I have a 2008 iMac that I use every day—more than my i7 laptop. This iMac is also a Core2Duo. Why? Well, I really like the screen and it happens to be setup in

I have a 2008 iMac that I use every day—more than my i7 laptop. This iMac is also a Core2Duo. Why? Well, I really like the screen and it happens to be setup in the nicest spot I have in my home to work. In particular, it is the best place to video conference ( Zoom, Teams, or GoToMeeting ). The real answer though is because I when I sit down at it to get things done, I rarely run into a limitation that makes me want to move something more powerful to that spot. I am lazy, and it works. The machine is fast and responsive. Mostly I just forget that it is old. When I am thinking about it, I guess I also get a kick out of it. So, it adds a bit of fun. I do email and office work ( documents, spreadsheets, presentations ) and browse the web of course. I author and run a few containers ( Podman ) to verify stuff engineering is creating for a key project. I am using it to teach myself Kubernetes and a bit of DevOps. A lot of the “heavy processing” I do it “in the cloud” anyway. Obviously I am not gaming or editing hi-res video. That said, I do so a fair bit of audio processing on this machine. It is my “work from home” computer. I originally put Arch Linux on this machine to “get through a few days” when my laptop got damaged. “A few days” has been a couple of years now because it has worked so well. MacOS was really slow on the few apps I tried. Worse, like the author, I found that none of the modern software I want to use worked. With Arch though, everything is up to the minute. For browsers, I have Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Slimjet ( all the very latest versions ). All my compilers are right up to date ( Clang, GCC ). I am even running .NET 7 on this machine. As Arch is a rolling release and I update every day, I have the very latest security patches for everything. I am not advocating we all use old computers. I guess my point is that, for most of my day to day professional life, a machine much like the one the author had has been just fine. It surprised me too.