I am trying something novel. Instead of dropping ten-thousand words into the forum as a reply to another post, I’m writing some stuff and putting it here, free of its original context. This is mostly for my own edification, because this stuff isn’t Important™ or even in any way important.
The context for this post is that somebody has started a thread asking about physical reliability concerns for some Mac Pro models slightly newer than an iMac they are using now. My argument in this thread has been that buying a Mac Pro 4,1 (the 2009 model) or 5,1 (the 2010 model) today is a Bad Idea™ because they are very old, very costly, and Apple is almost certainly going to discontinue support for it in the newest release of Mac OS X in the next two to three years.
The post directly preceding what I’ve written here argues that eventually the used Mac market will look like the used PC market, in as much as that (paraphrasing here) eventually people will buy a Mac, use it for a few years, and then buy a new one.
I admit, this is frustrating to see because this is, well, exactly how all computer markets have always worked. It is, as such, puzzling to see somebody write this. The biggest difference, and the first thing I address, is that the market for used high end Macs is affected by the Mac Pro 6,1, which is the somewhat unpopular cylindrical model introduced in 2013. The 6,1 is a huge change conceptually from the previous generations of the Mac Pro, but offered nearly the same amount of overall horsepower to the 5,1 model. Apple then skipped over the next generation or two of CPU and GPU equipment entirely, making the rock and the hard place even more severe.
Here’s what I wrote, essentially doubling down on the idea that a 2009 Mac Pro would be a bad replacement for a 2008 iMac, and that the Mac Pro in general is largely unnecessary these days unless you are doing a few particularly high end workloads.
I think one of the biggest problems with the way the used Mac market works right now, which I would argue is pretty different from the way the used PC market works, is that the Mac Pro 6,1 didn’t prove to be a particularly compelling product to anybody who had any Mac Pro manufactured in the previous five years.
For better or worse, you can add 64 gigs of RAM and 12 total CPU cores, as well as two GPUs, to any Mac Pro 4,1 or 5,1 (and the 3,1 was still considered a solid contender with its 8-core Xeon 5400 configurations, and still worked officially with the newest versions of Mac OS X in 2013). So, people who bought a 4/6/8/12 core Mac Pro in 2008+ (which, in 2008/2009, would likely have been a very compelling choice over the top end iMac for most people who were considering that top end iMac.
As the OP literally said, an iMac from 2008 has lasted them until now, so I don’t think that in modern times, there’s a lot to the idea that Mac Pros last longer than lower end contemporaries. The main difference today really is that the Mac Pro will easily handle more concurrent work at once, or doing large compute tasks more quickly (thinking: compiling, rendering, things that normally halt productivity for minutes-hours-days at a time.)
The unavoidable truth is that the Mac Pro 5,1 is a 7-year-old machine, nearly physically completely identical to an 8-year-old one, and over the past 15-20 years, Apple has generally not bothered to keep machines patched very far beyond 5-7 or so years. The last generation of Power Macintosh G5s got a bit over five if you consider that 10.5 can arguably be said to have received security patches until around 2011 when Mac OS X 10.7 was released.
Mac Pros are high end computers, but I don’t know if in this case, that really means they will be better, especially given that OP has already said they’re using a nine-year-old iMac.
I think that given the weird state of used Macs, especially Mac Pros, if you’re going to drop $1500 or so building a “well equipped” Mac Pro 4,1 or 5,1 (and: you will, a sampling of relatively middling 2009 configurations on eBay shows that you start looking at $500 or more when you get into six- and eight-core models) then it’s worth looking at what that money will get you in an iMac, either today or in a few months, when an i5-8400 in a baseline iMac will itself be a six-core chip, and likely a lot faster than a Mac Pro 6,1 and that much faster than a 6-core configuration of a 4,1 or 5,1.
To double-down on this point of the fact that the OP is currently using a 2008 iMac, I don’t think in this situation it’s worth discussing the idea of 12-core models, although dual hexcore Westmere Xeons is definitely something that contributes to old Mac Pros costing so much. A “late 2017″ or “early 2018″ six-core iMac (even an i5 model, without hyperthreading) is easily going to be a 300-500% overall speed/performance/capability uplift relative to a 2008 iMac, and it should give any 2008-2010 Mac Pro model (short of a 12-core) a run for its money as well.
And, if history is any indication, a new iMac in the next 6-9 months is going to last around as long as a new Mac Pro in the next 6-9 months.
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