Sure you can boot that machine up, but in no way will it be useful. In my experience nothing ages more poorly than a Mac. What seems so future proof at the time of purchase is a chugging useless beast at 6 years old. And Apple loves to push upgrades that make them literally useless. Not saying they should be expected to keep a 1998 computer useful, but a few years would be nice. This video is a good dissection of one of the many ways Apple bakes in the planned obsolescence.
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Ha I sure do. I hope Gmail releases a Eudora skin some April 1.
I’m typing this on a 2011 Thinkpad 530. I buy them in 3’s from eBay for under $200 each with SSDs, and flash them with a Win7/Ubuntu image. Damn useful, and blazingly faster than Macs of the same era. With the added advantage of being able to get new batteries easily and upgrade all the hardware.
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The Ultrabook was about 12 lbs if I remember correctly. Of course the power brick was at 2-3 lbs just by itself.
I had to lug that thing around along to with another Windows laptop for demos to customers using a crossover cable to connect the server software on the Unix machine to the client on the laptop. Whole package together was probably close to 30 lbs.
Still better than the sewing machine “luggable” computers like the Osborne I had as a kid.
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Literally not true. See:
- trilobite.local is a Mac mini G4 with 1 GB of RAM and a small hard drive and an optical DVD, used for working with older software and abandonware.
- microceratops.local is am 2009 Mac mini server with an SSD and a backup spiny drive, because I don’t really trust the SSDs. It also handles all of our Time Machine backups wirelessly.
- mamoru-oshii.local, Patlabor edition is a 2010 iMac with a bad internal HD, but boots from an external RAID via Firewire800. Surprisingly fast, we use it as a print and media server in the office because the TV has other uses. When I get money, I want to upgrade the CPU to an i7 and replace the failed HD with an SSD. Also, I use it for dubbing stuff from audio tape and other stuff, like Final Cut Studio.
- Dunkleosteus is a G3-based PowerBook 1400c, mostly so I can run Elastic Reality and a few other things. I used to use it for digital paint on the go with a wee WACOM tablet (ADB).
(Tully-monster.local, 2015 MBP, my primary machine, is for real work and is not as interesting as the older machines, probably because work. Adobe really knows how to make a modern computer feel like an old one.)
I … had a VIC-20. God damn it.
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My best friend had a Vic. We learned BASIC on that thing by copying programs out of computer magazines line by line. Had no idea what we were doing but it was fun seeing our little programs run successfully.
20 GOTO 10
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Maybe a literal exaggeration, but none of those are functioning without a lot of help, or capable of much modern computing, which I’d say proves my point. My 9 year old Thinkpads (for example) run modern Photoshop no problem. And they can function beautifully as coding machines at a cafe for example, which Macs from the same era couldn’t possibly do, in my experience at least.
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Like any device, most of them are only consulted when I have need for them, and I must be the one to push the “on” button, yes.
But I thought you fixed up older machines and keep them useful? How is that not “help”?
Ok, but your point depends upon everyones needs being the same, which they are literally not.
All devices will fail, but I find software actually doesn’t, and until I can find a way to get them migrated over, I still need that software to run every so often. And I need that more than I need to run a “modern” browser, for the “modern” computing on the internet, because if I can’t the rest is a bit moot in my case.
Is that weird? What if … you have a Nintendo GameBoy cartridge you like. It’s easiest to just keep a GBA around for playing it. Sure, emulators, but those suck at tactile controls without a lot of help. (And I’ve had no luck getting Snow Leopard on Virtual Box.)
Plus there’s just something about the design of the thing itself. I had to sell my NeXT last year for rent money, but I really miss that box. It was amazing.
I have a 136 MB Adobe Illustrator CC file which will rectify that, I promise.
Truth is, it’s easy to get good results out of 3D apps and Photoshop or similar on older machines—I have IRIX machines which run Blender just fine—but these applications have actual competitors in the field of work, some of which are free.
Adobe bought Freehand back in the 90s, so, little incentive for them to improve Illustrator much.
- Wow, remember FreeHand? That was the best. Still runs on Dunkleosteus.
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I’m sure it’s happened, but of the maybe 15 Thinkpads I’ve owned over the years, I can’t think of one that’s up and died. I’ve upgraded their harddrives, batteries and RAM though. And the fact that it’s so easy (and cheap!) to do so, and the fact that it makes it a perfectly usable computer even after almost 10 years, again shines a light on Apple’s practices. And I do think they’re intentional practices, not accidental, but I guess that’s debatable.
I have a 136 MB Adobe Illustrator CC file which will rectify that, I promise.
Ha good point!
And amazing that you had a Next Box. I’ve always wanted to behold one of those in person. Gets my vote for starting the modern computing era.
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Run MacOS.
(And yes I fully acknowledge the existence of Hackintoshes but there’s a lot of caveat emptor there.)
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a good hard drive spins at 15.000 rpm/
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“6 cores will solve all my problems”
Then you’ll love SSDs even more as they’re quite a bit more power efficient–if your OS and hardware supports it, they have practically zero power use when idle.
@YarraMul if power consumption is a concern, then SSDs are the clear winner. The idle power useage of a spinning drive goes up with (I want to say the fourth power of RPM) some high factor of the RPM. 5400RPM drives are fine. 7200RPM drives require attention to cooling. 10K RPM drives require heatsinks. 15K RPM drives require heatsinks and forced air cooling. And let’s not forget the sound. The sound of a rack of 15K drives running (with all the fans blowing air to keep them cool) is an experience you won’t forget. Then when someone fires up iozone on the array… You’ll wish you could. So glad I wore hearing protection in the machine room.
SSDs use less power, perform vastly better (as has been pointed out, but could bear repeating) in the order of thousands of times faster. Let that sink in a bit.
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I’m not sure what connector these iMacs use, but since they have spinning drives by default, I’m betting its only SATA on the board. The Macbooks have been using embedded SSDs for a few years now, so I guess we’re lucky the iMacs are still upgradeable post-purchase, at the cost of read/write speeds.
I remember going up north near Clifton, KS to go pheasant hunting with one of our old “neighbors” and the guys house we were at (he was a farmer) had a similar computer. I think it had to be a little newer because the screen was bigger and the keyboard not so clunky looking.
My desktop has a small SSD where Windows, Program Files, and other everyday stuff lives and it’s great.
But I also have almost 3TB of music, family photos/videos, and backed up disk images from my laptop, and back when I was buying the drives that store that stuff, 5400rpm hard drives cost a fraction of what 3TB of SSD would have cost.
That’s fine, but the important part is putting the OS and your apps on an SSD. If these iMac’s shipped with a 128GB SSD and a 5400RPM drive, that would be okay except for people doing video processing or other really data intensive apps.
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It’s kind of painful to hang a modern SSD off of a SATA port. I guess Apple’s thinking is that these are grandma machines and they don’t necessarily want to undercut their Pro line. Of course the Pro machines have been kind of mediocre as far as “Pro” parts are concerned, so undercutting them is all too easy.
Now, that’s not fair! It was one of the models with ambient (no fan) cooling, so it’s very useful for putting out heat without much noise. If you need to quietly dry some wet shoes or maybe a small batch of beef jerky, it’s very useful!
Yes, but I preferred Pegasus Mail.
Mission accomplished.
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The IBM “Portable” PC (quotes added by me) that I had as my first very own machine was only slightly better with a 9" screen, and 256K RAM and two floppy drives as-bought. By the time it succumbed to obsolescence it had a 286 on a card and a 65 MB hard drive along with the requisite multifunction board for RAM and ports, and a sound card.
Not mine:
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Almost the same here, although I have the Windows partition set to dual boot 7 and 10 and I prefer Linux Mint to it’s older sibling. It’s been my MO for about 15 years now. Buy lightly used off-lease Dell business class laptops, throw a bigger drive in it and go. My kid gets the previous machine as a hand me down. I’ve worked my way up from the “C” series Latitudes, never spending more than about $200 on a machine.
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