In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Some personal MacBook anecdotes:

1. Still have a 2010 MacBook Pro with factory SSD in pretty much perfect running order. I ran this one for almost 7 years straight. A few weeks ago I charged and spun it up and it was perfectly operational. SSD was fine.

2. Sold its predecessor, a 2007 17" MBP (2.4 GHz, 4G RAM, 160 GB mechanical HD) for £775 on eBay

3. Wife's 2016 13" MBP still running sweet

4. My mothers old 2012 MacBook Air was doing active service until last year, when my daughter who had inherited it after my mum passed, was gifted an M1 MBP. The front camera on the MBA had failed, everything else was fine.

5. Had a dead key / keyboard fail on my 2016 MBP earlier this year - 3 years out of standard warranty - Apple replaced the keyboard but also out of necessity the mainboard & CPU. What was an c.£669 retail repair they did as a free goodwill gesture.

6. I'm trading the MBP above now for £410 back ito Apple.

There you go, that says it all. A friend have got a old G3, I think it is a G3, the one with the CRT monitor built in, still works.
I know there are Windows based machines that are years old and still running, a mate was using a 233 and a P4 machine until he passed away last year, but he had problems with them that had to be sorted out.
My next door neighbour told me a few weeks ago that she is still using a old HP machine that was there when her hubby left, now that was over 10 years ago, and they had it way before that. I did tell her that using Windows XP is maybe not a good idea with the work she does on it. but not my problem.

It just seems Windows based machines seems to have more problems.
like how on earth did a pin snap off an internal USB 3 connector that have-not been touched for around 3 years? The internal USB 3 connectors are awful anyway.

And exactly the same would apply to a PC.

There's nothing magic about Macs; they are not immune from hardware or software problems. It's true that they are very controlled systems, but if you run a Windows PC from a reputable manufacturer it should be just as reliable.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Avoid the old iMacs with mechanical hard drives and you should be fine.

Unless you get a faulty component e.g power supply then first year warranty should catch that.

I would anyway, since it is a M1 chip based Mac I am looking at, not really looking at Imacs, I have a decent monitor here and a imac would just take up space. The Mac mini I have been looking at, I did think about a Mac book pro, the best of both worlds.

This machine is still playing up, it is better than it was, but still things that are not working as it should be, maybe it is the main board on it's way out. But the machine is only just over 4 years old.

Replacing the hard drive in the older Minis was a nightmare. Of course, you can't change the drives, memory, video, just about anything in a modern Mac. All jobs that don't even require a screwdriver on my PC.

Don't get me wrong; I love my Mac Minis but only one of the three of them will run the newest versions of the OS. The PPC one is essentially useless (although I still use it from time to time to lay with PowerPC assembly language).

Horses for courses.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Replacing the hard drive in the older Minis was a nightmare. Of course, you can't change the drives, memory, video, just about anything in a modern Mac. All jobs that don't even require a screwdriver on my PC.

Agreed, I have replaced an HDD with an SSD in an old i7 quad core Mac Mini. Made a stunning difference, but not an easy feature at all. Of course the M1 Macs don't seem to have the boot from external media feature that the Intel Macs had. I liked that recovery mode.

Don't get me wrong; I love my Mac Minis but only one of the three of them will run the newest versions of the OS. The PPC one is essentially useless (although I still use it from time to time to lay with PowerPC assembly language).

I have an old MBAir (3rd gen) around which I hardly use now at over 7 years old, but it is going strong. My 6 year old Windows desktop is going strong, but just too old for Win11.

Horses for courses.

Yep.

Edited by jchamier (Mon 29-Nov-21 09:15:30)

In reply to a post by jchamier:

My 6 year old Windows desktop is going strong, but just too old for Win11.

All my PCs can run Windows 10 (even a cheap Tesco tablet), and my newest one can run 11.

My 2011 Mac Mini can't run Monterey or Big Sur. (I also added an SSD - and upgraded the RAM to 16GB - to that when one of the hard disks went west - tremendous difference.)

I have a 25 year old Athlon PC (self build) was running Windows 2000 now Windows XP. Bit slow to boot but still runs all the old games and programmes I require.

Laptop is a 12 year old Dell Studio 1555 (W7) upgraded with SSD a couple of years ago, boots and runs very quickly. Has a dedicated graphics card so renders video at a speed I'm happy with.

I suppose any electrical appliance can last a long time or it can break down relatively quickly.

My daughter's iPhone X has the dreaded "ghosting" issue and because it is over 3 years old Apple won't fix it for free. Sale Of Goods Act might push them to do something.

I don't think it will be 25 years, the Athlon was launched about 1999., so that would make it around 21 years if you got it from the launch date.

i remember the first Athlon, they were on boards, like the Pentium 2. I never had one of them.

I have a acer celeron laptop, have to be around 10 years old if not older, but I have misplaced the power brick, it is around here somewhere, but not that bothered.

Rendering must be really slow, which is fine if you only do short videos, it is not just the rendering, it is also the editing, it also depends on what you are using to edit with. A lot of video editors these days seems to be heavy on the resources, which is why I like Vegas, Adobe premier is awful, i don't understand why so many people use it.

I had a strange problem with this machine again, new Blueray drive did not recognise the new BD-R m-disk I got,, so I thought, just for a laugh as I had a problem with the Sata last week, I would move it to another sata port, and it works and also the computer seems to be responding better, very strange.

Now I will stick the machine back together again,

It was a guess at 25 years. Looks like it was 22, so not so far out.

Rendering is fairly fast using Pinnacle Studio 14. You have to use a separate drive to output the video as that gives faster results.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Flipping computers and people wonder why I am thinking of getting a nice simple Apple Mac mini.

Yeah, a sealed unit using laptop parts so if anything goes wrong there isn't anything you can do except pay Apple to fix.

I built PCs myself for years, but no longer see the point when you can go to PC Specialist, Chillblast, Scan, or others, and even the mass market Dell and Lenovo PCs are good for the majority.

whilst this is a late reply. I would not buy a dell pc[desktop] because of non upgrade-ability. Companies that use standard parts the way to go so the likes of scan, box or cclonline etc.