Ode to the Dead IMac
A couple of weeks ago, I had to put my eight-year-old iMac to rest. After many years of faithful service, he finally died and was beyond repair. I don’t like buying new computers and I don’t like spending money on them. For me, buying a new computer is as exciting as buying a new dryer.
Think back to 2009. President Obama was still in his first year in office, Sweden legalized gay marriage, Taylor Swift was still regarded as a country music performer, and one of the most popular iPhone apps was Tweetie 2 .
My new iMac came with what is arguably the best Mac operating system of all time, OS X Snow Leopard. With Snow Leopard, Apple has finally achieved what OS X was supposed to be. The main goal of the update was speed, and with it, improved performance, efficiency and stability. He improved on Leopard and previous versions of OS X, turning them into something that anyone can use without too much trouble.
That year, I saved all my money to buy a new 27-inch iMac. I did my best with an i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and an Apple wired keyboard. It was the most expensive purchase I have ever made at the time. In fact, to this day, this is still the most expensive one-time purchase I have ever made, which is in some ways incredible considering I was working full time for $ 8 an hour and was trying to freelance on the side as well as intending to graduate school in 2009.
Eight years later, I can say that the iMac was worth the price. How many of us can say we have had anything for eight years, let alone a computer that has been heavily used every single day? Some people don’t even keep their cars that long. Of course, then it was not without unnecessary difficulties. In 2012 I had to replace my graphics card and hard drive, and in 2015 I finally replaced the outdated SuperDrive with an SSD. But otherwise it went on for at least 10 hours a day, every day, for eight years. I can’t even imagine how many words I typed on this computer. Even the thought of how many blog posts have been hacked about this makes me sick.
It also ran the old version of Photoshop just fine and worked great with the short videos I’ve made for this site over the years. Whichever random version of Logic I downloaded worked well enough for the silly musical thing I decided to create. In fact, while it couldn’t run any modern games, it could run everything else fine. This says a lot not only about the build quality of the iMac, but also about the state of computers in general these days. Why upgrade? Everything is good enough.
For most of these eight years, the iMac was my only computer. Although I had a few casual laptops in those years, they have never been in such high demand. MacBook Air here or older MacBook there, these laptops came with me to cafes or when I was traveling for work, but that’s about it. I’ve never felt the same affection for them as that iMac did, and never felt the same affinity as I did with my very first PowerBook G4. To this day, these old aluminum PowerBooks have my favorite keyboard of all time.
In those eight years with my iMac, many steps have been taken, and it has had the ability to crack that fancy glass screen or break the stylish aluminum stand. This damn computer went from apartment to apartment in Colorado, then traveled to a couple of different places in Seattle before it landed in Los Angeles, where it died.
His death was not unexpected. I knew it was coming. You can feel things like this coming. You just know . It started an accidental reboot one day before eventually diving into kernel panic. Towards the end of the screen, the screen turned into a vaporwave masterpiece before it rebooted again.
Perhaps it’s the video card again. Or maybe a motherboard. Nevertheless, it was impossible to find a replacement, and it was not worth the time and money. Perhaps proving that the iMac was once the Honda Civic of computers, the 2009 iMac still sells on eBay for between $ 400 and $ 500 .
I replaced the iMac with a refurbished 2016 MacBook Pro without touchpad and a 27 ” LG 4K monitor . Luckily, the iMac has enough life left to go through the migration process . But despite the technical update, it’s not the same at all. …
Once that was done, it was time to put an end to the poor machine. For so many years, my loyal friend had to be wiped up , reassembled, and eventually transported to a recycling center. It is a sad end for such a reliable beast, but when it comes time to move on, we must accept that fact and do it.