This weekend I threw away our 2012 iMac. I bought this mac for Märia in 2012 when it was brand new, top of the line. It cost $2,381 including tax. It replaced a 2005 Mac Mini G4. That computer cost less than half what the iMac cost, but only lasted us 7 years. It is really hard for me to throw away computers for some reason. Even now, I am kicking myself for throwing this one away. For a while I put Ubuntu on it and let Finnick use it, but it just wasn’t stable. I don’t know what was up, maybe some bad ram or an SSD that was going out. In any case, it just didn’t work like it should.
We got a solid 13 years of use out of it. That is enough, right? Throwing away things should make me so sad, but it does. Before we moved here in January of 2024 I threw away some other computers. I threw away a 2010 MacBook Air that I bought to take to Afghanistan with me. Pretty sure it cost exactly $1000 plus tax, but I couldn’t find the receipt for that one. It was this tiny little 11″ laptop and I really liked it a lot. I wish someone still made tiny laptops. And tiny phones. I want my gadgets tiny.
When we moved here to Italy Märia and I had this mantra we would say multiple times a day. “I can throw things away.” We threw away so much. I think I threw out 2/3s of my electronics stuff, including my closet rack with switches and routers and servers, minus one server which I migrated everything to and now sits in Jason’s closet. Thank you Jason! I still have boxes of cables and old stuff, and it is overwhelming. What do I throw away? I **know** there is stuff in there I will never use again, but I just can’t make myself throw it away.
Just an example – I have almost all the little mini consoles that were all the rage during Covid. The tiny little NES, SNES, Genesis, Comodore, Atari, and more. They are tiny and cute and totally functional. But I have all those games and thousands more on my Steamdeck and a couple other Retroid and Anbernic handhelds and I hardly play them there. I haven’t hooked up any of my mini consoles in the years that I have lived here, and I don’t know if I ever will. But I can’t let them go. I also have a Dreamcast, Gamecube, Wii, WiiU, and probably some other consoles all shrinkwrapped in boxes that may or may not ever get played again, and I just can’t let them go.
Broken in the head. But hey, I’ve got cool stuff. =)
