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Comment by applecore | Hacker News Reader

This strategy was hugely successful for Microsoft since the early days of Windows NT 3.1: “What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.”

The performance advancements on the hardware side of the platform are almost entirely consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the most popular app on the software side.

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That may be successful for the software companies. But pity the user who's stuck with old hardware and wants to know why used computers don't last as long as used cars. Maybe when Moore's Law finally becomes invalid...

Yep. 2005 G5 powermac. Totally usable machine. Can get a dual 2.5GHz boz with 4Gb of RAM for equivalent $40 in the UK.

But no, it's stuck on OSX 10.5...

Sounds like a job for Debian!

Debian was a complete dick on my old ppc g4. It sort of put me off. The was going to try FreeBSD but I have to persuade the wife to let me buy a g5 yet as they're large, noisy and entirely unnecessary. I just want one to play with and go ooh and aah and stuff :)

I did the same with old SPARC kit a number of years ago too.

PPC Debian runs just fine on my old Mac Mini. I could replace the thing, but it just keeps chugging on.

Time to have another bash I think. She might take to a G4 Mac Mini over a full sized G5 as well ;-)

Actually, the hacks they used make the app work better on older hardware. As another example, the proprietary office formats contained a lot of hacks specifically designed to make the files load faster on older PCs. Newer PCs were able to compensate with the complexity because they were faster.

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