At PHZ Full Stack our mission is Sustainable IT to lengthen the life cycle of both software and hardware by decades. This saves both the environment, but more importantly millions from our customer R&D -budgets, which can be redirected to make real investments rather than maintenance. The version 2.0 is actually a maintenance cost of re-creating the same application that you already had, with the same (or increased) cost than your previous version. This typically happens by every 5 years by our competitors. Also many developers are not yet enlightened in the ways of Sustainable Code ™, which enable refactoring over rewrite. The secret is unit testing, which is not a widely known skill among most developers, but you might be an exception!
Unfortunately Apple does not seem to value sustainability, but drives their billions of revenue by artificially creating new hardware models and deprecating the old, with an maximum life span of 5 years. However, especially the older Macbooks have a very decent hardware specs, and they keyboards are still superior even to the newer M1/M2/M3 macs. They are also lighter in weight (compared to a M2 Mac) and more convenient to use, since you don’t need to carry an extra bag of dongles to connect any external device to your laptop (such as HDMI, keyboard, mouse, USB stick or ethernet).
One issue with Macs are that if you can’t upgrade to the latest version, IOS development for game and app developers become impossible. Also it’s not possible to use deprecated OSX for CI Executor purposes either, for the same reasons.
Otherwise PHZ life cycle management tries to move broken hardware (such as cracked screens, laptops with bad keyboards, weak batteries, cracked casings to server house e.g. as CI executors or Kubernetes compute nodes. The highend laptops have typically better hardware specs than most actual servers, consume less power and have built-in UPSs. The downside is that they typically have just one nvme disk, and RAID 1 can’t be configured.
Assigning to Office-Only for Sales, HR, Finance
The older macs are still great for regular office and web browsing tasks, or as a Daily Standup -monitoring screens.
However, there are a few issues with Big Sur. The new Teams update (v17?) can’t be installed on Big Sur, and the classic Teams it will pop up every 30mins a popup saying:
"Your org is installing the new version of Teams. We'll let you know when it's ready".
You can’t update it, and you can’t get rid of this popup, so it’s annoying.
The minimum hardware specs seem to be quad core. Dual cores are sluggish with Big Sur.
Upgrading beyond supported version
This can be done by using OpenCore Patcher, but only if your older mac has at least
* 16GB RAM
* 4 cores
If it’s e.g. a dual core or 8GB RAM, don’t bother. The latest OSX uses some GPU accelerated graphics, and while it theoretically works, in practice it will be unusable.
Converting to Windows 10
This is a great idea. However, you can’t convert it to Windows 11 due to lack of compability. Also the drawback is that you need to buy a license, unless you have extra ones around. Lenovo’s and other brands have OEM Windows -license built in, but this is not the case for Apple Macbooks.
Converting to Linux
This is a great idea, since the keyboard of older macs is superior to almost any other, so it’s great for web developers, benefiting from the high quality Retina -display. Docker starts to work natively, and it has Intel hardware and thus full support for all docker images, which is not the case for M1/M2/M3 macs.
The limitations include 16GB RAM making it less suitable for Java-developers (who need 64GB), and compute heavy development.