Here you can find information about the hardware I own. I'll list the hardware I find useful, as well as some of my older tech.
This is hardware that I currently use most days.
This is my main computer. I don't really do many computationally intense things, so most of what I do is just web browsing. It's the base configuration, with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. That's mostly fine for the fairly light workload it deals with, but I do run out of memory sometimes - definitely go for 16GB if you can afford it!
Right now, I'm running the macOS 26 public beta. There's some general instabilities, slowdowns, but it mostly works pretty well. macOS seems to be a bit more buggy anyway these days, but running version 10.4 Tiger on your daily machine isn't really a viable option.
I bought this machine brand new in December of 2023. Prior to that, I didn't really have a decent work machine, and took all of my lecture notes on paper (like some sort of SAVAGE!!!). In spite of its limitations, it's the best computer I've ever had, and the only time I'd ever a computer that was just GOOD - I'd never had the money for it before!
As much as I like Macs, there's a lot of problems with them as they are now. macOS really is not that polished anymore, it's pretty buggy now, and I find myself having to work around unexpected behaviours - or even restart entirely - fairly often. I've been a Mac user for a few years now, but I might switch to a Framework when I have to retire this machine. It's lovely, but Macs are so locked-down now, and Apple are taking the platform somewhere I don't really like. Given that nobody else makes Macs but Apple, that's just too bad for me! Oh well, on to greener pastures, right?
This machine is my home server. It runs OpenBSD 7.7 (the latest release), and is mainly used to serve web pages. It's booting from an old 40GB IDE drive, but I do have a PCI SATA card installed, along with a 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard drive. I've yet to actually wrangle with setting that up, though, so I sure hope that IDE drive doesn't fail.
I got this machine from Facebook marketplace about halfway through my second year of university. Thankfully the seller dropped it off at my house, so I didn't have to carry it. I did take it home on the train one time, which did get me some funny looks, but thankfully the people I sat with were quite understanding!
In future, I plan to use this machine for backups, and possibly storing music for a simple self-hosted music streaming service. Using the old IDE drive isn't a great solution long term, but the G4 can only boot from an IDE disk. What I might end up doing is have the kernel on the IDE disk, and then everything else on the large, high-speed SATA disk. An alternative would be to just have a bootloader on the IDE disk.
As someone who primarily uses Macs, gaming options are a little bit limited. Given the expense of building a decent gaming PC, as well as the general impracticality of it (space, heat, noise, power, moving the damn thing), I decided to get a Steam Deck. It's a bit underpowered, and not a perfect replacement for a gaming PC, but it's still a fantastic investment.
Most of the titles I play on it are less intense, but simpler 3D games work fantastically. I sunk a good amount of time into The Long Dark, and it worked perfectly. 3D shooters are a bit awkward, and unless you want to master the gyroscopic controls, you'll find playing them pretty clumsy and awkward with the analog sticks.
I think my biggest gripe with it has to be that the docked experience isn't that polished at all. I'd like to be able to use it like a Switch, seamlessly switching from low-res handheld mode to a high-res docked mode, but that just doesn't work. You generally have to start a game in the mode you want to play it in, otherwise it'll be in the wrong resolution. I also found a few games would ALWAYS show the controller overlay, even if I was playing with a keyboard and mouse. Maybe the internal controls could be disconnected somehow when it's docked?
While I still find myself wanting a gaming PC for certain things, the Steam Deck is a fantastic little device that'll get you playing most of the games you want, and all for a very reasonable price - certainly much lower than a lot of its competitors. Its limitations normally push you towards trying out games you might not have before, and that's led me to some really spectacular experiences (Animal Well, Cult of the Lamb, and so on). You'll run into some limitations trying to use it as your only gaming device, but I still think it's a fantastic bit of kit.
Hardware that isn't in regular or active use, but is still cool!
The G5 is a bit of a 'holy grail' machine for me, I'd lusted after one for a while. Even if it really isn't powerful at all today (my single processor, 1.8GHz model is about as powerful as an iPhone 6), it's still a fascinating machine. I think part of the appeal of it for me is that it's a big, exotic machine - a great big behemoth with a strange architecture (64-bit PowerPC, big endian).
Sadly, the G5s (particularly the early ones) have some pretty serious reliability issues, and this one is no exception. Whilst the processor itself doesn't get all that hot, in spite of the great mythos around the G5s as space heaters, the memory controller DOES. This excessive heat buildup, along with the early lead-free solder causes the solder joints to crack. Usually this results in the machine failing to boot at all (the power light simply blinks three times in succession), but sometimes the machine will die whilst it's running.
You can sometimes revive a dead G5 with a heat gun, or even a hairdryer, but oftentimes the fix is temporary. Sometimes it's worked for 5 minutes, sometimes hours, but it usually dies again after a while. This is one of the main reasons I don't use the G5 as a server, as much as I would like to. Combined with more limited OS support (32-bit PPC Macs are better supported), as well as the fairly high power consumption, the G5 isn't really a practical server - but to be honest, neither is my G4!
I got this particular G5 from university. One of the old computer science labs (the Digital Systems Laboratory, first floor of the Physical Sciences building) was being cleared out for refurbishment, and I knew I'd seen a G5 in there, so I just had to rescue it! This was one of many things I'd saved from the skip. It also came with a 22" Cinema Display, which still looks good even today. Unfortunately, it uses ADC (Apple Display Connector), so isn't much use on modern hardware without a complicated adaptor.
I found out that the machine used to belong to Dr. Chris Price, former head of Aberystwyth's computer science department! I met Chris when he taught iOS app development with SwiftUI, for which he ran sessions on Wednesday afternoons for a couple of months. I didn't do a lot with iOS develpoment, and I ran into a lot of technical problems towards the end (with my machine - the code was fine, I assure you!), but I still found it a fulfilling experience.
While not nearly as cool as the G5 tower, the iMac G5 is still a very handsome machine! It's got a fab design, a great display, and it runs nice and quiet. Unlike the G5 tower, I believe these machines are fairly reliable, as it came out later on in the G5's life, and so the memory controller (not to mention the G5 itself) had undergone a die shrink, and thus some efficiency improvements. Less heat means less dead Macs!
I don't use this machine very often unfortunately. OS support is a bit more limited on big-endian 64-bit PowerPC machines, like G5 Macs, so I mostly just use old MacOS.
I got this machine from an antique shop in Leominster, when I went with my mum in late July 2024. I don't think they really planned on selling it, it was just something they had stuffed in a corner somewhere! The man on the till seemed quite confused, but he made some phone calls and we agreed on a price of 20 pounds, which I was more than happy with. He even found a matching keyboard and mouse to go with it, as well as a Mac Mini power supply. I don't HAVE a Mac mini, but it'll come in handy, I'm sure.
One (mildly) interesting thing about this machine is that it came from the Hereford college for the blind.
This is the first old Mac I ever acquired. I bought it off ebay in April of 2024, paying some £250 for it. Quite dear for an old Mac, but I REALLY wanted it. I initally equipped it with an internally mounted PiSCSI (Raspberry Pi SCSI drive emulator), but ran into issues with files not being saved (something to do with the Pi buffering writes to the disk, meaning writes in the buffer would just be lost when I powered off the Mac). Later, I built a BlueSCSI v2 from a kit, and found that to work quite well.
I spent quite a bit of time faffing around with trying to get this thing on the modern web. I did BRIEFLY get connected to the internet, but not without jumping through MANY hoops. I lost that disk image, and haven't attempted it since. At some point, I'd like to see my own website on it.
This is my most recent acquisition to my concerningly large collection of old tech. I'd wanted one for a few months, as I liked the idea of being able to use it for general productivity. Most of my university work consists of taking notes in lectures, which I write in Markdown using VIM, a text editor that runs in the terminal. Compared to using something like Microsoft Word, or LibreOffice Write, this is a very lightweight solution, and so even a very limited machine should be able to handle it comfortably.
Right now, it's running OS X 10.4 Tiger, upgraded with modern SSH using Tigerbrew. Eventually, I will replace this with another UNIX, most likely Gentoo (once my resident Gentoo guru comes to help me out!). I'd go with OpenBSD, like my server, but sadly there's no support for the AirPort card, meaning no WiFi - bit of a dealbreaker in a portable.
Such old hardware has some quirks. The display is fairly dim, and takes a little while to reach ffull brightness when turning the machine on, or waking it up from sleep! I think there might also be a problem with the hard drive - move the machine the wrong way, and you get a kernel panic! If iI do end up using this machine more regularly, I'll get an IDE SSD for it, but for now it's not that big of a deal.
I bought this machine off Facebook Marketplace for £80. That's not a small amount of money but it's in pretty solid shape, with no bits falling off, so I don't really mind!
I own two C64s, both are variants of the later "C" model, with the newer 'wedge' case design. I got my first Commodore 64 years ago, probably 2018 or so? It's the machine that really got me into retro computing. I've played around with a couple different things on, including the Pi1541 disk drive emulator, and GeckOS, a UNIX-like system for 8-bit micros. I even took my lecture notes on it once! That did attract some funny looks.