I’ve been using a 2009 cheesegrater Mac Pro for quite a while now. I bought it used quite a while ago - around 2013 if I remember correctly - and it’s been serving as my main photo/video/general programming workhorse, although the latter tasks have been taken over mostly by a Linux machine housed in the infamous NZXT H1 case. It’s been upgraded a lot during its life - now has the latest 6 core Xeon these machines support including the upgrade to 2010 firmware, USB 3.0 ports, PCIe SATA cards to get SATA-3 and a PCIe NVMe card, plus a Mac-flashed AMD RX580. Nevertheless, it was showing more and more signs of getting long in tooth. Plus some of the software that I’m using really would like to use macOS 10.15, which this Mac Pro doesn’t support unless I effectively turn it into a Hackintosh. Combine that with distinct signs of the machine getting geriatric and I decided that I was time for a replacement. But what?

Like pretty much every other programmer with a Mac, I’m currently looking at Swift. Will I write anything but toy programs in it? I don’t know yet - I don’t really write any Mac-ish software on my Mac,  just unix-ish programs. If Swift doesn’t escape the OS X and iOS ecosystems it’ll be a nice exercise in a neat language that’s not really that relevant to the world at large, or at least to my part of the world at large. Not that this sort of vendor lock-in can’t work well - Visual Basic 6, anybody?