There is a certain sense of accepted outrage that everyone seems to have about computers, and it can roughly be summed up as this: I bought my computer last year and it’s already obsolete!
Well, that’s true. I doubt it even took a year for that to happen; it could have been days (handy-dandy tip: Apple has a 14 day return policy, and even if you’re past that, they are often quite receptive to helping out folks who just shelled out a ton of cash on a machine that has been freshly discontinued). Of course, being obsolete is very different from “not able to do what it did when you bought it,” which is a situation that is going to go on for years. After all, technically, car models are rendered obsolete every year also, but no one has a spasm and insists their car is now worthless.
Curiously enough, one of the most significant ways that your computer is eventually going to show its age is internet access. While most websites, at their heart, are simple amalgamations of text and images, the technologies they use to provide services get constantly updated, and have heavier and heavier system requirements. For many of my clients, the biggest reason Facebook won’t work on their older computers is because newer versions of Flash won’t run on older Macs with a PowerPC chip. It’s not that these new flash videos are any more awesome than they were a year ago; it’s just that you won’t be able to play them.
And if your computer happens to be satisfying you in every other way – which is entirely possible, because many computers running PowerPC G5 chips are still very capable machines – that can be really, well, lame.
But rather than drown our sorrows in digital pity, we have options! Many of them, but here are some internet options that are frequently overlooked: