A decade in 5K

Back in December, my iMac 5K turned ten. The fact that Apple never released another iMac with a screen so big and beau­tiful has inoc­u­lated me, over the years, against upgrade fever. At a cer­tain point, my con­tent­ment hard­ened into cold determination: I’m going to run this thing into the ground!!

About a year ago, appli­ca­tions began to announce that they couldn’t update, because I was stuck on an old ver­sion of macOS. I wasn’t too both­ered by this news, though I could hear the far-off tolling of a fateful bell … and then I found my way to OpenCore Legacy Patcher, the pro­gram with a cyber­punk name that allows older Macs to run newer ver­sions of the OS.

This doesn’t seem like it should work, yet: it totally works.

I’m now back up to date on my iMac. The bell will keep tolling — there are more and deeper dep­re­ca­tions ahead — but/and I am going to use this machine until I lit­er­ally cannot. It’s been a trusty com­panion and an eye-wateringly pow­erful tool. (I bought it with 32GB of RAM, one of my all-time best con­fig­u­ra­tion decisions.)

It feels great, in an era of elec­tronics that are dis­pos­able and/or unrepairable, to be using a com­puter that’s a decade old.