3 ms·
I can feel this. My main work computer was/is a late 2008 MacPro, running OS X 10.9.5 (the latest MacOS you can run officially on this). After one and half year
by masswerk 4y ago
I can feel this. My main work computer was/is a late 2008 MacPro, running OS X 10.9.5 (the latest MacOS you can run officially on this). After one and half years, I've still not transitioned fully to a shiny, yellow M1 iMac standing next to it. The usability and productivity on the MacPro, its OS and the apps on it are much better, and, on top of it, it's all software that I own.
The real dealbreaker is evergreen browsers and websites updating from whatever is available on Github, making up-to-date browsers a requirement. The newest browser you can run on this is Firefox 78.15.0esr, which, funny enough, tells you that it's up to date.
I also second that security by out-of-date obscurity may be a concept. (The vectors available just don't scale, if you're not a target prominent enough to make this a sensible investment. Moreover, old hardware gives you things like ECC memory, which is also immune to rowhammer attacks, as it's slow and not that tightly integrated. Having no privileged network connections to any cloud services may help, as well.)
(However, I'm writing this on a rather fresh Apple Silicon MBA, because, well, the Web…)
- themodelplumber 4y ago> The newest browser you can run on this is Firefox 78.15.0esr This made me wonder if there are still working dev kits/tools with browser components available in such a way as to provide a fairly simple pathway from basic dev skills (or just "web browser example" code) --> up-to-date browser engine, running on 10.9.5? Thinking of somewhat more obscure dev tools too, e.g. PureBasic, etc.
- masswerk 4y agoThis would have been a viable path, when WebKit was still "a thing" and enjoyed some integration. I guess, with WebKit2, things became more complicated and resource heavy. Given the rapid development cycles and feature releases, I doubt an integrated web-view would be able to keep up, nowadays. Esp., if nothing short of 100% compatibility to current Chrome will do. (That said, Firefox 78.15.0esr works still fine in most cases, but I doubt that this will be the case much longer, mostly because of CSS feature adoption.)
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoThere are up-to-date builds of Chromium for 10.9.5. (Actually, they work as far back as 10.7, Lion) https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy I daily-drive this browser on a 10.9 Mavericks Hackintosh. It's great.