For light use it’ll be fine - I am typing this on a 2010 Mac Pro - quite a powerhouse when it was new but still very usable now for general admin tasks - being a big tower it has four hard drives in it!
It will still run Photoshop quite happily as long as I don’t want to use any heavy-duty plugins such as Topaz Sharpen AI.
But almost fifteen years of use is pretty good for any computer! People say Macs are expensive but you get your money’s worth out of them.
Yes the OS is out of date and I’m finding I can’t update the Firefox web browser any more, but it will do for the next year or two until I retire for admin purposes.
I have an M1 Mac Mini for photo and video editing and an M2 MacBook Air for travel use.
TBH even at 3 years old I was really regretting buying it, and I replaced it at 5 because it simply couldn’t hack Lightroom 5. OTOH The Dell XPS15 I bought in 2014 as a replacement was my travel computer until last year, when the keyboard was starting to fail. Roughly the same price as the Macbook, and with the kind of working life the Mac should have had.
I have an early 2015 Macbook Air. It’s running Sonoma 14.7 thanks to Opencore Legacy Patcher >> OpenCore Legacy Patcher
My only warning would be you need to be a bit savvy and definately backup before hand.
It has meant I have not had to throw away a perfectly good piece of kit for the sake of Apple stopping updates for it. (purely greed on their part)
Lightroom’s weird though - I’ve known photographers with high power computers have endless trouble with speed with it, yet I’ve always had fairly modest kit and it’s been fine.
LR5 was always a bit too much, and using brushes required a lot of patience while the processing caught up with the mouse. Even though the software was current for the computer, it was just too much. Upgrading to 4gb ram helped, as did rebuilding frequently.
Eventually it got an SSD which helped a bit, although with the Lion upgrade came a new bios which took boot time to around 2min. We’d use it as an entertainment computer for DVDs, but it could get too hot for a lap. I redid the thermal paste a few years ago and it only booted once afterwards - the ribbon connectors aren’t designed for owner removal, and I probably didn’t get it back in properly.
Intel Macs (and Intel Windows PCs) always were RAM-hungry - the M-chip Macs are much better in that respect as the RAM is tightly integrated with the CPU and GPU on the motherboard.
My M1 Mac Mini only has 8GB of RAM and is happy editing 4K video.
If it still works for what you need, then no, but:
you may find it becomes unbearably slow over time, if it hasn’t done so already (8Gb RAM is barely enough these days for a large photo library;
more importantly, there will come a time when there are no security updates to either the OS or the installed software once you’ve reached Apple’s declared end of life.
I have an old Mac mini Core 2 Duo Intel at home that I pimped up with more RAM (16Gb), but the fact is that it is still pretty slow, simply because the processor is running out of puff for handling today’s software applications.
Re-visiting this one, Christmas is over and tax is paid, so money available to look at this wretched slow Mac issue.
I refuse to give Apple money for selling me an expensive item with outrageous built-in obsolescence for those that just want basic functionality. So, first step is to trot off to Caracssonne tomorrow to have an SSD fitted. Some questions please - and pls keep the answers on topic and in simple non-geek words…
How much faster would it be with an SSD but continue using my Monterey 12.7.4?
Is it safe to use an SSD for OS and storage?
If I should install Linux, that you say will be much faster, will I still be able to use Apple photos, Numbers, Pages, Safari, Time Machine - in fact all the basic Mac functions?
If Linux cannot run these programs directly, then are there easy-to-use interfaces and what are they please?
Is it easy to install Linux? If I did this from day one, would I be able to get everything up and running quickly?
An SSD should make it boot up and launch software faster; any operations that use the hard drive (read/write) should also be faster than with a magnetic disk;
SSDs have a lifespan like all drives, yes it will be “safe” but you still need backups - e.g. Time Machine to an external drive as a basic and maybe additional backup for critical files.
No, a Linux install will not include any of those programs; if you wanted to retain access to Mac applications you would need to partition the hard drive and do a “dual boot” setup so that you could choose whether to use MAc OS or Linux.
A lot of Linux distros are fairly Mac-like; “similar but different”; they will have versions of typical productivity applications for e-mail, spreadsheets, web browsing etc. but not actual Mac apps.
I haven’t done a Linux install for years so can’t comment directly on that one.
I found the difference with Windows 10 to be 3 minutes (HDD) to 20 seconds (SDD).
My current MacBook (SDD) takes about 30 seconds to boot.
I don’t really keep anything on the MacBook (the OS makes this easy). We have 2To of storage with Apple One. If you like MS, you can get 1To with an Office 365 account for 80€/yr.
I do not have to use the actual Apple apps - I just want to use the main functions - email, write a letter, simple spreadsheet etc. Does Linux have their own versions, and, are they able to be opened if I send them to a Mac or PC?
I tried to look for an idiots guide to Linux, but so far it is all geek to geek stuff
Yes and yes - the best known is LibreOffice, which is the equivalent of Microsoft Office, and can read and write Office files. Thunderbird is a fairly standard email program.
The others don’t need defragging either and never really did. Years ago, some people used to be very anal about defragging and compacting but in reality it didn’t make much difference even then.
Their advice was to create a virtual Linux within the SSD and play with it. Maybe a good idea. I have the Mac booked in for a change to a 2TB SSD, that includes the re-installation of the OS I came in with. I presume that if this Linux business speeds everything up, then I can wipe the Apple OS?
Reading the guide above, the author praises the fact that this Linux thing is open source - a term I have often heard but not had any interest to ask until now as s/he explains open source is good because it can be accessed by anyone and ‘… allows other developers to take the source code, “fork” it, and modify the code…’ Now, maybe I am missing something, but I do not really want to be running something that has been forked by someone with a whim… what is the score here?
If you stick to a commercially distributed Linux variant it will not be much different from Mac OS or Windows in terms of updates.
Yes in theory anybody can tinker around with Linux source code but a reputable branded version will be properly tested before a new update is released!
It just means not using FredOS* created by Fred the computer geek down the road.
Linux is actually only the kernel of the OS. A guy called Linus rewrote the UNIX kernel and the result was named after him. All the other stuff is just layered on top of the kernel, some of which can be open source or proprietary.
UNIX was developed by Bell Labs in the sixties, many years before PCs, and could have become a common platform across midrange multiuser hardware architectures, but instead ended up forked, that is stuffed with proprietary S/W by each H/W manufacturer. Which meant that applications that ran on AIX (IBM UNIX) might or might not run on HP-UX or something that ran on DEC UNIX might not run on SUN UNIX.
Forking was bad for end users because if the proprietary add-ons (which might have seemed advantageous at the time) were used in application development it gave their vendor a lock in advantage. This, of course, was in the days when the money was in the H/W, the OS was given away or very cheap and applications were more often than not home grown. Pre SAP, Oracle Financials, etc.
Linux and open source tries to standardise all that and provide that common platform. So applications that run on one distribution should run on the others too. And as the midrange H/W architectures were overtaken by Intel based servers, Linux became an increasingly viable option for them and then the desktop too.
BTW, macOS is UNIX based too. So Linux and macOS have the same heritage. That other thing that Cutler developed after his fine work on DEC VMS, I think its called Fenêtres or something, is the outlier
I won’t quote Mr Scully’s post as it was quite long but anyone interested can look up “The UNIX wars” and the history of POSIX.
Linus (Torvalds) tried to avoid Linux being named for it’s creator but failed.
I’m not sure Linux helped Unix fragmentation though. Although all modern Linux systems are POSIXy, and System-V ish but different distributions differ quite a bit in their userspace layouts which can make developing software tricky.
There’s FreeBSD, should you feel more at home with a Berkeley derived system, or Open Solaris if you hanker for some Sun nostalgia.
Arguably Unix is the most successful OS of all time, especially in it’s Linux incarnation.
It is found in everything from IoT toys through routers and network infrastructure, phones (both as Android and also embedded in some of the phone subsystems such as LTE models), desktop machines and large servers. Oh and MacOS is BSD under the hood.
