It’s Black Friday, and while the shoppers in the West are killing each other over disposable junk manufactured in dystopian hellholes, I’m at home basking in my frugal nature with my 13-year-old Mac Mini brought back to useful life with an installation of a Linux Mint operating system.
I call it The Mac Minty.
Below is an inelegant photo of the late 2012 Mac Mini which I saved from obsolescence. It was Tina’s everyday machine, but it was showing its age and getting clunkier with each update. Eventually the updates ceased and the little aluminum box that promised the future became part of the past. She was constantly being nagged by warnings of insecure browsers, and other operations which were reasonably swift at one time had became ponderously slow. We caved, and she upgraded. The old Mini went into storage.
That is until my old laptop started to nag and the irreplaceable battery refused to hold a charge. There was no way I was going to buy new, and even a used refurbished model was more than I wanted to spend.
So I did a little research and voila.
(Read about how it was done HERE!)
Outside of purchasing the cheapest VESA mount to bolt the Minty to the back of a small VGA monitor, a small thumb drive to install the operating system and an inexpensive webcam, I had everything else on hand. Yes, I need to tidy up those cables, but I can easily deploy this setup on a minimum of table top real estate. It’s not really portable as a laptop or tablet would be, but it’s movable around my house with a minimum of fuss.
So I may have spent $40 which I tried not to, but it beats the cost of a used Mac laptop which is what I usually did when I needed a new computer. Refurbished and used were the way to go, but Apple has insisted on making their machines impossible to self service so I would be buying inevitable e-waste.
This old Mini is pretty peppy with a Linux OS. It is one of the last of the line to have replaceable RAM and a hard drive. It still has its factory installed mechanical hard drive, and when that goes, I can replace it with a Solid State Drive which should make the thing an absolute speed demon.
I’ve got my eye on a few other Macs which have outlived their usefulness as far as Apple is concerned. They may do very well with an operating system transplant.
Stay tuned!
I’ll be curious on the laptops, since I have an old one too!
I had a HP Pavilion ZD8000 with a gorgeous 17 inch screen that was destined for the dumpster. It ran like a champ on Ubuntu for a few years. I wish I still had it, but I ran it until the wheels came off. It did wind up in a dumpster, but I gave it a reprieve of a number of years.
You may have to do a little research as far as the laptop model and which distribution of Linux will work best for it. If it is sitting around unused and powered off, it’s worth a shot.