I admit, I had never expected to post anything on this blog again. But then again life goes it’s own way. I has been 3 1/2 years since my farewell post and guess what, our “obsolete” Tiger machines are still up and running! And we’re still enjoying every single day with them. At least I do.
So what has happened in all those years?
Well, on the personal front – yours truly became the father of a little daughter and moving in with his wife, space became scarce. We have a housing shortage here in the Greater Munich area, so we’re still looking for a bigger flat. Until then the PowerMac G5 had to be stored, to be taken out once we move to a new flat. Hopefully by the end of this year. As a replacement and after lots of consideration, I got myself a MacMini G4.
Image may be NSFW.
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I had never owned a MacMini before and honestly wasn’t too thrilled about them. With their many limitations, I always saw them as sort of a precursor of the use-and-throw-away mentality that Apple exhibits for a decade now.
But the MacMini with its G4 seemed like the perfect solution – very small, quiet and being able to run Tiger while still being reasonably fast. I should mention though that I was lucky to obtain the top of the line model with a powerful 1.5 Ghz G4 CPU, 1 GB RAM and a 64 MB ATI Radeon 9200. It also came with the rare Airport Extreme Card und Bluetooth, which are hard to come by, because they were a(n expensive) BTO option. (keep that in mind if you’re looking into buying a used G4 MacMini).
My “Mini” was built in the last November week of 2005. That is more than 10 years ago. And yet, in today’s fast-changing world it is still working wonderfully and getting all my work done. After using OSX 10.4 Tiger for a decade now, I can say I finally “mastered” it in a sense that I know exactly how to customize it to my needs, I know what shortcuts to use to speed up my common workflows, I know what software gets things done for me, etc. etc.
That is something I feel highly undervalued in today’s computer world, with new OS versions being churned out every year, requiring the users to quickly adapt to the engineer team’s latest inventions before the next iteration. It has become almost impossible to get to know a OS version on a first name basis, as we do with our beloved Tiger OSX machines.
I can relate to the actual excitement of trying out new features. But then wasn’t the whole idea about using computers to help us getting things done ?
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Expect some more posts soon, we’ve got a lot to talk.
