Posted on 05/19/2015 7:50:57 PM PDT by Swordmaker
I always suspect OS upgrades are intentionally designed to slow down older machines, thus prompting purchases of new machines.
My MAC is going on 8 years old, I upgraded to Mt Lion 10.8.4 and can use the magic slide mouse. I also added memory. I’m good for another 8 years. This thing is really built. The only problem is the blue tooth mouse does go thru batteries pretty quickly.
It only every existed at a point in time. The only way to insure it will continue to "just work" the way it did when you first installed it is to make sure that the hardware it runs on and any other systems in has to interact with never change.
Well - there is some logical reasoning behind this... but the answer is not simple (unless one doesn’t mind forced obsolescence).
Apple hardware (laptops/desktops) has a tendency to have a longer useful life. Our primary desktop at home is a PowerMac Dual G5 machine... and if not for some software that just cannot be updated due to the lack of intel processor... it would be even more functional than it is. Its certainly isn’t limited by hardware capability.
But - for efficiency in OS function, the fragmentation is a pain. Most companies simply eventually drop all support. OF course, that ticks off a lot of consumers (who have otherwise perfectly functional hardware).
IMHO the fallacy is in thinking of the price of a computer as entitling you to use that computer in perpetuity. You should think of it more as a lease.That logic especially applies to hard drives; you should understand that
So it makes no sense to think of cleaning up a hard drive when it gets full - the logical thing to do is to just buy new.
- Hard drives don’t live forever, and
- Hard drives get bigger (for the same price) over time.
Same thing with your ‘outer. You can’t run new OS X versions on ancient machines; that’s just a fact of life.
I wish Apple would just provide software to make old G4 boxen into dumb terminals - and enable the user to use a Mac mini to run OS X and the apps, feeding into your “dumb” terminal. Probably it doesn’t make economic sense, really - but at least if that combination were on offer, you would feel better about the fact that your old, “perfectly good” Mac can’t be upgraded.
bmfl. THANKS
On Macs, the older computers usually run faster with an OS upgrade. Not always, but I'd say nine times out of ten that's been the case.
Most people get rechargeable batteries and keep a set of batteries always recharging.
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