I work in a company since 2015 and when I joined I was handed over a new MacBook which was the latest at that time i.e 2015 Mid model i7 16GB Ram. This company does not have a rotation policy for the hardware allocated to employees at all. So they will end up repairing and replacing parts till its no longer viable.
My profession is mobile development so I would require the latest versions of macOS and Xcode all the time. Of late it has become difficult to work on the said MacBook and its sluggish all the time. I had put in a request to replace the Mac with the system team and it was simply shot down saying that the current config is good enough. I replied politely indicating the Geekbench scores for the 2015 model and the latest Intel MacBook. But again I was shot down just saying that 16GB Ram and i7 is more than enough. I understand that the current MacBook configs are not bad, but it is indeed slower than the latest ones and also 5 years old.
If not for geek bench scores how can I put a case to compare older Mac with newer ones ?
EDIT: My current macbook has been repaired a lot already and it still has issues w.r.t battery, heating issues etc … Display,
Logic Board & Battery were already replaced last year. All those
repairs are pretty expensive, and yet for some reason this is the
route which they might want to take still.
Best Answer
I would look at three things
In the end, you’re appealing to your manager for funding and reasonableness of the “requirements” and not IT for a “blessing” of the age or benchmarks.
Consider that people are expensive to recruit and train and hardware is cheap. But it’s easy to measure hardware expenses, so that tends to get scrutinized over process (erase and install) or training.
Do some quick math on “Is it worth it?” and good luck!
In your case we would send you an identical Mac to your 2017 one that is erased and have you run your chosen tests. Most of our managed Macs need an erase every 2 years and developers tend to need erases much more often since they alter the system so heavily. They understandably complain bitterly when asked to clean (just like system admin do), which is why we send them a second kit to run tests so they aren’t forced to migrate but can do a good test on a clean system. It’s rarely the hardware slowing them down in my experience, but when it is it’s nice to have good data on a clean build so that the budget person doesn’t think the “spec” was made up or not backed by data and testing.