Although all of us try to get the biggest sustained bang for our hardware buck, we know that any computer purchase will have a finite service life. We demand ever more performance and we accept that there will be incremental costs to pay along the line.
Sooner or later most of us find ourselves calculating and re-calculating the trade-offs. Are my current computer’s capabilities any match for the new software I want or need? Should I migrate to a new computer now or would I be better off sitting tight for six months?
There is a small minority among us who have stopped asking these questions. These people are not looking for an upgrade path. They flat-out refuse to acknowledge that their computer has left them at a digital dead end.
Because (as a computer columnist for the San Jose Mercury News) I’m out of the closet as being a Mac-to-the-core Apple loyalist, I get plenty of queries from people running Macs produced during the Era BJCB (Before Jobs Came Back). There was one reader recently who bitterly complained that he could not find an Internet service provider with software that would run on a Mac IIcx with eight megs of RAM.
And then there’s the dear friend who’s trying to upgrade his Centris 610 from Mac OS 7.1 to 7.6 so he can run modern versions of AOL and Netscape Navigator. (The current version of the Mac OS is 9.)
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A hint for all of them: Go to “help” and scroll down to D. See the entry for defenestration. Unplug obsolete machine and carry to window. Push. Resume meaningful life.
These people and their similarly deluded brethren are penny-wise and pound-foolish in the worst way, spending ever-increasing amounts of time and energy in attempts to keep 30 mHz vehicles running in a 330 mHz world. Frankly, if you’re spending hours scouring on-line help forums and software sites trying to figure out how to wring one more year of service out of a Windows 3.1 machine, you are not a cool geek. You are like the guy who bought his last nice suit in 1979 and has become oblivious to the fact that it no longer fits. You need someone to help you see the unattractive truth. You need an intervention.
Get real. Get out the manual and warranty that came with that beloved old machine. Show me the fine print that says you’re entitled to free compatible software upgrades for life. Yes, that purchase came with a reasonable expectation of entitlement–that the product you bought wouldn’t be obsolete in six months or a year. But at some point after that the manufacturer’s obligation was fulfilled. And when you passed Year 4, frankly you started sounding less like a customer with a reasonable complaint and more like an enterprise-strength, ISO 9001-certifiable crank.
I’m sure many owners of IBM PS/1s and Mac Classics will undoubtedly flip a surge protector when they hear this. They’ll say there’s nothing wrong with their machines. All the original applications still run. Well, those machines do continue to run–but they’ve long since ceased to work with the rest of the tech world in any meaningful way. They are the electronic equivalent of flies in amber.
Don’t get me wrong–I revere old machines. And I have a family history as a Class A pack rat. My dad still has, among many other computers, a fully operational Commodore PET 2000–the muscle-machine version with 36K of RAM–on which I learned to program in BASIC back in the Pleistocene age. Dad is clear on the distinction between operational and useful. Hence, when he decided to get on-line last year, he set aside his antiques and made the big leap with a brand-new entry-level Compaq. I still have the Mac IIvx that took me to the wired world for the first time, but I haven’t relied on it for serious work in years.
Look, I know letting go is hard. I’m going to make the decision easier for you. Answer me this: Does your current computer have a drive to accommodate 5 1/4-inch floppy disks? Are the monochromatic monitor and the keyboard both housed in the same all-in-one box? Are the megabytes of RAM measured in single digits? Amount of hard disk space measured in any denomination other than gigabytes? Did this machine move into your den before the Clintons took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.? If you answered yes to any of the above, all roads lead to Breakup City.
Some people who don’t want to hear this will say their reticence is purely economic. They either don’t want to spend the money or they flat-out can’t. Nobody’s saying to spend a mint. There are state-of-the-art G4 Macs starting at $1,600 and perfectly serviceable Windows machines at well under half that. There is no such thing as a free upgrade. At some point you and every other consumer must pay to keep the wheels of innovation turning. You cannot cling to a 7-, 8- or 9-year-old machine and grouse about how the rest of the world is moving standards and performance forward.
If you want performance befitting the year 2000, stop whining and pay the price.