I might need to hop on a 2018 mac for some dev work, so just curious what those still on it think about it. Are there major roadblocks, or you mostly fine once you get your code editor/remote ssh?
I still very actively use a Mac Pro 2013 (aka trashcan). It has 64 GB RAM, an 8 core Xeon cpu, and 1TB NVMe. I'm running macOS Monterey (12.7.6) on it. The hardware is still plenty powerful enough to be very useful. Supported software is getting to be more troublesome as the days go by. When the pain gets too great I'll look into installing Linux on it with the goal of continuing to use it.
2018 Mac mini, running Monterey, for webdev and Ruby scripting and it’s still fine. The biggest issue, as ever, is that the OS can only feasibly be upgraded to a certain point and that ultimately limits whether you can run current browsers.
Xcode and Android Studio do, of course, necessitate a more recent Mac.
I've got a 2015 MacBook Pro running Monterey which I can code on. It's offline (no DNS entries) but I can AirDrop[1] stuff to it. I use Dash[2] for offline documentation and Sublime Text[3] for editing.
It's really just an experiment to see how little (software, hardware and internet) I can get away with. We are moving next year and I may not have space for the large desk and monitor I have now.
I remember using an old 2018 Intel MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM about two years ago. That thing was noisy. Every time I tried to compile a larger project or work in Logic, the RAM would fill up and the fans would go full blast. Now I am on an M1 MacBook Pro, also with 8GB. Granted, the RAM is still a bottleneck, but the fan noise is completely gone and the machine always stays at a comfortable temperature.
I use a 2019 27-inch iMac every day.
I replaced its internal drive with a 1TB SSD myself, and it handles all my work needs perfectly.
I use Ghostty for remote server access and Parsec to remotely control my Windows PC.
Intel is very very close to dead now as apple has officially EOLed them and software communities are following suit (eg homebrew and nix). I just picked up an apple silicon because the writing was on the wall that it could be any day that I could no longer get “real work done” on the intel machine
I have a macbook air from 2017. I use it when I travel, major work being done on a m4 mac mini. The issue is end of support for brew and many of the new/ latest apps not working but otherwise for simple things is works well
I have 2 (an i7 MBP and an i9 iMac)and rarely think about it, except when I want to try some local AI idea or do something intensively GPU related. Unless you want to do something like videotranscoding or high-res, high frame rate gaming/simulation/eye candy, they work great.
why not? its more like a retro machine nowadays but still a good one. but then i should admit that most power-hungry workloads have now been offloaded to newer machines, alas..
I still have my iMac G3 Bondi Blue in my basement. I had an Intel MacBook but sold it because it only ran up to MacOS 10.7. It worked fine about 10 years ago. Now I doubt it will.
Xcode and Android Studio do, of course, necessitate a more recent Mac.
It's really just an experiment to see how little (software, hardware and internet) I can get away with. We are moving next year and I may not have space for the large desk and monitor I have now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirDrop
[2] https://kapeli.com/dash
[3] https://www.sublimetext.com