‘Rubbish is money’

From malaise to Malaysia? Let’s hope not.

The 2009 iMac is heading for the Last Roundup.

Its fans have cranked up to 11 for no discernible reason for the final time. No more will its internal not-so-SuperDrive refuse to read a disc, its USB 2.0 ports decline to recognize the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface, or its attempts to record and play back sound through same bring back memories of trying to tune in distant FM stations at 2 a.m. while piloting a ’74 Datsun pickup along U.S. 50 in Nevada, with a sixer of tallboys between the knees and rings of marching powder around the nostrils.

This iMac ran $1,200 new, but 10 years later Apple considers it worthless for any purpose beyond recycling, and frankly, so do I. P’raps Tim Cook will make a new MacBook Air or Mini out of the auld beastie and try to sell it back to me (at top dollar, it goes without saying).

That will be a tough sell, Timmy old scout. We already own a 2012 MacBook Air and a 2010 Mini. Both remain functional yet underemployed, like me, and so I think we can struggle along for a while before deploying the Visa card in the direction of Cupertino yet again.

I just hope this goddamn thing doesn’t wind up in Malaysia, where all the rest of our old crap seems to be piling up, when it’s not being buried in landfills or mysteriously catching fire.

Tags: Apple, iMac, Malaysia, recycling, Tim Cook

This entry was posted on December 30, 2018 at 8:28 am and is filed under Apple, Computers, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

16 Responses to “‘Rubbish is money’”

khal spencer Says:
December 30, 2018 at 8:36 am | Reply
I took the hard drive out of our mid-90’s I-book and took it to the range for the sake of making sure no one could ever read it again. Put a whole bunch of 9mm holes in it. Rest of the computer went into our county’s recycling center.
Patrick O'Grady Says:
December 30, 2018 at 9:10 am | Reply
Hal and I used to talk about having a Mad Dog MacShoot up in Crusty County, back when we were both rocking ill-conceived MacClones from Power Computing and Motorola, but we never got around to it.

That would’ve been big fun, ’cause we had serious firepower on hand. Everything from .357 Magnum and 7.62x39mm to black powder and bow and arrow.
- khal spencer Says:
  December 31, 2018 at 10:19 am | Reply
  I’m still grieving that you gave away that Mini-30 to the P.D. Woulda looked nice along side my Mini-14.
Pat O'Brien Says:
December 30, 2018 at 11:42 am | Reply
First we shipped our jobs over there, then our pollution, and now the resulting toxic waste. Then we wonder why they don’t like us and think we should pitch a few extra bucks in the carbon cleanup fund.

RIP Mr. Mac. Apple went sideways when they adopted intel processors and third party software developers. If I wanted to run windows I wouldn’t have bought a Mac.
- Patrick O'Grady Says:
  December 31, 2018 at 8:01 am | Reply
  The Macs we have left are ticking right along, though I have doubts about their longevity. I mean, I don’t see any of these “new” ones lasting 20 years, the way the two G4’s have.
  
  True, the auld fellas don’t much like surfing this modern Internet, even with geezer browsers like Opera or TenFourFox, though they were fine Back in the Day®.
  
  But they both have ancient copies of Photoshop and I can use ’em to color my cartoons, if nothing else.
  
  Even the cheapo black MacBook from 2006 still works fine, though it smells a bit like burning pencil eraser when it heats up, which it will. I maxed out the memory and swapped the original hard drive for an SSD, and since it, too, has an old copy of Photoshop it remains a more up-to-date-ish bulwark against the predations of Cupertino and San Jose.
John A Levy Says:
December 30, 2018 at 5:52 pm | Reply
25 yrs ago I had attorney friend that had a daisy wheel printer. (WTF the youngsters ask). any way this printer would print no more that 10 pages with out screwing up and it liked to start from the beginning. so one day I got some consulting work done for this guy and he asked how much do I owe you? I said I will trade you 2 hours of my time for this printer. being cheap he jumped at the deal. I pulled his window air condtioner out from the 2 story window and I taught that POS Brother to fl. it flew once and took me 20 minutes with a push broom to dispose of it in a public dumpster. ahhhhhh a pleasant memory. No recycling and no regrets. So e times termination is a option
- Patrick O'Grady Says:
  December 30, 2018 at 8:13 pm | Reply
  I had a colleague once. Dude had to be restrained to stop him from throwing his terminal out a window after it ate his story, on deadline, three times running.
  
  These devices are not our friends.
larryatcycleitalia Says:
December 31, 2018 at 1:57 am | Reply
Technology. Might be fun for some…but. Right now I’m cursing the stuff since I’m now locked out of all my online banking accounts. Logging in worked just fine when I tested ’em all just before we left the US of A and just a few months earlier when I used ’em all from Italy, but now for some reason they all want 2-step logins via cell phone.
Of course the phone numbers they have on file don’t work anymore and unless I can log in, I can’t give ’em a new number….as if their format is going to take our Italian phone number anyway.
So I suspect I’ll be burning up some serious phone money calling some tech wizards later this week to get it all to work again…until the next time they decide to “improve” things.
Oh, and while I type this the prof is yelling at her college-supplied Macbook-something…….
- Patrick O'Grady Says:
  December 31, 2018 at 8:03 am | Reply
  That should be an hieroglyphic for modern life … an emoji, if you will. A person yelling at a device.
  
  Good luck with the bankers. Jeebus. I hate getting caught in those techno-loops where one must do (a) before (b) but (a) is impossible and the bots just laugh tinnily at you — ha ha ha beep ha ha ha — when you call.
  - larryatcycleitalia Says:
    December 31, 2018 at 8:43 am | Reply
    Yep and what do I get in email today? A notice from that gawdawful phone company that they’ve billed us again!!! GRRrrrrrrrrr!
  - Patrick O'Grady Says:
    December 31, 2018 at 9:04 am | Reply
    These bozos are on a plane all their own. Back before CenturyTel and Qwest fused into one giant clusterfuck they started sending us a parade of DSL modems as part of a mandatory upgrade necessary to access higher speeds.
    
    The Brown Truck Dude was bringing one every day there for a stretch, I shit thee not. It finally caused me to yell at various knaves, varlets and minions over the phone, which is something I rarely do, because you never really get to yell at the person who really needs yelling at.
    
    I forget how many we got before I finally got the floodgates closed, but we still have three of the sonsabitches. They’re probably billing you for them.
    
    • Update: It was 10 years ago that we enjoyed the Parade of Modems. Here’s a little trip down Memory Lane, circa Aug. 15, 2008, for your amusement.
    
    “Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain,” wrote Johann Christoph Friendrich von Schiller in “The Maid of Orleans.” He must have had Internet service from Qwest.
    
    We have had a land line and DSL service with Qwest for several years, and while the service and hardware both seemed overpriced, at least they mostly functioned as required. True, we had a few confusing chats with East Asian tech-support people early in the relationship, and blew up an ActionTec Wireless-Ready DSL Gateway modem a few gigabytes further down the road, but all went more or less swimmingly until the second ActionTec went south in the exact same fashion last week.
    
    That way, as the saying goes, lies madness.
    
    When the DSL went down on Thursday, Aug. 7, I called tech support. Dead modem, they diagnosed; we’re trying to get all those old ActionTecs out of customers’ hands anyway. We will send you, with all haste, the very latest in Qwest communications technology. Agreed. Deal done, I hung up.
    
    Then I was afflicted with an idea — as usual, a bad one. I called the Qwest folks back and said, cancel that delivery, I’ll just pop on by my local Qwest store and fetch home a new modem, save you the trouble and me the delay. We can’t be without high-speed Intertubes for 24 hours. There are words to be processed, libels to be transmitted. Right you are, sir, they replied, and off I went.
    
    My antennae should have tingled when it took three of the four boneheads working the Qwest kiosk at the Citadel Mall to find me a new modem and enter the appropriate data into their computer. Alarm bells should have begun clanging when one of these wankers proposed kicking my download speed up a few notches as long as I was standing around, flattening my feet and watching the parade of thugs, slugs and Repugs. Klaxons should have begun hooting when the checkout process took longer than the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
    
    But no. It had been a long week, and I was tired, cranky and in a hurry. All I wanted was to be able to get back to downloading choppy videos of Tijuana donkey shows and e-mailing them to Laura Bush. So I grabbed the new modem and fled.
    
    Setup was something of a bother; the instructions only covered Ethernetting a computer to the modem, and we’re an all-wireless family, so several chats with tech support ensued before I finally got things up and running again, just in time for happy hour.
    
    And then, at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 12, the DSL croaked again. This was not the third bum modem — it was Qwest, shutting off my old high-speed service in preparation for starting up my new high-speed service. This apparently can take as long as three business days, a downside to the service upgrade that nobody discussed with me, though they did manage to sell me the wrong modem for the new service — and deliver me two more just like it — before finally shipping the proper model.
    
    In the meantime, I am shouting down various tech-support and customer-service wells and getting a different tale each time. That 2Wire Gateway modem should work. No, it won’t. Your service will be up and running Tuesday. No, Thursday. No, Wednesday. Sorry, we cannot compensate you for your time spent decoding our outrageous fucktardery, mendacity and apathy. OK, we’ll give you a free modem for your trouble. No, thanks, I already have four of the god-damned things and a free modem was part of the original deal! Yaaaaaarrrrrghhhh!!!
    
    Long story short, after two days during which I grew a callus on one ear from being on hold, where a soothing voice told me over and over again how awesome Qwest was and how important I was to Qwest, we finally have our DSL up and running again.
    
    Well, kind of. None of our “Classic”-OS Macs can use the new modem, and Herself is on the horn with tech support at Brother, trying to figure out how to make her MFC-885CW printer-scanner-fax combo work with the sonofabitch. But at least Laura’s finally gonna get that donkey video.
    - Pat O'Brien Says:
      December 31, 2018 at 1:05 pm | Reply
      I tried DSL from Century Link/Qwest about 12 years ago. Terrible experience across the board. Went with the cable (Cox) and haven’t looked back.
      - khal spencer Says:
        December 31, 2018 at 1:38 pm
        We called it Q-Worst in Los Alamos.
      - Patrick O'Grady Says:
        December 31, 2018 at 2:15 pm
        Shoulda called ’em Qwurst ’cause they were always out to slip you the sausage.
      - Pat O'Brien Says:
        December 31, 2018 at 6:01 pm
        Qwurst! Now that’s funny right there. The standup stage is calling you bro.
      - Patrick O'Grady Says:
        December 31, 2018 at 7:53 pm
        O, my little act is a veritable Yugo among the Freightliners of funny.
        
        We just watched an old Bill Hicks standup, “Relentless,” from the Just for Laughs festival in Montréal. Now there was one funny, if dark, dude.
        
        Pancreatic cancer sent him off at 32, which I figure was at least 40, maybe 50 years too soon.