I still have a mac mini from 2006 that works perfectly fine.
I've got a 2004 Mac Mini running in my Airbnb space for guests with a 64GB SSD. It's a media server for movies and music and still works great for that - if a guest decides to log into their bank with it, oh well.
Still have a little digital signage box with a C2D that triple boots Linux, Mac and XP - super handy still for fixing bootloaders and partitions with the tools that were never ported to later versions of Windows. Anybody remember Heron's Boot CD or the like?
I used to repair and maintain all of my friends Macs going back to Power PC G3s and iPhones up to the old SEs. Now there's just too much miniaturization and closed systems and I'm just not up for keeping up with it. Super happy though with my new M1 Mini even though it is the epitome of a throw-away desktop with absolutely no user upgrades and an integrated SSD that will fail with time. I had a full blown ATX board that I triple booted with as well all the way up to Mac Mavericks OS before I threw in the towel just because I enjoyed all the tinkering one could do with the hardware and had fun getting it to work.
I still fix my car, tractor, appliances and house on my own up to the point of the cost of my time and labor being outweighed by someone else's expertise.
Edit: That triple boot C2D is never exposed to the internet in any way - it's just a tool.
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