Happy Birthday, Mac!

Today is officially the sixth birthday of my Apple PowerMac G5. On July 18, 2004, I took the plunge and drove down to London Drugs to buy it. And to this day, it is still in active service. When I bought it I owned two other PCs but over the years they got decommissioned and I stayed with just my Mac.

And you know what, despite its age it still runs great. It manages my media libraries and feeds my iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV. It checks email and web sites. It even can encode video. Maybe there's no way it can run the latest graphically intensive games. And there's no way I can ever upgrade the OS any further than OS X 10.5 (AKA Leopard) since it's no longer supported. But it does everything I need it to and that's the important thing.

Occasionally I contemplate buying a new Mac, and whether the extra features and abilities justify the expense. Yes, video encoding would be over four times the speed. But whether it takes four days or less than one to take transcode those TV season DVDs I just bought really doesn't matter since I won't be watching the show that fast anyway. Yes, all the iMacs have built-in cameras. But I think video chats are just a novelty anyway. And yes, I would have a computer capable of running Sims 3, probably the only computer game I would really like to play (all other games I want to play are on video game consoles).

But is it really worth spending $1,500 or so on a new iMac just for that? As much as I like having new "toys" to play around with I think it probably isn't. There's nothing wrong with it, and maybe it'll end up being another few years before it gets replaced. Or maybe Apple will release a new Mac in the fall that's so amazing that I won't be able to resist the urge to buy one. You never know...