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I have a 2008 iMac that I use every day—more than my i7 laptop. This iMac is also a Core2Duo.

Why? Well, I really like the screen and it happens to be setup in the nicest spot I have in my home to work. In particular, it is the best place to video conference ( Zoom, Teams, or GoToMeeting ). The real answer though is because I when I sit down at it to get things done, I rarely run into a limitation that makes me want to move something more powerful to that spot. I am lazy, and it works. The machine is fast and responsive. Mostly I just forget that it is old. When I am thinking about it, I guess I also get a kick out of it. So, it adds a bit of fun.

I do email and office work ( documents, spreadsheets, presentations ) and browse the web of course. I author and run a few containers ( Podman ) to verify stuff engineering is creating for a key project. I am using it to teach myself Kubernetes and a bit of DevOps. A lot of the “heavy processing” I do it “in the cloud” anyway. Obviously I am not gaming or editing hi-res video. That said, I do so a fair bit of audio processing on this machine. It is my “work from home” computer.

I originally put Arch Linux on this machine to “get through a few days” when my laptop got damaged. “A few days” has been a couple of years now because it has worked so well. MacOS was really slow on the few apps I tried. Worse, like the author, I found that none of the modern software I want to use worked. With Arch though, everything is up to the minute. For browsers, I have Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Slimjet ( all the very latest versions ). All my compilers are right up to date ( Clang, GCC ). I am even running .NET 7 on this machine. As Arch is a rolling release and I update every day, I have the very latest security patches for everything.

I am not advocating we all use old computers. I guess my point is that, for most of my day to day professional life, a machine much like the one the author had has been just fine. It surprised me too.

Right there with you, with an old i5 iMac from 2009 as my "daily driver," also because it is set up in the main room with an incredible view, and I love its 27" non-Retina display.

I use the 2009 iMac more than my 2023 M2 Pro Mini, although the latter machine is IMPRESSIVE (to say the least).

The irony from the author's statement, is that Core 2 Duo was in no way top of the line in 2009.

Core 2 Quad was already out for a couple of years, and in 2009 Intel already had the Nehalem based i7 with quad cores and 8 threads that moved the goalposts an insane amount it became a staple CPU for the next decade till Ryzen launched.

I still have a Core 2 Quad and Duo chips kicking around the house but at around 17 years old they're long in the tooth already to be remotely useful at anything. Even a raspberry pi would be better.

A 4 year old Android flagships has more performance than those, let alone performance per watt where they're just not great to fire up at EU energy prices. At 65w-95w they make the most insane gas guzzling machines you could ever (not) want.

Unless you get your energy for free, best sunset and scrap them for something more power efficient.

> in 2009 Intel already had the Nehalem based i7 with quad cores and 8 threads that moved the goalposts an insane amount it became a staple CPU for the next decade till Ryzen launched

Used one myself until 2018, was a great piece of tech.

That's the thing. I'm an it professional. I've had a computer since I was 6 (30years ago). Couple of decades ago, I could be reasonably confident that my pc was safe.

Today? I take above average precautions but I would never claim that my system is not pwned on some level. That feels like arrogance and hubris (as well as a little bit of "I played Russian roulette several times and I'm fine! It's dangers are overblown:)

Russian rullete is safe! All who participated can confirm it!

> opening your CD-ROM drive automatically

Speaking of the CD-ROM drive, Windows XP is vulnerable to malicious CD-ROM discs thanks to AutoRun [1] and can be compromised just by inserting a CD, from which Windows XP will happily execute code automatically. Firewalls don't protect against that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoRun#Issues_and_security

That's why everyone and their dog held Shift when inserting any disk. Moreover, CD-ROM autorun is nothing at all compared to the real issue of autorun on USB flash drives. That's how viruses really spread among commoners, and specific tools were invented to fight it. That you haven't mentioned it, and focused on something that has existed since Windows 95, when non-factory-made (i. e. burned) CDs were rare, probably means you've had zero experience with any of that.

To be fair, there's a lot of outdated hardware and software running behind the scenes right now where the mitigation is precisely to "firewall" it, but I feel like the sense in which that's used colloquially by people who do this for a living and the way that word is used by this guy are miles apart.

In very broad terms the idea should be to profile what the outdated thing is actually needed for and restrict all possible requests to this narrow allowlist and put it behind a gateway that handles the actual connections from the rest of the network and rewrites the requests it forwards.

This guy is talking about arbitrary usage by a human which is far more risky and all he thinks is needed is to block off some unused ports and protocols.

>Or something has been compromised or exploited and you've had no idea because it's not something obvious like opening your CD-ROM drive automatically.

This is addressed two paragraphs after the one you've quoted.

> This is addressed two paragraphs after the one you've quoted.

And it's equally an incomplete assessment based on the same "This is fine" attitude. The computer could be participating in a botnet dedicated to bring down the network in hospitals or steal their sensitive medical data, and the author would never know.

Does using Windows 11 and keeping up with the latest updates as soon as they’re available prevent that from happening, compared to the author’s setup? Nothing would help if you click on the wrong download link for your favourite software in either case, and an innocent PDF has hacked Linus Tech Tips nevertheless. At least, by not keeping up to date you’re not opening yourself to new bugs.

You're comparing using an obsolete version full of known exploits in the wild, which may be hacked by automated scripts, with adopting a bleeding edge system which may or may not have undisclosed vulnerabilities potentially know only by a few elite researchers? Try again.

Also you're missing the obvious solution, using a long-term support system with a robust audit process and well timed security releases. Author's setup will NOT be safer than that.

> Even worse, the author's successor computer is a Windows 7 PC, which is already out of support

If Microsoft cared more about security, they would keep releasing such shovelware at modern editions of Windows.