My laptop died this past weekend. It was a 2011 Macbook pro, and it served me well for almost eight years. That’s quite a while for a laptop of any sort, so I can’t say I didn’t get my money’s worth.
Or maybe I can, because I am pissed that it died.
I am pissed because we live in a weird time in which PC hardware does not age as quickly as it once did. The first time I bought a PC with my own money was in 2003. It had 120GB of disk, 512MB of RAM, and a single core AMD CPU. Eight years later I bought my Macbook Pro, and at that time most computers shipped with some sort of quad core CPU, and somewhere between 4-8 GB of RAM (though upgrading to 16GB was not uncommon among power users).
Fast forward another eight years, to 2019, and PCs are still shipping with quad core CPUs and 4-16 GB of RAM. The tech of 2011 simply did not exist in 2003, but the common tech of 2019 is, in some ways, just the fanciest tech from 2011.
This is why I was seriously considering upgrading the memory and swapping in an SSD to the Macbook Pro. I believed doing so would allow me to get another three or even four years of use out of it.