Earlier today I was trying to upgrade a piece of software on my somewhat ageing iMac at work. During the upgrade a message along the lines of “your version of OSX is no longer supported” flashed past.

I am not overly eager to run whatever is the latest version of OSX because with every upgrade there is the risk that I will lose a couple of days of productivity. And with every release it seems Apple makes life harder for software vendors. Things tend to stop working and the solutions to those things tend to be that I have to spend money on something I rather wouldn’t spend money on.

However, it turns out that for my iMac at work, this is the end of the line. It will not run any newer OS than High Sierra. So once critical applications stop supporting High Sierra, the machine is essentially junk unless I can repurpose it as a Linux machine. Which I will probably try at some point.

But okay, I probably should get a new workstation at work. I’ve squeezed a lot of life out of the one I have.

But what to get?

MacBooks are not an option. The new (intel based) MacBook Pro doesn’t really seem to be a professional grade laptop so that route seems closed off. Users report that the fans spin up (loudly) at even the mere hint of increased CPU use.

I’ve had a look at various iMacs, but the value proposition of Macs has changed somewhat. I’m not paying premium prices for a hardware platform where I can’t necessarily perform upgrades and where there is legitimate doubt that Apple will support the product properly.

As for the new M1-based Macs, sure the performance looks impressive, but I don’t really want to become a beta-tester. I need a computer to do work and my work isn’t unboxing stuff on youtube and fawning over packaging and surface finish and benchmark suites.

I’ve started seriously considering going back to Linux for development work. I need a stable platform that allows me to write software in Go.