Hi all, I'm new here - so I have some dumb questions 
I work for a small business that is at a jumping-off point for potential Mac upgrades. Currently I work in an art department that uses three Early 2009 Mac Pros. About 2-3 years ago my boss upgraded the drives inside to be 1TB SSDs, and that was a huge boon to the speed of our Macs which were already 6-7 years old at that point. We still do work on them every single day, running multiple Adobe applications, Spotify, internet, email, etc. all the usual stuff.
We have the money to be able to upgrade, and have the green light to spend money if we were to get something like the new 27" 5K Fusion Drive Mac Pros. This is naturally where I'm leaning. But I DO have to ask the question: do we NEED to upgrade our 2009 machines? In my limited experience it seems that nowadays things are much harder to physically upgrade. MacSales.com (where I've been getting a lot of questions answered about the breakdown between machines) tells me that the newer 2017-2018 models are difficult to swap out RAM on, cannot boost storage as easily, etc. Whereas our 2009 Mac Pro is still operating well enough for us to do our jobs, and we have been able to install Blu-Ray drives with ease. Is it crazy to think we could just buy better hard drives and SSDs down the road even a few more years, and still be using these? As of right now we ARE unable to upgrade to OS Sierra, let alone High Sierra, so I am thinking that may be a major limitation which will cause us to have to buy new models.
As a department we are quite good at using backups to keep all our files safe. We have a dedicated startup disk and backup all our files regularly, so I would say the 2009 Mac Pros are still running pretty well. The only slowdowns in my experience have been their inability (at least on my machine) to shut down properly. I cannot go to Finder > Shut Down and walk away knowing it will shut down. We have had to hard reset quite often. But everything is still operating well on the machines.
We aren't opposed to buying new Macs at all. I just wanted to rule out the possibility if a simple upgrade on internal hardware could buy us a few more years on the 2009s, and if said upgrades are something my boss and I could do in a weekend at the office with some simple tools. Here are our current specs, if this will help:
I work for a small business that is at a jumping-off point for potential Mac upgrades. Currently I work in an art department that uses three Early 2009 Mac Pros. About 2-3 years ago my boss upgraded the drives inside to be 1TB SSDs, and that was a huge boon to the speed of our Macs which were already 6-7 years old at that point. We still do work on them every single day, running multiple Adobe applications, Spotify, internet, email, etc. all the usual stuff.
We have the money to be able to upgrade, and have the green light to spend money if we were to get something like the new 27" 5K Fusion Drive Mac Pros. This is naturally where I'm leaning. But I DO have to ask the question: do we NEED to upgrade our 2009 machines? In my limited experience it seems that nowadays things are much harder to physically upgrade. MacSales.com (where I've been getting a lot of questions answered about the breakdown between machines) tells me that the newer 2017-2018 models are difficult to swap out RAM on, cannot boost storage as easily, etc. Whereas our 2009 Mac Pro is still operating well enough for us to do our jobs, and we have been able to install Blu-Ray drives with ease. Is it crazy to think we could just buy better hard drives and SSDs down the road even a few more years, and still be using these? As of right now we ARE unable to upgrade to OS Sierra, let alone High Sierra, so I am thinking that may be a major limitation which will cause us to have to buy new models.
As a department we are quite good at using backups to keep all our files safe. We have a dedicated startup disk and backup all our files regularly, so I would say the 2009 Mac Pros are still running pretty well. The only slowdowns in my experience have been their inability (at least on my machine) to shut down properly. I cannot go to Finder > Shut Down and walk away knowing it will shut down. We have had to hard reset quite often. But everything is still operating well on the machines.
We aren't opposed to buying new Macs at all. I just wanted to rule out the possibility if a simple upgrade on internal hardware could buy us a few more years on the 2009s, and if said upgrades are something my boss and I could do in a weekend at the office with some simple tools. Here are our current specs, if this will help:
