Ask Paul: December 30 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and welcome to the final installment of Ask Paul of 2022. So let’s kick off the weekend, and the New Year, with some great reader questions.
How old is too old?
andrew b. asks:

A videographer friend of mine has a mostly base model Mac Pro 5,1 that is still his one and only machine. He does have a day job with a much newer computer, but he freelances often and despite that still has no interest in replacing his ancient Mac. It works for him, even if we tech lovers might find editing on it to be abysmally slow.

For those who are also curious, the Mac Pro 5,1 is the huge Intel Xeon-based tower Mac that debuted in 2012. (I had to look it up.) This was a very powerful computer at the time, obviously, but is quite old for day-to-day use by any standards, especially given the audience that would have bought such a thing when it was new. I assume it’s on an older version of macOS now too as well. Very interesting.

Which brings me to my questions: Of all the computers you have owned, which is the oldest one you believe you could still get your work done with? Do those of us in tech tend to overestimate the time we'd save if we just bought newer, faster hardware, or do we overestimate the value of that time, or both? Or, is there a very legitimate case to be made for switching out computers every three to four years as we seem do?

I’ve been thinking about this topic all week, go figure, based on my recent experience of resuscitating a NUC8, which dates back to 2018. So it’s four years old. As I noted, More Mobile: Minimal Mobile (Premium), this PC, which is based on an 8th-Gen Intel Core chipset, feels a bit slow to me compared to the 11th- and 12th-Gen Intel laptops I’ve been using for the past year or more. But there’s a lot that goes into this, of course: it has whatever storage and RAM, and neither is likely the fastest-possible option. So some combination of CPU, storage, and RAM speed is likely to blame, not just the CPU. Which, frankly, is probably fine: 8th-Gen is when Intel made the leap from dual-core to quad-core in its U-series designs, and it was basically a performance gift for no additional cost and, for laptops, no battery life hit either.

I should also add that it’s worked fine in day-to-day use. The performance difference was noticeable at first, but it isn’t a major difference and it hasn’t impacted my work in any way. You see it in things like launching apps: when I bring up Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 from scratch, for example, a silly front-end app with links to Organizer and Photo Editor appears first. (You can’t disable this, and I hate it.) When I click the Photo Editor link that I really want, it appears in about one second on a new-generation PC. But when I click it on the NUC8, it takes about 2, maybe 3, seconds. Then you use it, and it works normally. No biggie.

But this is an interesting question. On the one hand, it’s clear that modern PCs---PCs that were new in...