Does it still run well? I have an iMac that I bought from ~2010, and while I can get it up and running, it isn’t that fast and overheats easy, the fans kick on and stay on even when on standby, so I just have it off.
My mother has a Mac Mini she bought a few years ago and all she does on it is spreadsheets really, and that too has become unbearably slow, lots of beachball waiting.
That said, I have a 2013 MBP from my work and it holds up.
As for the keyboard, I was using someone’s newish MB with touchbar and I hated the keyboard. So if that is still the current gen (and somehow it was worse before), I don’t know how ai feel about that.
The normal iPad in 32GB for like $300 is a deal that‘s really screaming to me though.
That said, I did just order the new 12 Pro Max, and the tiny increase in screen size over my current 11 Pro Max may hold me over (can’t be spending too much money).
Anyone know if the iPad can run the browser version of Google Sheets with ease? Running it on my iPhone causes crashes (the app is fine, but isn’t fully featured).
My iMac is the late 2009, 27" screen, lower-end model, so it has a lowly 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo rather than the early "i" series (i3 maybe?) CPU that the top-end iMac of the time had.
Still, it runs just fine for word processing, Zoom, web browsing, YouTube, audio editing, music playback, lightweight Photoshop work, spreadsheets, photo management, and much more. What has kept the iMac humming along is that I removed the original hard drive and replaced it with a 500GB SSD. And when the optical drive finally bit the dust, I got one of those optical-to-laptop-drive adapters and put a 1GB SSD in that spot.
The 27" model is also nice because in addition to the massive amount of workspace it offers, it also has notably more airspace inside than the 21.5" model, meaning it stays cooler. My CPU temp sensor shows 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) or less under most loads, and I can't remember the last time it went over 120F (49C) under any circumstances.
Of course, the internal case volume is not the only reason for the lower temps. The SSD instead of a spinning HD helps, and I imagine both SSDs add even more air space since they take up less space than the original HDD and optical drive. But I think the low temps are also due to the limitations of the Core 2 Duo CPU- it probably doesn't get super hot or thermal throttle much because it's simply not that powerful.
I definitely notice the speed issues in comparison to my early 2020 MacBook Air, which has twice as many cores and a CPU that, while lower-end, is still several generations more advanced than my old iMac's. So for example if I use XLD to convert a music album from FLAC to Apple Lossless, the Air rips through the process at warp speed, while the iMac is snappy enough but takes 1.5 to 2 times as long. Similarly, when I play high-res YouTube videos on the iMac, sometimes there will be a brief stutter a couple of seconds in while it buffers or something. The rest of the video plays fine, though. Ditto for Zoom - if I have a Zoom meeting going, and I'm switching to multiple other apps to refer to documents or check email, I will get some minor stuttering of the video on Zoom while it's in the background, which never happens on the newer Air.
But overall I have been quite happy and quite pleasantly surprised at how usable this Mac has remained over all these years. I did have to replace the CPU fan once, which sucked because doing so requires disassembling almost the entire computer - and in the process I accidentally connected the microphone cable to the wrong motherboard port and now the mic no longer works. I corrected the connection error but no dice. So I had to get a $40 external USB mic (because I didn't want to buy a mic cable off eBay, open up the unit again, replace the cable, and then find out the cable isn't the source of the problem). So it's definitely been through the wars, but it still looks great and works fine. With a little luck it will carry me through for another year or so, when I believe the first Apple Silicon iMacs will be released and I can at long last give the old iMac a long-deserved rest.