Information technology advances at an incredible rate and this inevitably involves shelling out a lot of cash on a fairly regular basis – not to evolve, but just to keep up…
This came to mind with the latest group of updates for the ADOBE Cloud suite – warnings of « Your system is old, a bit like you, and you need to update it » flashed up on the screen. It transpires that my iMac from late 2009 won’t take the most recent Apple macOS Mojave, and so the latest updates for Photoshop and Lightroom can’t be applied. Frankly this doesn’t change a lot for me in that I’m quite happy with the processing power of my machine, for the most part, and the latest updates bring things that I’ll never use. However, it worries me in the long term, as I feel sure that Adobe will only keep the older software alive for a finite time – and this is very important to those of us using the ADOBE Cloud suite (Photoshop, Lightroom etc.) – and when they disappear from their servers one day, I’ll be up a famous creek…
There is, it seems, a way to use the iMac as an external screen – which means that I can update the hardware (with a mac mini for example) but still have the advantages of a large 27″ screen. The mac mini is not exactly cheap at 899€ but it’s a whole lot more interesting than a new iMac at over 2000€.
There are ample ports to attach just about everything I could ever want, and with WiFi and Bluetooth the possible connections increase (Wireless keyboard, mouse etc. ) and although the inboard SSD is relatively tiny (128Gb) the Thunderbolt ports/USB3 are sufficiently fast to simply add a cheap external box with a 500Gb SSD to increase the disk size.
The 2x4Gb RAM can actually be changed easily in this model, and with a maximum of 64Gb it’s just a case of waiting until the RAM gets cheaper before increasing the capacity.
A cheap Thunderbird (USB-C) to Mini-Display port cable will link the computer and the screen, so I could be up and running with a ‘modestly’ future-proofed (Latest macOS and ADOBE Suite) setup for a not too exhorbitant price – now all I have to do is find the money…