Over a year-and-a-half since Paul died, I am still very much in the throes of clearing stuff. I have more or less reached the stage of finding ancient backup disks and user manuals for PCs dumped more than a decade ago.

Then I remember I hoard old Apple hardware. 

Why do I do this? Let me run through the thought process.

As with a lot of technology, things become superseded by newer and better stuff. It may have cost an awful lot of cash to purchase, say, an Apple PowerBook G3 laptop back in the day. It was useful, and was used a fair amount. Eventually, software moves on and the hardware can’t keep up. A new machine is acquired, but the old one will linger for compatibility with older software and older formats.

This lingering affects almost every Mac purchase I’ve made in the past 25 years or more. Take that PowerBook mentioned earlier. I still have it, under the desk here. Why am I keeping it? Well, it is the only Mac in the house that can run MacOS 9 natively, and therefore is the only Mac capable of running my copy of QuarkXPress. 

Now, I haven’t needed to run the venerable page layout program since I switched to the Adobe Creative Suite in the early 2000s. I don’t even remember if I have any XPress format files any more. In fact, I’ve moved away from the Adobe suite, too, but I still have it on a MacBook Pro, just in case.

So, why am I keeping 20- or 30-year-old computers? It can’t be just sentimentality or nostalgia, can it?

The machines that replaced the PowerBook are also still around. The backwards compatibility here is the MacBook Pro has FireWire, and can run Apple Aperture. I’ve migrated my Aperture libraries away to another app, and while I still have FireWire hardware, the Intel Mac mini that replaced the MBP can handle that. Ah, now, both laptops still have physical CD/DVD hardware, so should I ever need to rip my CD collection again…  

Why am I keeping hold of the now 14-year-old Intel Mac mini? It has, in its turn, been replaced by a newer model, of course. Again, backwards compatibility. While it’s really getting on now, it’s still a capable bit of hardware. I have plans to perhaps use it as a workstation to digitise the videos Paul and I made. It would also be handy to drive the scanner and capture all the photos we both took over many years. Then again, my current Mac is quite capable of doing the latter, and isn’t actually used for much else these days. As for the videos, well, do I have the time and inclination to spend hours running old tapes back on sketchy camcorders? 

So, will I ever be able to part with these old machines? I don’t really know. They’ll have to be recycled one day, but not just yet.