Kudos to Apple

Working and gaming in a Windows environment as well as having Android phone and tablets, I don’t often have the opportunity to comment on the goodness or badness of devices designed in Cupertino. However, I do keep an iMac at home in my office for the sole purpose of running music apps like Garage Band and Main Stage, so that I can tinker with a keyboard and record guitar tracks. I also use it so that the kids can play with a more featured keyboard than their $100 Yamaha. So music only.

I recently bought a new iMac for this purpose, which replaced the 9 year old (late 2007) version. I brought the original one my office and in fact it is on this which I am typing this post. It is basically the first model that they got the black frame around the screen out near the edge.

The new one of course is edgeless, fast, cooler looking, and takes up a little less desktop. It’s running Sierra.

Anyway, I’ve doggedly updated the old one with each version of OS X, and while she is slow to wake up and load apps, does a fairly decent job of computing once she shakes out the stiffness. Like her owner. I bet that if I were so motivated, I could even find a YouTube video describing how to swap out the old HD for an SSD, and she would be almost new.

HERE IS MY POINT → Today, I finally got around to updating it from El Capitan to Sierra and got a message that this system no longer supports the new OS. Finally. After 9 years? You’ve got to be kidding. Try running Windows 10 or Ubuntu on a 9 year old PC with original hardware. Un-fricking-believable. I’ve been expecting this message since Lion, or Leopard, or Snow Leopard, or whatever the names where over the last 9 years.

So Kudos to Steve and the engineers, both software and hardware, at Apple whom designed and built this old girl. Damn good job if I may say so and a bloody fine ROI on top of that.

I think that I’ll go look for that YouTube video.

Not to be combative but you can and I have. My gaming rig from 2007 is now an media server running Ubuntu, and to enumerate where and what the Dell’s salvaged from my parent’s dental practice have gone and done would be folly.

Also Steve Jobs had about as much to do with day to day engineering as I’ve got influence on NASA flight schedules. #Woz4lyfe.

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I should have stated that it hasn’t been my experience that in general, hardware designed for the Windows OS does not have the same longevity. Congrats for that. I admire Woz, but he left Apple 12 years before my iMac shipped and long before the architecture supported Intel processors.

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I agree with that, and I’m not trying to argue that Wozniak made your computer, but I was more using it to further illustrate that Steve Jobs gets credit for Apple’s engineering successes. I won’t argue that the man was a beast at marketing, and made choices that ended up handsomely profitable and visionary one which products to invest in, but he was never the engineering strength behind the company.

Admittedly I’m a pretty ardent apple hater. I respect the longevity of their products, but I’m a tinkerer. I build and tweak my own computers, I like looking at and playing around with code. Apple willfully makes both tasks more difficult. I don’t abide.

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