I guess it had to happen sometime! My iMac display has officially given and now only displays streaks:
This started happening intermittently yesterday evening after it woke up from sleep, and now it's just not displaying anything period. Really, it's no great surprise. This computer celebrated ten years of daily service this year (don't ask me for a specific date). Yeah, I've been using this computer since I was 14 or so. I'm now 25. The fact that it hadn't developed issues sooner (outside of being slow to start up) is a testament to how good of a computer it was and how well I took care of it.
To be clear, the computer still works. My stuff is safe, the speakers in it still work, and I have my cheapie old Emerson HDTV (with all its horrific overscan issues) hooked up as a monitor at the moment. This is very much an annoying temporary solution, though. It's time for a new one. I knew that time was coming years ago. I simply wanted to take this Mac as far as it'd go, and I accomplished that. That's my statement against e-waste: I used the same computer for ten years, and I'm proud of it.
Everything has its day sometime, though, and this computer's has come. If this were a normal tower PC, I could just replace the display and call it good for a little bit longer, but given it's an iMac, not having the display function means it has an absolutely obnoxious footprint on my desk, and again, plugging in my little HDTV means I'm stuck with the edges of the screen either cut off or slightly cut off. It'll work for now, I can make do with it—but I need to replace it.
I'm pretty adamant about never going with another Mac for a daily driver again. Windows is a requirement for me, and the fact that Macs now run on ARM means no native Windows. I'm not gonna do the Parallels dance to get Windows stuff to run next to MacOS stuff, either, because I fucking hate dealing with MacOS. I think MacOS is ungodly sluggish, I hate Gatekeeper, I hate Apple dropping 32-bit app support—it's just not an ecosystem I ever want to invest myself into again. Keeping a retro Mac around for GarageBand and maybe iPod syncing? I'd love that, but as a daily driver? Never again. It was only because of Boot Camp that I was good with Macs for so long anyway.
Jake suggested I look at some prebuilt gaming PCs through IBuyPower, and I'm honestly really tempted. Even their $1100 special (not counting any further deals) is still light years ahead of what mine can do right now—a Ryzen 5, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD, a GeForce RTX 3050—even that feels like a lot of power that I might not need. I don't know!
What I do know is that I'm happy to treat myself a bit once I get the funds. I should be able to replace this by mid-next month. My student loans are paid off, and now I just need a few weeks to cobble together the $1300 or so to get myself a nice new monitor and something that'll comfortably play TUNIC or Doom Eternal or whatever. If a laptop in a 27" case carried me ten years, I imagine a decent gaming PC with my interest in new games not quite what it used to be (and it was never there too much to begin with) will last me into my mid-30s. Emulation performance is what matters more to me, and anything will emulate PS2 games better than what I've got.
Both a lot and not a lot has happened in computing in the past decade. I could continue to use this one because 8GB is still an okay baseline that most software respects, and I don't play a lot of heavy modern games that would tax the 2013-era laptop-grade GPU in this machine. (I remember streaming Doom 2016 on low settings back in the day!) That said, USB-C is now dominant, AMD took the top spot in CPUs from Intel, and SSDs, even big ones, are pretty much standard now. The world this Mac came to be in no longer exists, and that's socially and that's technically.
It is sad to think that my time with this computer is coming to a close though. I'm a sperg; change is hard sometimes. I've been using iMacs since I was 10. Computers like this one have been with me across four different houses, as far back as middle school. This one in particular has been across state lines to stay with me with family, it's been to college, it's gone far. I made every song on In Free Fall and on Last Summer on this machine. All of my websites have been built on it. Every stream I've ever conducted has been on this computer. Save for anything I drew in Wales, this has been my art machine.
And it's starting to go on me. It's still here, and I'm making sure all my stuff is safe in case it does go completely, but it is a loss. What will come after it will be more powerful, but it won't be the same. I'm alright with that, but yeah, damn. I don't have the highest opinion of Apple products anymore, and I know plenty of people who never did, but this was one of the good ones.
Getting rid of it is gonna be a fucking chore too, but that's more a family issue than it is a computer issue. Come on, car!
