC in my opinion. I only have them for sentimental / interest value, whereas my first 486 board from '95 is actually being used for gaming, such is the versatility of such a system. If I wanted to do gaming on the Power PCs I'm fairly limited - Medal of Honour, UT and Quake III - I'm sure there are others, but I don't own them. I have never considered it a gaming platform.

Apple have never had the 'upgrade' or 'repair' ethos. Service manuals used to be impossible to get hold of unless you were an engineer (which cost £1,000 a year to be), purchase of replacement parts is only possible 'under the counter' or on eBay (I'm surprised they haven't tried to regulate or restrict this), it's extortionate as a result, and Apple consider their hardware to be theirs, not yours. The only plus side is that second-hand Apple gear holds its value quite well.

I do, however, have a lot of love for the engineering that went into a machine like the Mac Pro but jeez - that platform stood still for years and years while PC equivalents moved forward in leaps and bounds. And it's only thanks to EFI that they were able to transition to Intel in the first place, without which they would have died or ended up with ARM-powered desktop machines. Motorola could not produce a next generation chip following the G5, which ran so hot they couldn't even manufacture a G5 laptop.

Now they glue their new computers together. I was able to repair a faulty MacBook Pro recently, only because I purchased the special 'pentalobe' screwdriver you need to undo their new screws. Good luck replacing the battery in one of those things.

Apple eschews everything this community holds dear - reparability, longevity, upgradeability, and a personal relationship with your hardware.

I think this is a silly statement. I'm using a system that was bleeding edge in 2008, 8 years later. Not a damn thing wrong with it, the only complaint I have is I can't stick an uber graphics card in that would saturate a PCIe 3.0 bus. My motherboard "only" supports PCIe 2.0 x16.
With 18GB RAM (I saw no reason to not upgrade when ram was going for like $60 for 12GB a few years back) and a modern Geforce card I am pretty well set. The only thing I'd like to upgrade on it is a 1 terabyte SSD if they drop down to the $150 range. And yes this is probalby overkill for most folks but I do video and 3D graphics as a hobby, no such thing as too much PC where those are concerned.

I honestly don't know what is going to drive the demand for new PC (in the generic sense, meaning all personal computers of whatever brand...including Macs) gear, other than games. Office work/office automation is more or less a solved problem, they are just trying to drive demand. Yes, there are some things that will always want more processing power (machine learning, machine vision, expert systems) but I think for the average consumer we've been at peak demand for some time. You will continue to see more and cheaper mobile devices, and probably a continued push for VR gear but I just don't see a need for anything beyond 4k for gaming and movies/TV since your eye can only resolve so much detail. I guess the ultimate end game is a VR pod or holodeck or something but I'd rather just get outside once in a while, you know?

What kills me is this hobby is so bad for the environment, I used to upgrade all the time I try to go as long as I can now between upgrades. I often buy used or refurbished gear, since in addition to being slighly more "green" it is easier on my wallet.
I'd much rather carry around a device that is 5mm thicker that I could actually repair, you know? Maybe I'm and oddball in that respect.