on the obsolescence of my computers

In the last days I was thinking to a couple of posts that my friends  Fabrizio Venerandi and Manuel Moreale, published recently. So this morning I thought it would be fun to examine the status of the computers I have at home / work, annotating something for each one of them.

Then, you can make an idea of the obsolescence of my hardware.

Here's the list

• Acer TM803LMi | 2003 | still works, zero battery life, I use it essentially for the old legacy ports sometimes I need in the server room or for some old peripheral;
• PowerBook G4 15” | 2005 | I took second hand from a collegue in 2008. Still boots up and is updated to the latest Mac OS X that it supports
• MacBook Pro 17” | early 2009 | it was given to me as a present from a colleague, when she finally updated to an M1 MacBook Air.
• MacBook Pro 15” | 2010 | this still works "fine". In the years I've upgraded it with 8GB of RAM + SSD, and it was given to me at workplace. It's been used on casual necessities;
• MacMini | 2011 | This has been upgraded long time ago with 16GB of RAM and two SSHD hybrid hard disk of 750GB. It was the vanilla model, with a 'poor' Intel Core 2 CPU which is today the real bottleneck for browsing recent websites (or YouTube);
• iMac 27” | 2012 | this is the only broken machine we have at home and I'm going to try to sell it for spare parts. It has been working endlessly at my wife's studio, and then when the lockdown spread it had nearly two years of uptime. When we took it back home we gave it no rest, and so the heat melted the video card (the original one also melted, since it was part of a faulty series: Maybe a reballing could help, maybe not. We choose not to spend any money on that; 
• MacBook Pro 15,4” | 2012 | brought from a friend in 2018, it's the notebook for my wife's needs,
• Mac Pro | late 2013 | the amazing trashcan one, I took it second hand at a ridiculous price (with 64GB or RAM, 512GB drive and two Radeon D500 cards) this last December 2023. For me it's a collector's item and I've always wanted one. So I took it. With OpenCore Legacy Patcher I've upgrade it to the Sonoma operating system and now it's at work, replacing the (quite) old dual core iMac 21,5" the employee gave to me:
• MacBook Pro 16” | 2020 | with an i9 CPU and maxed out SSD it's my main machine, works great … but given the M3 arrive a worm started crawling in my head (for heat and battery life essentially);
• MacMini M1 | 2022 | with 16GB of RAM and 512GB drive it's the new desktop of my wife, after the iMac 27" failure. I took it second hand by a friend's friend in February 2023;
• MacMini M2 Pro | 2023 | this is my desktop at home. The basic version of the M2 Pro series, a true workhorse;

That should be it!

Amazingly, the Acer I got in 2003 (and paid more than 2000€) works perfectly with its first-generation Intel Centrino, and apart from a now exasperating slowness at boot it has served me both to play with the Rapid-Bike controller for the old Yamaha Fz1 Fazer bike I had, and today--though very occasionally--at work, when I need a legacy port.

I am very sorry to have decommissioned from daily use the MacMini mid.2011, basic CPU configuration but with 16GB of RAM and two hybrid drives put in later. I need to find an operating scope for it, at least in the office. Occasionally I think about putting a GNU/Linux distribution on it and making it a little web server for "internal" use.

~~~ 

PS = I also have an iMac G4 at home complete with speakers. It is slow, a bit noisy ... it would need to be cleaned properly inside, but the music can be heard just fine. My regret is that, like a fool, when I got it I removed mac OS 9 from it. The system in fact had dual boot with the old and the new operating system (OS X).