New computers are not in the cards for me
Money’s tight and freelance is sparse making the purchase of a new computer less and less likely. It won’t pay for itself. The necessary evil loses its necessity, and it just becomes evil.
The major strike against a new computer is that our Silicon Valley overlords have seen it fit that we, their customers, should own nothing. You’re not buying a computer. You’re paying for the privilege of using it temporarily. The software is a rental and most of their hardware will give up the ghost in five years or so.
You never truly own what you pay for. It’s sort of like real estate taxes.
That is why I have been pulling out some old Macs I’ve had in mothballs and giving them a new lease on life. Some of them are getting a fresh operating system in the form of Linux Mint like the 2012 Mac mini I am typing this article on while others are getting a little surgery and are running a feline-named OS.
It started with a Mac Pro from 2009 which was our “emergency” standby in case something went wrong with our newer machines. It had old operating systems on it and an installation of the last Adobe suite of desktop publishing software I had on physical media. What I didn’t realize is that the “emergency” already occurred in the form of rental software. Against my better nature, I was renting Photoshop, but a recent price increase made up my mind for me. I was going to lean into that emergency equipment. The old packaged software did everything I needed it to do.
My future relied on my returning to the past.
I detailed upgrading my 2009 (in case of emergency) Mac Pro with a speedy Solid State Drive installed into a PCIe card which was installed into the computer’s massive aluminum chassis in this post. The previous mechanical hard-drive containing the Snow Leopard operating system and the Adobe CS4 suite was cloned to this SSD. The machine is a speed demon and I have a perfectly workable version of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
The second of the three 120GB Solid State Drives went into a 2009 Mac mini which I detailed here. It is also booting into Snow Leopard and has the Adobe Suite on it.
Cracking open a 2009 Mac Mini was a lot tougher than upgrading a 2009 Mac Pro.
My third and final 120GB 3G SSD from OWC which was the last one they had in stock went into a well-worn Mid 2010, 13-inch MacBook Pro which I also purchased used about 11 years ago from OWC. I ran it until the updates ceased and probably a little longer than that. I put it away and nearly forgot about it until this whole Frankensteinian experiment came about.
The MacBook Pro had a nice, big 1TB mechanical drive I didn’t want to part with. It had High Sierra on it with a number of programs and files I wanted to continue to use. So it was back to OWC to purchase a Data Doubler.
The OWC Data Doubler is a hardware kit from Other World Computing (OWC) that lets you replace your older Mac’s optical drive (SuperDrive) with a second internal hard drive or SSD.
It’s a DIY upgrade for compatible older Macs where the SuperDrive isn’t heavily used anymore.
I yanked the optical drive, which was called the Super Drive, which I never thought was super and moved the original mechanical drive into the Data Doubler bracket in that bay. I closed it up, plugged it in, and now my 2010 MacBook Pro will boot into either Snow Leopard or High Sierra.
It is my third redundancy girding me against an unkind and undoubtedly expensive future.
The toys are old, but they still work, and they are fun to play with.
If it works, it’s NOT wrong!!!
I’m not going to do anything on the old computers under the old operating systems that would require a secure browser or what have you. I probably wouldn’t even have them online. I’m going to use them with the old software that was meant for them. I plan on canceling the subscriptions I have shortly.