Someone might want to run old Adobe stuff, prior to its exponential bloat and rentification, on an era appropriate OS like Snow Leopard (which is widely thought to be one of the best versions of Mac OS) that’s familiar. It wouldn’t be smart to take such a machine online, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t serve as someone’s comfy offline “zen mode” creative machine.

That said if I were to do this I’d probably build a hackintosh running Snow Leopard or Mavericks or at least procure an old cheesegrater PowerMac/Mac Pro tower for the extra flexibility offered rather than using an old iMac.

I use old PC and Mac because it continues to work. I also have an old Macbook (2008) that I wish I could repair, so I could continue using it. While the old macbook doesn't run modern software, it ran Linux well, and it would've been fine running Home Assistant, web servers, NAS with Thunderbolt2/3, etc. I'd hate seeing old computers go to e-waste, if I could just fix it cheaply. Also, I might've run some classic software that is no longer supported on modern system, like old Adobe Photoshop that ran without subscription, and classic games as well.

Why can’t you repair your 2008 MacBook? Is it the aluminum model A1278 or the polycarbonate model A1181?

Main issue for most people is legacy peripheral support. There was never a good reason for the iMac to be glued together over just using screws.

Legacy peripheral is why I keep an old Mac mini in my music making setup. I have a tascam mixer/audio interface that the whole thing is built around but tascam never released a 64 bit osx driver. They released a 64 but windows driver but stopped support just after windows 7 so it’s still a nightmare to get it to work on any windows version post 7 even with the 64 bit driver. There are workarounds to get it working in windows 10/11 and there’s even ways to get it working in modern macOS by getting it working on a windows machine and doing a network midi bridge although you lose the audio interface part.

All that’s a headache so I just keep my old Mac running old software. It’s annoying to not have the latest features, an ancient version of logic that runs like shit, no support for new plugins, etc, but it still works.

Maybe someday I’ll upgrade but it would be pretty costly to do so and this works despite the headaches. Really wish manufacturers were required to at least release documentation of hardware like this when they dropped support; it was quite expensive back in 2005 or whenever I purchased it and now it’s basically useless outside of this niche scenario. Frustrating and one of the many projects I want to someday get to although I’m probably too stupid to reverse engineer a FireWire bus device and write a driver ha