Article by Russell Harris

Replacing my Mac

If you are now wondering what Macs you should replace, we would recommend starting with older devices in the following order:

• Any Macs with spinning/rotating Hard Disk Drives or HDDs. (Normally shown as SATA when checking your Mac's spec).
  Or those Macs with a Fusion Drive, Apple's hybrid drive with a combination of a larger sized traditional rotating hard disk drive with a smaller capacity NAND flash storage (SSD) drive.
  Essentially, what we are saying here is any Mac which does NOT have an SSD/flash storage drive.
• Macs with less than 8GB RAM in total.
• Macs over 5 years old.

Note: The easiest way to check any Mac's spec is to click on the Apple menu icon right at the top left of your screen and choosing the 'About This Mac' option.

Apple's Vintage and Obsolete products page is a great way of gauging a device's longevity as this is where Apple list all of their older products that they have in some way reduced support for. That could be that these devices cannot run the latest macOS or Apple no longer manufacture and stock replacement parts for them meaning repairing them will be hard or impossible. 'Vintage' products are usually an Apple device that Apple stopped manufacturing between five and seven years ago. Whereas 'Obsolete' is normally a product that was discontinued more than seven years ago.
So again we can see that five-year timeline being mentioned.

Remember though, this does not mean you HAVE to replace your machine if it is working and in good condition. But Apple's Vintage and Obsolete list along with software vendor's like Microsoft and Adobe's supported hardware and software documentation are the main reasons why here at Maya solutions we consider a machine older than five years to be a recommendation for replacing.

In general then, you can hope to get about 10 years of life from a Mac, if you manage to escape any unforeseen hardware issues and take good care of it.

Mac Lifespan Summary

To sum up, any computer whether it is a Mac or a PC should last several years if looked after properly. Just like maintenance on a car, this can be time consuming and costly and you can do a lot of it yourself or get a professional to perform the services and repairs.
Regular maintenance though, is likely to save you time and money in the end compared to having to keep paying for a new machine.

That's the end of this article on the lifespan of an Apple Mac, I hope it has been of use to you and given you some thought.

Keep a look out on our website (http://mayasolutions.co.uk) or on our social media pages for our next articles.