Is your Mac obsolete?
Apple designates Macs as “obsolete” after a period of time. We look at what that means
What it means if your Mac is of the “vintage” variety. Plus a look at Intel’s latest graphics-boosting chips.
Apple recently recategorized a number of its Macs as “obsolete” or “vintage.” This specifically affected the Early 2009 Mac mini and Mid 2009 13-inch MacBook (obsolete), and the 15- and 17-inch Early 2011 MacBook Pros (vintage). What does this mean, and what can you do if you own one of these?
Obsolete means that Apple will no longer offer official repair support through its retail stores and third-party resellers. Vintage is the same in all regions except California and Turkey, where residents can get limited support on certain products up to two years after they become obsolete. Apple tends to classify its products as obsolete between five and seven years after manufacturing has been discontinued.
There’s no need to panic if your Mac is affected and you need to replace a part, though. Companies
such as iFixit ( ifixit.com) publish detailed guides to replacing almost every part in your Mac, should you need to. As long as you can source replacement parts, from eBay for example, and don’t mind getting hands-on, repairs can be made. What might be more of a concern is the time and effort you have to invest in replacing parts, rather than having Apple do it for you. For some components, such as the hard drive, this is an easy process (depending on your model of Mac). If a fan or speaker goes, it’s much trickier. If keeping your Mac running involves numerous complicated fixes with hard-to-find components, you may be better off buying a new computer.
Hardware isn’t your only consideration when working with an obsolete Mac – you’ll need to find out what software it can run. The most important consideration is that Apple no longer offers security updates to any version of OS X earlier than OS X 10.9 Mavericks. How much that’s likely to affect you depends on what you do with your Mac – running it offline should be fine, but using it as your main work device could spell trouble. There’s no point upgrading the hardware if it falls prey to malware! Swapping your old version of Safari for a recent alternative, such as Camino ( caminobrowser.
org), and using anti-malware software will help, but you’re still at risk when online.