It's not a unique property of Macs. I've got the cheapest laptop I could buy in August 2001, a Toshiba that still runs...and runs fine with Wary Puppy or Win2k despite it's CopperMine 800mhz Celeron for many tasks. I've got a Dell workstation from 2008 that still has more cores than I can light up unless I try...and this Thinkpad, bought used, is 2010 vintage.
Computers tend not to go bad. Instead, jumping on the feature bandwagon that drives the product line model to profitability makes us feel that 800 million cycles per second is useless. In the early aughts, out in my garage I had bootlegged Windows Advanced Server running on a 40mhz 486DX2 with 8 megs of RAM full time to serve up the occasional file off the 340meg disk.
Computers tend not to go bad. Instead, jumping on the feature bandwagon that drives the product line model to profitability makes us feel that 800 million cycles per second is useless. In the early aughts, out in my garage I had bootlegged Windows Advanced Server running on a 40mhz 486DX2 with 8 megs of RAM full time to serve up the occasional file off the 340meg disk.