[kentuckyfried]

What's an "average" lifespan of PC? What about a mac?

I like my BW g3, it is honestly feeling it's age though running under OS X. It's not even that old per se, it's just unfortunate that in switching OS's, this machine doesn't run it very snappy. And I don't feel like upgrading (other than maybe a new laptop as soon as a 15" al comes in) to a new desktop until the 970 comes out.

Just want to get some consensus on how often the average mac consumer upgrades machines nowadays, and also how often people drop in memory/accelerator cards to extend that lifespan.

[DrBoar]

If you do leading edge applications renderings or some games the life span is a year or less. If you do word processing web surfing etc 5 years or more is quite resonable.

The life span is also affected by while the CPU increase more or less smothly in small steps, features on the other hand that may or may not be critical either is or aint. For a nubus powermac there is no way to get USB, firewire and IDE and PCI support.

For the PCI powemacs they either have some or all those features or they can be added by PCI cards. However, there is no way to add AGP. And on the first two generations of AGP G4 there is no way to add ADC support.

On the Mac side OS X and on the PC side XP have risen the bar quite a lot so this complicates things compared to the smaller steps in OS 7-8-9 and win 95-98-millenium.

I have tested a G3/350 192 MB RAM and a G4/400 AGP 448 MB RAM running 10.2 side by side and the G4 is a bit faster but not by much. In games the Radeon 8500 in the G4 is wastly superior to any PCI card you can put in the B&W.

I bought a LCII in 1992 upgraded it with a 32 MHz 030 upgrade in 93. Got a 7200/90 in 1995 and upgraded it 2002 with 7600 and 604E/200 CPU from ebay. 2002 I got a G4/400 and have added external CDRW, one extra HD the ATI 8500 and a lot of RAM, still I do not plan to upgrade the CPU as I expect 970 CPUs to come out later this year and have other new nice features.

My idea is to go for the midrange. The budget offering like the 1 GHz tower will age badly like the 6100/60 in its days
The dual 1.25 will fare much better while the dual 1.42 only offers marginal speed increases for a hefty sum of money.

For upgrades to little RAM was a killer for the LCII in OS 7.0 and now 11 years later to little RAM is still a killer in 10.2.4 so RAM is good
Upgrading a G4/400 with a dual 1.2 CPU upgrade at half the price of a new dual 1.25 is a good deal only if the CPU is the only thing that needs upgrading. To get a old plain vanilla G4 on par with the dual 1.25 you will need the
dual 1.2 CPu at 1100 dollars
ATI radeon 9000 card at 150 dollars
IDE card for supporting 4 IDEs 100
an CDRW probably an external FW drive as you need the original drive to boot from 150 dollars

Now we are at 1500 dollars and still have no FW 800 or ADC.

To conclude , to pin down the average user is very hard and upgrading have very little do to with common sense. I have sen a professor that mainly used Eudora and Word 5.1a ( he did not have time to learn later version) replace his 7500 that runns Word 5.1a very fast with a B&W G3 and students at the same time doing image analysis on a 6100

I have a friend with a 400 MHz PC in a ATX case and sure the CPU upgrades are way cheaper than on a Mac. But then he also need to replace the motherboard and the RAM to get a up to date CPU and the old graphical card is hopelessly outdated if he want to play games and the CDRW is a snail by current standards.

So the difference in upgradability in PCs and Macs are not that much if you really dig into it.


back to waiting for the 970

[Eug]

If you're looking for PC vs. Mac upgrade price comparisons, the PC will win. I'm still running a 4-year old motherboard, but with a 1.4 GHz CPU and a Radeon 9100. (My TiBook gets used more but I use the PC as a general use desktop for surfing and wordprocessing, and for gaming. And it runs games faster than most PowerMacs in use today.) To get just a CPU of equal calibre on the Mac side would have cost me 3 times as much as my entire PC upgrade (RAM, video card, CPU, CPU adapter). And just for the hell of it, I even bought a new case for $45.

However, it really depends on the apps you plan to use, so a blanket question like you've asked doesn't really address the issue. You can't run iMovie too well on a PC.

However, OS X.2 is a special case in that just about everything but the newest hardware won't run it adequately. I thought my iBook 600 was slow with it and thus upgraded to a 1 GHz G4 TiBook. Personally, I wouldn't be happy running OS X.2 with anything less than a Radeon 7500 and G3 700 (preferably G4), but that's just me.

[Tom N]

I agree, it depends on what you will be using it for.

I have a Beige G3 that is on 24/7 running OS X 10.2.4. It is used as a web and email server.

I have a Pismo powerbook, that is my everyday knock about laptop, It also runs 10.2.4 and is used for writing, editing, some design work (architectural) and other daily uses. It has a 400 MHz G3 and 320 MB RAM, and runs OS X fine (more memory would help, and I think I will pick up some more).

OK, now for the oldest Mac I have,
A Mac Plus, runs system 7 with 4 MB or RAM, an 800 Kb floppy drive and a 20 MB hard drive. It sits in a closet, and runs most of the time as part of a dedicated remote management system for my home experimental environment control. It monitors temp inside and out, humidity inside and out, weather (wind speed, direction, humidity, cloud cover, rain) and makes decisions on running the heaters, AC, Solar panels, and watering the garden. It's a bit temperamental and occasionally likes to water the garden when its snowing, but thats the programmers fault mostly (me) who doesn't seem to have time to work on it very much.

No computer is obsolete, as long as it has a function it can perform.

Tom N.

[bradoesch]

My old highschool still has old Macs (SEs, SE/30s, etc.) in use in classrooms as word processors, and the library also has some for students to use.
The old PCs have been junked a long time ago.

[kentuckyfried]

Thanks for all the answers.

The intention for me is to perhaps juice the g3 to give it a few years more life before I finally hand it over to my dad for email/web-browsing.

It's not like I do anything heavy duty either at home, there's simply not that much free time.

[Pilotkev]

Originally posted by kentuckyfried:
Thanks for all the answers.

The intention for me is to perhaps juice the g3 to give it a few years more life before I finally hand it over to my dad for email/web-browsing.

It's not like I do anything heavy duty either at home, there's simply not that much free time.

That's exactly what I'm doing with my B&W G3/300. I've got the Powerlogix G3/800 ($299) on order, to arrive in March..... I hope. With 512M Ram, a 40G HD, and a G3/800, it will be more than adequate and all that can be had today for about $400. That should last me until I can afford a nice dual G4.

Kevin

[Eug]

Originally posted by Pilotkev:
That's exactly what I'm doing with my B&W G3/300. I've got the Powerlogix G3/800 ($299) on order, to arrive in March..... I hope. With 512M Ram, a 40G HD, and a G3/800, it will be more than adequate and all that can be had today for about $400. That should last me until I can afford a nice dual G4.

Kevin

What video card? Just wondering. And please report back with what you think about the upgrade when you get it.

And a general question for anyone. If you stuck say a Radeon 7500 32 MB in an older machine that traditionally can't do QE, like say a BW G3, would it do QE? My guess is yes, but I dunno for sure.

[kentuckyfried]

^ http://xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/quartz_ex....html#storytop

hehe...that reminds me, I haven't tried enabling QE on my machine.
is that QE checker mentioned in the link available on versiontracker?
(errr...can't check right now, for some reason while I'm on my work PC, there's no search box after clicking on OS X).

I've got the radeon 7000.

[Gul Banana]

My current main computer is now 40 months old (1999) and still serves my needs well, even though I do some reasonably heavy stuff, compiling large applications and the like. It'll probably be years before I get a new one, too..
It's all about knowing what upgrades to put in - there are surprisingly cheap things that can drastically increase your performance.

[Superchicken]

G3 333Mhz iMac with 256 megs of RAM, runs fine for what I do right now, could be faster, hence why i'm buying a zippy Power Book for college... but I'll live with a bit of lag.

[yg17]

I have a beige G3 with a 500MHz G3 upgrade, 384 megs RAM and OS 10.2.4. Its still pretty damn fast for my needs and for being 5 years old, it isnt too far behind my Athlon XP 1800. CD Ripping/MP3 encoding is a lot slower on the Mac obviously, but boot time is just over a minute and the load time for Photoshop is no more than a couple seconds on my PC.

Now, my old Pentium 2 400MHz machine running XP, a year newer than my beige is a nightmare. Boot times are at least 2 minutes and I can double click the photoshop icon, go grab a quick snack, and come back to still see the loading screen finishing up the last stages of loading. (the P2 also has 384 megs RAM) On the P2, simple stuff such as web browsing becomes unbareable. But my beige still handles everything quite well.

[Mr.Clicky]

As a 1999 Rev D iMac user toying with upgrading to a 1.25 dual I have to say the thing that holds me back the most (apart from the price and 970 chit-chat) is that the iMac handles 10.2.4 just fine thank you very much. Rule of thumb though is the more RAM the better (I believe you can cram 512 in these now original max was 256). The Rev D was not the best model at 333mHz, vailla ATI Rage Pro and a fan to rival the last round of leaf-blowing towers but with 384MB of random thinking available to it coupled with a larger HD it takes most things thrown at it with ease. I run everything from Photoshop 7 to MS Oriface acceptably well. Of course sys 10.x was written for G4-dom but the only huge difference I can feel in perceived handling (and it's a bloody big one) in with the duals.

Scale it back a few years and our LC475 did us proud by performing somersaults it was never meant to until 8.6 came along.

Pricey yes, but you at least get some long-term bang for your buck with a Mac.

[kentuckyfried]

I'm going to be maxing out the ram on this blue and white shortly, that 800 mhz powerlogix upgrade is really tempting, maybe I'll shell out for it in March/April.

[Eug]

Originally posted by yg17:
I have a beige G3 with a 500MHz G3 upgrade, 384 megs RAM and OS 10.2.4. Its still pretty damn fast for my needs and for being 5 years old, it isnt too far behind my Athlon XP 1800. CD Ripping/MP3 encoding is a lot slower on the Mac obviously, but boot time is just over a minute and the load time for Photoshop is no more than a couple seconds on my PC.

Now, my old Pentium 2 400MHz machine running XP, a year newer than my beige is a nightmare. Boot times are at least 2 minutes and I can double click the photoshop icon, go grab a quick snack, and come back to still see the loading screen finishing up the last stages of loading. (the P2 also has 384 megs RAM) On the P2, simple stuff such as web browsing becomes unbareable. But my beige still handles everything quite well.

Defrag? Or a new hard drive? My 192 MB Celeron 400 (same speed at PII 400) runs OK (although not great) with an IBM 34GXP (20 GB, mostly empty). I plan on getting more memory for it though.

I'll save most of my Photoshop for my TiGHz though.

[freakboy2]

I have a 3 year old dell p3 800 and its still kicking pretty good.

I don't think it's going to be "obsolete" ever for what I use it primarily for:

counterstrike, email, surfing, excel, a little photoshoping, etc.

Of course more speed is nice, but it's pretty fast and winXP is so much better than 98 on that machine it's scary. (I've also put a radeon 8500 in it and a faster HD).

My g4 cube 500 megahertz, 768megs of ram, gf 2 mx and a faster HD (Maxtor 60 gig) is not fast enough for me. I think one of the newer macs would satisfy my desire for the right amount of snappiness that is just lacking on that machine (compared to any PC i've used).

for raw speed at processing things, mp3's, etc 500 megahertz is fine, but I think i'll put a faster proc into it within in the next year to get it to go faster.

OSX makes my brain happy, so I use my mac most of the time for email and surfing, but it's dog slow at certain things.

Anyway, good luck, I'd wait a little bit to see if apple comes out with something in the next 6 months - either the 970 or faster g4's. This should drop the prices quite a bit.

Fb2

[kentuckyfried]

^ Amen to that. And thanks.

[Cory Bauer]

If you're a serious computer user, that is it's performance literally effects how long it takes you to accomplish your work and you use it all day, then a good rule of thumb for me is $1,000 buys you a year. If you get a $3,000 computer it's good for three years, and so on. At that point, it's time to upgrade. If you can afford to upgrade more often than that and it's going to improve your performance and efficiency then by all means do so.

On the other hand, if you have a computer sitting in the den and gets turned on once every couple of days so you can check your e-mail, then there's no point in upgrading until the computer quits working. But if that's the case then you shouldn't spend more than $1,499 on a computer when you do decide to purchase a new one. I've seen too many folks who plopped down $2,000 + for a computer they really don't utilize, and one day when they finally decide to put some use to it and you tell them they're better off getting a new computer for what they are looking to do, they get very upset because "I paid $3,000 for this computer I shouldn't need a new one!".

Other than the lifespan of the computer, you've got to think about it's capabilities. Even though a 5 year old Powermac G3 might work, it doesn't have USB, Firewire, CD Burner, DVD Burner, etc etc. And of course you can add those things, but it isn't really worth it in the long run. Even with all those additions, you wouldn't be able to sell the thing for more than $200 (that's the most I'd be willing to pay) on eBay.

[Avon]

A typical user gets around 4 years out of a Mac.

If you are a lowend user who only reads email and stuff, I expect around 5-6.

This has been for the computers of the past. The computers of today and the future might last more though. Who knows.

Historicaly I have gotten 4 years out of all my macs.

LCII 4 years
7500 4 years
G4 400 (3.5 years as of today)

I expect current Macs to last longer than older ones, they are just so fast right now, most people will not need an upgrade.

[drjoe]

A lot of this has to do with your philosophy about upgrading. I see it in two lights. IF you are going to upgrade, then the way to do it is a gradual process. It makes no sense, IMHO, to upgrade nothing and then at some point to indulge in a spasm of upgrading. Better to save your shekels and then buy a new machine. But the other point of view is to gradually upgrade the machine over its life-span. It probably costs the same but the utility of the machine gradually increases with the upgrades that are applied. This is the way that I have chosen to follow.

I started in Jan/Feb 1998 with a brand new shiny rev A desktop G3 with a 233 Mz processor, 32 meg of ram and a WD 4 gig drive. Over the past five years I have put in an

XLR8 467 G4 processor,
a pair of IDE drives [45 & 55 gig],
a 36 gig SCSI as boot drive,
768 meg ram,
an LG 4120 combo drive [to play DVDs],
an ATI 7000 video card,
a ridiculously cheap CompUSA FW/USB card,
an Initio Miles [since relegated to a server]
and lots of other bits and pieces.

I am running OS X 10.2.4 and am very satisfied. While I don't do video I do audio mastering, run Sibelius for music scoring and master CDs for friends , local schools and community groups. So I have gotten five years from this machine, and with the exception of Quartz Extreme see little need for upgrading. I will probably hold on until the PPC 970 is shipping. I also have an 8500 [also running OS X 10.2.4] that I use as a combined File, print, web and mail server but that it another story [ bought in 1995 ! ]

[kentuckyfried]

^ yeah, I agree. I didn't do such a great job at maintaining gradual upgrades. It seemed that everytime I wanted to buy memory, it was selling at a premium of $40. And the first time I tried adding a hd, I went through three of them, none of which my computer would recognize. I ended up having to beg an Apple rep. to let me buy Applecare just after my warranty ran out b/c my G3's processor burned out, that was a mess. Later on I got a IBM desktar hard drive, and it ended up failing on me earlier this year. Don't I have the greatest luck?!

The major interest in upgrading, the absolute need, came with OS 10.2.
Prior to that I was running 9.2.2 and everything was running great, no complaints for my purposes. Prior to 10.2, there was no impetus to really bother adding anything and I got lazy about it. As the saying goes, "if it ain't broke, why fix it?"

I asked this question originally b/c it's been somewhat of a myth that Apple machines don't need to be replaced as often as PC's, I wanted to get a small consensus of where that statement stood up today.