The Tale of an old Computer

tolkiennerd69 · June 12

Not long ago I was walking down the stairs leading to the second floor of my maternal grandparents’ house. As I was putting on my shoes and preparing to go, I heard my 85-year-old grandfather asking my grandmother to “update Chrome” on his computer. Always eager to show off my admittedly meager technological knowledge, I volunteered to try. After turning the ancient Mac on, I was struck by what I saw. Or maybe I should say what I was seeing with. A beautiful 1080p 30hz integrated monitor. Who needed 4k, I wondered? But then I remembered what I was doing. I quickly typed “Chrome update” into the browser. Darn. “Your OS no longer supports the newest version of Chrome.” Well, what OS was that, I remember thinking? I found the “About this Mac” page and found that the computer was running MacOS X El Capitan. How old could it be? I did the obvious thing and googled it. Hmm. 2015. Maybe that was the issue. So, I tried to update it. No more updates were supported. I decided to check the specs. I was blown away. The CPU was a 2.7ghz Intel Core i5. What in the world did they have back in 2012 that could cool this monster? Well, on to the RAM. A whopping 8 gigs of DDR3 clocked at an incredible 1700mhz. My gosh, I thought, how many windows and tabs could you have open with this? But then my eyes fell to the GPU.

It was the all-powerful Nvidia GT 640M with an astonishing 512MB of DDR5 VRAM. I checked its specs on Safari. 384 cores. 32 TMUs. 8 ROPs. A 64bit bus width. What was possible with this beast, I questioned? Starfield at 8k 240fps? I could not comprehend the possibilities. But there was a problem. What did all of these wondrous specs mean when the newest build of Chrome supported was from 2022 and the OS version was from 2015? Maybe the days of this long-fighting veteran were over. Maybe it was time for my grandfather to get a new computer. Well, maybe I could build him a cheap PC? No, he needed something that would require zero upkeep or technical wisdom. He needed a new mac. Well, we might as well look at the options.

“The page ‘https://www.apple.com’ is no longer supported by your browser”.

danalog · June 12

Apple abandons perfectly good systems. That could run Windows 10 just fine and 11 with the TPM/CPU requirement removed. That's probably like, a 2012 model.

Ha-Satan · June 12

Sounds like a great candidate for a Linux install! My laptop is not much newer (2013 Dell with an i5-4200U, 8GB of DDR3, and a 500GB SSD) and running Linux Mint XFCE it still has no issues browsing the modern web, playing Youtube videos (even at 4K!), doing office/spreadsheet work, or even light scripting and programming.

Now personally I have never installed Linux on a Mac, but from what I have seen, most mainstream Linux distros like Ubuntu, Mint, MX Linux, etc. will typically install with few to no issues on any of the older Intel Macs:

If it doesn't have an SSD you'd probably want to upgrade to that, but a cheap 250GB SSD would likely be more than enough for a web browsing machine (make sure you know what form factor you need before you buy lol).

I don't typically recommend Linux as a first choice OS for non-technical people but if they're only ever going to need it for web browsing, then you can probably just set it up and they'll rarely to never have to mess with it. So it might be worth doing since they already have the laptop and it seems to be working.

OddOod · June 12

1 hour ago, Ha-Satan said:

I don't typically recommend Linux as a first choice OS for non-technical people but if they're only ever going to need it for web browsing, then you can probably just set it up and they'll rarely to never have to mess with it. So it might be worth doing since they already have the laptop and it seems to be working.

That is something I've been plugging for a while now. If all someone is gonna do is wordprocessing and internet, they are a fantastic candidate to move to Linux.