Used Intel Macs, usable on a budget or not?

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ham bulu

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  • #81
    I cannot believe for the life of my first born I'm on year 4 of my work-provided M1 MacBook Air. It feels as fresh, responsive and reliable as the first day I used it – even in comparison with my private M3 MBP sitting next to it today.

    I don't care if compute-bound tasks take a couple of seconds more or less, that's not what it is about to me. It's about switching between a dozen smaller things I'm doing or even doing half a dozen thing simultaneously without the system showing any signs of stress at all.

    To paraphrase my most-commonly used German saying: I wouldn't touch a Intel Mac with BBQ tongs.
     
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    gregatron5

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  • #83
    I'm going to make a bad analogy.

    Say someone has never driven a car and wants to know what driving a car feels like. (Maybe they're from Venice and have only piloted boats or something.) They're asking if they should get a 2018 Corolla with an underpowered CVT or a 2021 Chevy Bolt, which even though it's a cheap older EV can chirp the tires off the line.

    They're both cars, yes. They both go when you push the right pedal and slow down when you push the left one. Both have air conditioners etc. But they will feel vastly different, mostly due to the powertrain.

    If you want to feel what macOS was like, get an Intel Mac. If you want to feel what macOS is like, get any AS machine.

    Posted by someone who has a 2018 MBP Core i9 with 32 GB RAM who used have a work-issued M1 MBP.
     
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    armwt

    armwt

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  • #84
    I wouldn't say that the 2018 will lose software support. It might not run the LATEST OS, but Apple usually supplies security patches for N-1 or N-2 versions. It might not be the latest and greatest, but for someone just trying to "use a Mac to see what it is like" they're still a cheap entry point, even if a little less than ideal.

    (and FWIW, my 2017 iMac Pro makes the cut for 10.15, so from a security-patch perspective, I expect it still has between 2 and 3 years of life left if I wanted to make it stretch that far)
     
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    hanser

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  • #86
    ant1pathy said:
    First, that 2018 model is going to lose software support shortly and I would never recommend someone take a non-updated machine onto the internet. Second, performance increases are a lot easier to notice when you become adapted to the faster machine and go back to the slower one than you realize when you move from slower to faster. If you've been on your M3 for a while now, grab an older machine and do some similar tasks for 15 minutes and you'll really notice how much more sluggish it is.
    Click to expand...
    You moved the goalposts too much:

    Likewise i am thinking to get a feel for Mac OS. Apple is expensive (About 30 percent more than in the US) over here in the frozen north, and i am not about to invest in a Mac Mini or something entry level just yet until i am sure i will feel comfortable using it as a daily driver since i am a poor bugger. If i will go that route, i also need to understand what kind of hardware i will need to future-proof it a bit.
    Having said that, if i went looking for a used Intel Mac, what would be the minimum amount of hardware that i can get away with, but still have a decent experience? if it runs for a year, it will be more than enough to understand, but i also do not want to splurge too much since i am not sure it's something i will stick with.
    Click to expand...
    This is about experimentation to see if you like macOS. And the Intel Macs will be supported WRT security patches for a while to come.

    And I personally pick up my wife's laptop to do something on it about once a month.
     
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    iljitsch

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  • #87
    gregatron5 said:
    I'm going to make a bad analogy.

    Say someone has never driven a car and wants to know what driving a car feels like. (Maybe they're from Venice and have only piloted boats or something.) They're asking if they should get a 2018 Corolla with an underpowered CVT or a 2021 Chevy Bolt, which even though it's a cheap older EV can chirp the tires off the line.

    They're both cars, yes. They both go when you push the right pedal and slow down when you push the left one. Both have air conditioners etc. But they will feel vastly different, mostly due to the powertrain.
    Click to expand...

    And how exactly does that make your commute any faster? The difference between a boat and a car are so vast that the differences between a perfectly fine car and a better car are meaningless.

    Not too long ago I took a trip down memory lane, looking at various MacOS versions. I actually still have a 2007 MacBook Pro that has four old versions of MacOS installed. Now that definitely no longer represents what the Mac is like in the 2020s. And I haven’t used an ARM Mac yet. So maybe I’m missing something. But I have a 2013 MBP, a 2016 one and a 2020 Mac Mini. IMO the latter two are IMO absolutely still capable of conveying the Mac experience, and the 2013 isn’t too far behind, either.
     
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    dal20402

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  • #90
    Just to clear up what seems like a lot of ambiguity in this thread about software support...

    The current macOS is macOS 14 Sonoma. It supports all 2017 and up Intel Macs. It will be the current OS version until (likely) September 2024. If Apple stays consistent with past security practices, it will get security support for two years after that.

    Apple just announced the list of supported Macs for macOS 15 Sequoia, to be released sometime this fall. It will run on all 2018 and up Intel Macs, with the notable exception of the 2018 MacBook Air (likely because of its underpowered integrated Intel graphics), and also the 2017 iMac Pro. So these Macs should be security-supported for quite a while - likely through late 2027, if Apple sticks to form. Even though It seems likely that Sequoia will be the last Intel-capable release, on Sequoia-capable machines, there should be three solid years ahead.

    But Apple is not going to make Apple Intelligence, or likely any other major new feature in Sequoia or any future macOS version, available on Intel. The Intel macOS experience won't ever be much different from what you get today.
     
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    gregatron5

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  • #91
    iljitsch said:
    And how exactly does that make your commute any faster?
    Click to expand...
    Well, I said it was a bad analogy ;)

    But to continue the bad analogy, it's not about making the commute faster, necessarily. It's about if the experience is nice or not. Acceleration/speed helps, but isn't the whole picture. Regardless of how you slice it, a cheap 2018 ICE car (in context of this analogy) is going to be a significantly inferior experience to a cheap 2021 BEV with the exception of starting price.

    The AS experience with macOS is just so much better than on Intel that if someone wanted to test the waters I wouldn't want to sully the experience with the subpar experience that Intel machines offer at this point in time.

    Another bad example (completely made up): Let's imagine someone wanted to see if they liked No Man's Sky on console (and further pretend it had a PS3 release). Sure they could pick up a PS3 super cheap and play it upscaled from 720p at 30 fps with low poly and short draw distances, but for a little more money they could get a PS4 and play with native 1080p at 60 fps with high poly and better draw distances. On the older, different architecture you might be able to get bit of a feel for the game, but it really wouldn't do it justice.
     
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    Megabat

    Megabat

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  • #92
    The 2016-17 12" MacBook and 13" MacBook Pro (non-touch bar) go for between $200 and $300 used in the US. While they represent (arguably) the worst Apple notebooks of the last decade, they still have excellent displays, trackpads, and chassis. They'll run macOS 12. IMO most importantly they charge via USB-C, so you don't have to mess around with a separate MagSafe 2 cable. I agree with the above discussions about ARM Macs but personally the non-compute elements are what keep me on the platform. The 2016-17 models are fast enough to evaluate Homebrew, check out well-loved utilities like Preview, and experiment with workflow composition/window management.
     
    japtor

    japtor

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  • #93
    gregatron5 said:
    I'm going to make a bad analogy.
    Click to expand...
    Hey I made a similar car analogy on the first page of the thread :p
    iljitsch said:
    And how exactly does that make your commute any faster? The difference between a boat and a car are so vast that the differences between a perfectly fine car and a better car are meaningless.
    Click to expand...
    You could maybe go back a few more decades and still have the same argument, as long as they work both vehicles would get you from A to B fine. Roughly same controls (as long as it's an automatic!) and functionality and everything, but it's still a significantly different experience.
    Megabat said:
    The 2016-17 12" MacBook and 13" MacBook Pro (non-touch bar) go for between $200 and $300 used in the US.
    Click to expand...
    For reference it sounds like the OP is in Canada Norway so pricing/availability may be a bit different, about +30% was mentioned.
     
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    iljitsch

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  • #94
    Ok, let's take that car analogy for another spin.

    Interestingly, I've also never driven an electric car. But I think I can pretty easily imagine what it's like: first of all, it's simply a car and the basics are the same. No engine noise to speak of, high acceleration, and optionally "one pedal driving" where you gently brake when you release the gas. Am I missing much?

    Same thing with the Mac experience. For stuff I'm doing right now (typing in a text box) no difference at all between this 2013 machine and an ARM one. Starting apps and switching between them? Works the same, but faster/smoothe.
     
    Louis XVI

    Louis XVI

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  • #95
    iljitsch said:
    Ok, let's take that car analogy for another spin.

    Interestingly, I've also never driven an electric car. But I think I can pretty easily imagine what it's like: first of all, it's simply a car and the basics are the same. No engine noise to speak of, high acceleration, and optionally "one pedal driving" where you gently brake when you release the gas. Am I missing much?

    Same thing with the Mac experience. For stuff I'm doing right now (typing in a text box) no difference at all between this 2013 machine and an ARM one. Starting apps and switching between them? Works the same, but faster/smoothe.
    Click to expand...
    One can imagine all kinds of things, but what one imagines often does not match up with reality, especially one’s subjective experience of that reality. I can use my imagination to extrapolate what a really good burger might taste like from a Quarter Pounder, but I’ll be missing out on a whole lot of details that add up to the actual experience.

    Sticking with the car analogy, if one can simply and accurately imagine what going from an ICE car to an electric car is like, then why would anyone bother with test drives at all?

    Edited to add: to bring this back to the discussion at hand, at around the same time as I went from a 2018 Intel Macbook Air to an M1 Macbook Air, I upgraded my phone from an iPhone X to a 12 Pro. One would imagine the upgrade experiences to be about the same, as in each case I was replacing one Apple device with its three-year-newer equivalent. But while the move from the Intel Mac to the M1 was really striking, and felt like a qualitative step change, the move from the iPhone X to the 12 Pro was much less exciting, as the upgrades felt qualitatively much more incremental.
     
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    gregatron5

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  • #97
    Yet Another Bad Analogy!

    Imagine two extremely similar looking business planes. Identical cockpits. Similar interiors. Both have a service staff, and on the first the staff is accurate but lackadaisical, while on the second the staff is accurate and prompt. Same level of service. You get an idea for what the service is like, but on the first it's so slow you can easily get fed up by waiting, even though it's nice but just takes a while. Also, the first a prop, the second is turbojet.

    That analogy might actually be slightly less bad, now that I think about it a bit.
     
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    Made in Hurry

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  • #101
    Louis XVI said:
    Meanwhile, the OP is probably happily playing around with a shiny new-to-them M1 Mini, completely oblivious that we’re still going back and forth about this…
    Click to expand...
    Oh, that has an autumn time-frame since i need to save up, but i am at least convinced that an M+ machine will be the correct step forwards, but i liked and i understand the point made above about wanting to feel how it was vs how it actually is. I think i will be one of the few in the world that will never use an Apple with Intel hardware.

    This was my last encounter: An iBook G3 300Mhz, i had to look it up as i thought it was the G4 but nope.

    s-l1600.jpg

    And for a certain poster here. I have no words, a reply is coming, but i have some login issues.
     
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    emaren

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  • #104
    I have Four Apple machines that I use for various tasks .

    My Daily driver is a 2013 Mac Pro 6,1. It has an 8-core, Xeon, 64GB of RAM, dual D700's and 1TB of NVME M.2 hdd, plus a huge raid array connected to the thing. I use OCLP to allow it to run Sonoma.

    For almost any task this thing flies - it is really, brutally rapid in every day use. The only thing that shows its age is video encoding, which is something that I do very rarely.

    My Daily laptop is an M2 MBA 16GG device that is faster than the trashcan. It's lovely to use but not my daily.

    Third up we have a Mac Mini - its an ancient Intel thing that has 8GB and 500GB of aftermarket SSD - its junk at this point, but it runs Linux rather well and I use it for tinkering

    Finally we have an old MBA - 4GB of Ram Core i5 and Running Linux.

    The Trashcan is the only Intel Mac that I own that still runs OSX - it is insanely powerful though, so it will probably last for a few more years until I eventually revert that to Linux. At that stage it will get replaced by an M3/M4/M5 Mini, shame that the upgradability if then is so poor really....
     
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    dspariI

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  • #105
    I jumped from a 2014 MBP to an M2 Mini recently, and I wouldn't discount the difference in heat either. The M processors run so much cooler. It's not fun to have a heater of a computer during the summer in a room with effectively no air conditioning. The thing runs cooler at full blast than the MBP did idling! I can't remember what the default location iStat used for the summary temperature, but it went from ~150F idling and ~210F max to 95F and 120F.
     
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