Ah, farewell ye Mac Pro “Trash Can.”
If you’re a Mac person, remember when these came out? They were ridiculously expensive new (I bought mine when it was four years old, used it for almost six, ten years is a pretty good run for Macs), and universally ridiculed for their “trash can” appearance. Judging by how quickly Mac went back to their previous stylings when they replaced the “Trashcan” Mac Pro in 2019 with a newer model, the “Trashcan”” can only be called a failure of industrial design. You couldn’t add stuff to the Mac Pro internally, so instead your whole rig became the Trashcan with a bunch of peripherals attached to it—an inelegant look, no matter how you slice it.
I buy all my computers used. I hate computers, cars, and cell phones for the reason that you will never get your money back out of them. You buy ’em new, they’re crazy expensive, a couple years later, they’re worth pennies on the dollar. So, I buy my computers used.
As ugly as the “Trashcan” is, as I was migrating all my files and hard drive stuff to a new used Craigslist Mac Pro 2019 model tonight, I reflected on this piece of machinery. It never crashed, it never misbehaved, it was quiet. It just kept working and working and working until, finally, like all computer products, it couldn’t be updated anymore, and finally it became an issue and had to be replaced with a newer, flashier model.
I recorded hundreds of recording sessions on this computer, wrote a big chunk of the Merle Travis book on it, used it for a ton of things important in my life, and now it’s truly an obsolete piece of junk. I raise my glass to the old “Trashcan.” Thanks for your service!
