Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's talk about how old is too old.
Is it time to replace your Mac or other Apple device.
So I get asked this a lot.
Is my Mac too old?
Should I be getting a new one or perhaps maybe my iPhone or iPad.
Well there is no one answer that fits everyone.
It depends on what you use your devices for and what you expect from them.
There are people that want to get the latest and greatest and replace their Mac every year
and there are people who want to hang on to theirs as long as it is still useful before
upgrading.
Of course there is matters of budget as well.
But I can appreciate the want of good hard data.
What do other people think.
What does Apple think.
There are actually a couple pages Apple has on their website to give clues as to what
Apple says is too old.
So the first page I want to share with you is this support page at Apple.
It's their HT201624.
It is Vintage and obsolete products.
This page is obviously created to have some regulations about what products are obsolete.
There is a bunch of information here that is obviously legal.
But it does give some insight as to what Apple likes to support and what they consider to
be old.
They list all sorts of models here and you can see these are the ones that they believe
are obsolete or they are vintage rather than current Macs.
So you can see if your model is on there.
There are also peripherals listed in addition.
It even goes back into a lot of older stuff and varies by country probably because of
different regulations.
You can even see some interesting things.
Like, for instance, yep that's right.
The Apple II is considered to be vintage or obsolete as well as some older Macs here as
well.
So it is an interesting page to look through.
I almost found myself looking to find out which ones of these I owned.
So the other page good to look at is the page of Technical Specifications with the current
version of OS X.
So in this case it is SP28 in the knowledge base here.
This one for El Capitan lists the hardware requirements for El Capitan.
You can go with the idea that basically if your Mac does not run the current version
of OS X then you can consider it to be too old.
Here it goes.
Instead of listing all the models it basically will say something like for the MacBook Air
anything late 2008 or newer.
So anything that's earlier than that might be considered obsolete because it doesn't
run El Capitan.
You can look at some of the other things that are supported or not supported.
So there are certain features, for instance like AirDrop, FaceTime that kind of thing,
that are not supported on some older Macs.
So you want to look at say AirPlay Mirroring.
Well then it's basically a machine that's not even a year old might be too old for you
if you want to use AirPlay Mirroring.
Now how about iOS.
Well go to Apple's What's new page for iOS.
So ios/whats-new and you get all this information here.
But if I scroll down to the bottom of that I get a compatibility list.
This will show me which devices are compatible with iOS 9.
Now it doesn't tell quite the whole story.
Notice that even the iPad 2, the very second iPad to come out, is compatible with iOS 9.
But not all features are going to be compatible with it.
For instance Siri has never been supported on the iPad 2 even though that goes back several
versions of iOS.
But it does give you some sort of good idea especially with the iPhone here that anything
older than the 4S is probably too old to be using anything older than the iPad Touch 5th
generations is going to be too old to use iOS 9.
So you may want to think about upgrading if you are beyond this list.
Of course, for me it's ultimately subjective.
It depends on you and whether or not the device is still fulfilling your needs and whether
or not you've got the budget to upgrade and get a newer device that may support newer
software, newer things, be faster and have more storage and so forth.
So I would like to hear from you.
How old do you think is too old for your Mac or your iOS devices.
Leave a comment at this post at MacMost.com.