A long time ago, back in 2006, I got my second Mac. It was a Core Duo iMac, and at the time it was the most tricked-out Mac you could get your hands on: half-terabyte hard drive, 2GB of RAM, 128MB dedicated graphics card, SuperDrive, and a 20″ screen. It took a week to ship over from China but I was so stoked when I finally got it. I had spent an entire summer working in an accounting department as a summer intern to earn that computer, and I really put iMac through her paces. She rendered video, played games, built some insanely sexy websites, and this weekend I’m going to say goodbye to her.
My iMac has been having issues for a while; it started randomly freezing and locking up about 18 months ago. Just once in a while, maybe once a week, tops. Never on the same thing. Then it got worse. By this spring I had concluded that I could not in good faith unload this computer on anybody. While I never truly pinned down what was wrong with it, I’m reasonably confident the fault lies with the graphics card, given the well-documented history of nasty graphical artifacts that would pop up while doing graphics-intensive tasks like opening Finder windows (don’t even start me on StarCraft). All the while, iMac has been my devoted media server, streaming the content that wouldn’t fit on my AppleTV, and she’s run almost continuously since I got her back in August of 2006.
This week though iMac has locked up and frozen several times. This afternoon it was three times in 20 minutes, and frankly, the computer has simply become unusable. iMac is like a cat that’s 17 years old, has arthritis, and can’t make it to the litter box. While I can still boot her up, she isn’t very useful anymore, so on Monday I’ll take her to the office, pop the hard drive out, and then set her gently in the pile of hardware that will get sent to Goodwill for recycling. Depending on how I feel about it I might do it myself. I’ve never directly disposed of one of my computers; my original iBook that I had died about a year after my friend bought it from me, and I have no idea what’s become of the MacBook Pro I sold him after that when I got my work-issued Dell.
For now, I’ll go back to being a one-computer person. iMac was very useful for coding websites, and it was nice to be able to leave my laptop on the dock at the office and still have a computer at home to work on. Long-range, I’ll get a Mac Mini and use it in place of my AppleTV to handle my iTunes library and Hulu on my TV, and I’ll eventually build a beast of a machine to drive the 3 displays I intend to get, but for now I’m just going to rough it with one computer. I’ll save some energy and my desk in my office at home will be a little cleaner for it.
I will miss iMac, though.
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