Lifespan of laptops

Hi, I am looking at purchasing my first macbook pro. I have always used dell laptops/desktops and the lifespan is usually about 3-4 years before you start to notice slow downs, freezing, etc. Do the macbooks have similar lifespans? I am concerned about the cost if the laptop is only viable or 3-4 years. Any info would be appreciated!

My last ibook was 4 years old when I sold it and it still ran the newest OS and had non freezes. The only reason I sold it was to help pa for my MacBook Pro. Hopefully the MacBook Pro will be longer.

my old ibook g4 i had 2 years on 24/7 and i only had 2 replace the hdd and battery once and its still going well with no problems. i sware its faster than my macbook

not if sure if i can directly answer your question correctly, because i've only had my ibook for 5 months, but I see a lot of older G3 and older G4 models on ebay and on computergeeks.com.

The people I know who have laptops (PC's) use them for work. All of them upgrade about every two years because "....they more or less start falling apart -- physically as well as OS glitches." No feedback from Mac-owners. None in my circle.

I would say the lifespan of a mac is longer then that of the pc because osx does a better job and not slowing down over time, and the hardware is almost the same with the new intel chips, apple is built a little more solid IMO, which should las you longer then your typical pc computer, especially longer then dell.

Macs will last forever. The only end of life span is they become to old to run the newest OS from Apple (5-6 years) or you need a faster machine to run things you want to run. Quite honestly the latter will happen before the former mentioned.

Benjamindaines said:

Macs will last forever. The only end of life span is they become to old to run the newest OS from Apple (5-6 years) or you need a faster machine to run things you want to run. Quite honestly the latter will happen before the former mentioned.

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This is very true.. although the computer will eventually not work after it has been beaten around alot.

reasserting some of what's been said.

laptops really only need to be replaced if they start to fall apart or become seriously out of date.

slowdowns are no reason to get rid of a laptop - mac or wintel. in either case, if normal maintenance does not seem to help to your satisfaction, a complete reformat and reinstall of the OS will always do the trick. just make sure you have backups of your data and your non OS packaged apps.

PowerBookG4 said:

This is very true.. although the computer will eventually not work after it has been beaten around alot.

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Well naturally, anything will stop working when you break it

Benjamindaines said:

Well naturally, anything will stop working when you break it

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sounds like a riddle.

what doesn't stop working when you break it...

how about an egg?
or a toyota pickup truck?

eric said:

sounds like a riddle.

what doesn't stop working when you break it...

how about an egg?

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haha nice

I G3 laptop that lasted me 7 years.. I finally upgraded just because I wanted something a bit new and faster.. The G3 still works to this day.. I just dont use it.

i have a friend who has three (or four?) mac laptops, each a successive generation from the last. all still run and all still run quite well. the oldest is almost five years old and is still doing well. his daughter plays with it daily.

I have an 8 year old G3 Wallstreet running at 233Mhz that can un-officially run Tiger so I hear. I've got Panther running on it. It is slow but works properly. A memory boost to 512MB would certainly help, since I only have 256MB in it right now. Is this a viable machine. Well for e-mail and web browsing it is fine. I did video editing on it when I had a 466Mhz card in it, but that doesn't work any longer. It would be OK for Cocoa programming and non-professionaly image editing, and using MS Office. Using anything that challenges the graphics system would likely be unadvisable.

Considering Microsoft hasn't released a new version of their OS in 5 years, I'm not sure why you'd be seeing the problems you describe. I have heard slow downs can occur due to software problems, but out right freezing seems weird. Defragging your hard drives may help with some slow down issues.

The biggest issues facing older iBooks were failed logic boards and failed HDD.

The latter can happen to any machine and regular backups are the only thing to mitigate the issue. The former would mean the buyer was very unlucky, but it is a fact that notebooks and laptops are slightly more likely to have these issues because of the abuse they take from users and the slightly higher risk of overheating.

I sold a G3 recently that was still going stong (despite a few knocks). I only hope my MacBook goes on for the same amount of time (around 4 and a half years) before needing upgrading. Now Apple is with Intel, you can expect better faster machines to be coming out every 6 months, which might make you feel like you have to upgrade. G4's seemed to have a long life span.