Goodbye old friend
In 2011, I bought a slightly used MacPro Desktop to use with Apple Final Cut Pro 6. It was a 4.1 Quad 2.8 with a 120Gb SSD (still rare at the time) and 16Gb RAM, I seem to remember paying £1600 for it and I collected it from near Oxford. That Mac was my main video editing machine and it’s gone through many upgrades, the first was to flash the board firmware to 5.1, then a processor upgrade to a 3.06 6 core, then a RAM upgrade to 32GB.
With an Apple software upgrade the requirement was for a ‘Metal’ GFX card, and I found an Apple ‘flashed” PC 4Gb card on eBay for £150. The Mac then reached a point where the OS could no longer be updated and any further software updates to Final Cut Pro wouldn’t work.
Looking online, I found DosDudes website, this software allowed overriding Apples limitation on upgrades and I successfully updated the Mac to Big Sur although by now, this Mac had been delegated to a general purpose machine for email, web browsing etc and my video editing Mac was now a 2020 5K 27” iMac bought during the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Recently a software update ‘broke’ the Big Sur OS and I had to restore from a Time Machine backup, so I decided to finally retire the Mac Pro.
I found a 2018 Mac Mini, 3GHz 6 core with 500Gb SSD and 16Gb RAM for £350 (the same Mac Mini’s elsewhere were all in the £550 price range!) so I bought it. There is always a certain apprehension setting up a new machine from scratch, I was able to update the system software to the very latest (and new) Sequoia 15.0.1 and then there was the scrabble to find serial numbers in old emails for the most used programs I’ve bought and needed to use.
I’ve kept the old Mac Pro in a usable condition and it could be switched on and used, one reason is it’s DVD / CD Superdrive (DVD’s and CD may be dead but there are still many around that might need to be read at some point), it’s still a very fast and capable Mac, it’s just some of my current software requirements for a general purpose machine can no longer be upgraded on it.
