Planned Obsolescence - Geez it's irksome!!

This is more of a rant, really, but it irks me how short of life span computers and phones have these days - and not because the hardware is failing, but because software updates choose to not support machines that are only a few years old. And I'm not just talking about the OS, but crap like Google deciding that my mail program is no longer legit, so it blocks me out.

To make a long story short, we did some work on the house and I had to pack up my iMac 27" for a couple of months and work off my M1 13" Macbook Pro for several months. It was painful. I miss having a solid desktop with lots of screen real estate that I don't have to stare down in to my lap or squint at on a table if I want to use a keyboard and mouse. Sure, my wife's 15" MBP has "tons" of screen space compared to the 13", but I can do like seven things at once on the same screen on my iMac. I can only work on the laptop for an hour before I'm ready to scream. Anyways, I finally pull out the iMac today and boot it up. Starts like a champ. Fast, easy, ready to rock n roll. Go to open my mail and BLAMMO - Error! We won't let you log in to your gmail with a password. Huh? Well, my ISP decided to discontinue email hosting after 20 years when an up-and-coming company bought them out so I was forced to rely on another email system. Already had a gmail account so shifted to that (should have set up a ProtonMail account, but I'm in it now so no point looking back...). But after only a couple of months, my Mail program no longer works.

Ok, lets check for some system updates.... Nothing... That's weird. I've been delaying an OS upgrade because I have a few programs that aren't supported by anything newer than MacOS 13, so I guess it's time to abandon those and just bite the bullet. I'll upgrade the OS. But the fancy pants new OS Sonoma isn't compatible. Hmm. Can I find the latest OS that IS COMPATIBLE? Nope. I mean, I'm sure I can if look hard enough through various file repositories on the inter webs - just gotta find the right legit one instead of some pirate copy that wants to frag my hard drive.

Grrr. K, lets find a copy of OS Whatever Monterey but I'd better make sure my machine is backed up first. I haven't pulled out my physical backup drive yet, so I'll just update the network backup on my Synology NAS. Oh, right, time machine hasn't been playing nice with that NAS for some time. There ARE backups on it, but it keeps wanted to start a new one. Well, how much does it need to backup on the latest iteration. 1 terabyte. ARRRGGHHGHGGH.

Ok, ok, I understand why on some levels software developers don't like to support "Legacy" machines. This machine IS all of six years old. I know, you are screaming 'ANCIENT!! ARCHAIC!! SEND THAT THING TO THE RECYCLER!!!' It may be six years old but it still spanks the snot out of my fancy pants M1 MBP! Quad core i5 3.8 GHZ, 8 GB video card, and 24 GB of DDR4 Ram will do that. Despite the M1 having, what 8 cores? my old iMac still stomps it's geek bench score by at least double for both combined and single core operations. Overall system operations and response is still faster and smoother than the MBP; it's monumentally more robust; and I just prefer working on it.

So what am I to do with clunker?! Might be time to get a window box and couple of monitors. Gasp. I don't believe I just said as much...