The Longevity of a Mac

Reading Time: 3 minutesI have a 2016 Mac Book Pro that I still use daily despite it being old, and vintage by the time Autumn comes. The reasons for which I kept my mac for so long are that it’s about budget. I don’t want to spend 1600 CHF to get a mediocre computer that a cheaper computer can mirror.

## Cheap Alternatives Like the Pi5

For web browsing a pi5 with 8gb of ram is sufficient to browse the web, write blog posts and more. A new Mac Book Pro would be more performant, and less prone to crashes due to overheating and ram saturation. It’s also 16 times cheaper.

According to the [Consumer intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) people keep macs for at least 3 years](https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/11/mac_upgrade_not_happening/). I’ve kept mine for over six years. My main reason for using it less, now, is that the battery is old. I’ve replaced it once before, and I should replace it again soon. In fact I was going to replace it, until I realised that within six months the machine would be obsolete according to Apple. I could spend 300 CHF to swap the battery and the lower half again, but for that price I can get three Pi5s, with heat sinks and have a bigger internal hard drive. I also have the M2 hat for when I get an M2 compatible drive.

## Incremental Improvements

In the past you would buy a mac because what you were doing pushed a computer to the limits. Video editing would require more and more power, so you upgraded so that h.264 and h.265 and other compression tasks would speed up. Mp4 conversion often took minutes or even hours. Now it takes a few seconds. Two decades ago a simple fade would take half an hour. Now it’s in real time.

Web browsing and office tasks work well with most machines. This means that you don’t need to change computer every two or three years. Most software will work, whether your computer is five years old, or six weeks old.

For years the reason for updating was that big leaps and bounds were made, so to upgrade was to continue using new games, new software and more. Now that old computers are as dependable as new machines we can afford to keep computers for longer

## The Big Expense

A few years ago I bought a top spec mac book pro for video editing, I made sure it had enough ram, enough storage and more. I evaluated that I would keep it for several years, because I had spent so much money on it.

## Silver Lining

When I bought the 2016 Mac Book pro it was a low spec machine that I expected to keep for a year or two and I kept it for seven to eight years. The cost per year is 200 CHF. That’s as expensive as a Pi5 and one terabyte SD card that is replaced every year.

## Ad On Costs

At face value, that people are buying fewer phones and laptops looks bad for Apple, but then we need to consider all the apps. 300 CHF for Final Cut Pro. 25 CHF per month for Adobe Creative Suite. 80 CHF per year for Strava, 30 CHF per year for Sportstracker, 28 CHF per year for quite a few sleep tracking, step counting and other apps.

Yes, we might buy a phone every three or four years, and a new mac every six to eight years but we’re paying 3 CHF per month for iCloud, potentially 120 CHF per year for Google Drive, 67 per year for Kdrive, 180 per three years for Flickr, and more.

## The Long Tail

The point of the ad on costs for Apple Fitness at 7 CHF per month, Apple TV at another cost per month and more, is that we’re not just buying a mac every three to eight years. We’re buying a mac every three to eight years but we’re paying for other features every month, and yearly. It’s easy to spend 100 CHF or more, per month, if we’re not careful about app subscriptions. We’re spending less on hardware, but more on the long tail.

> Mac sales as a percentage of Apple’s revenue, on the other hand, have steadily declined since 2000, when the machines accounted for 86.2 percent of Apple’s revenue… …Last year Macs accounted for just 7.7 percent of Apple’s revenue, according to Statista.
[source](https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/11/mac_upgrade_not_happening/)

## And Finally

The cheapest Mac Book air is below a thousand CHF and the cheapest Mac Mini is 651.40 CHF at the time of writing. The cheapest options are uninteresting and would need replacing quite regularly. Hardware might be less popular now, but people are spending more than ever on software and this software locks them into using Apple hardware.