Looking at older Mac Pro for iOS Dev, Photoshop, etc.

Well, I've seen some machines not go up, but rather hold their value for a decent amount of time without any depreciation.

That said, yes, someone got an amazing deal, and I'm positive the machine was working.

I'm actually waiting on the prices of nicely optioned T5500 Precisions to go down so I can score a replacement for my 690. These are probably the only dell machines I really do love. Reliable, last for years, and easy to keep up with. Not to mention the cases are hefty and look great.

I can tell you what I have and my experiences.

First I have a 2006 v1.1 Mac Pro into which I installed three years ago two additional 8 GB stacks of ram for a total of 20 GB, all recognized and running perfectly. It had the fastest of everyting I could buy at that time including twop Xeon duo processors for a total of four. It also has two 1TB internal drives in addition to the initially installed 500 GB HDs for a total of four drives and 3 TB. I have much software installed in addition to all the original software including:

1. Adobe Acrobat Pro X
2. Adobe CS5.1 Web package with DreamWeaver, Photoshop and Illustrator, etc.
3. DeltaWalker Oro
4. Double Twist
5. Firefox and Chrome along with Safari
6. Parallels 6 Desktop with Windows 7 installed as a virtual machine (allocated 4 GB RAM and minimum HD space
7. QuickBooks 11 for Mac
8. MS Office for Mac 2011
9. TC 2000 trading software
10. Wacom Tablet along with Magic Mouse and TrackPad, all wireless
11. DivX Player and Converter
12. Dragon Dictate

and a bunch of miscellaneous software as well.

Furthermore, all of this software works fine on my 2011 MBP in Yosemite with a couple of exceptions. I had to upgrade from Parallels 6 to Parallels 10 to use Windows 8.1 on the laptop and DivX was said to be incompatible so I have not even tried it on the MBP.

So, I would say any machine back to the original Intel desktop box would do the job for you as long as it is running well when you buy it...full diagnostics in order. Don't be fooled by Apple's telling you the 1.1 MP will only take a max of 8 GB RAM...this was simply an upgrade path sales gimmick. But, it is not supported, of course. This machine, however, can not be upgraded past Lion without modifications in the boot whatever (I would say Boot ROM from my old PC days) and video board...carefully so you don't produce an anchor. I would not go with an earlier non-intel machine.

So I would suggest you find the best you can for a price you can afford and don't worry about the software you have mentioned. It should all go well with the newer OS X versions.

Just saw this after the last few days of being out of the loop; I appreciate the detailed response of your sharing your experience. Definitely excellent feedback that I was looking for!

It should be noted that much of the list of software sailor#1 listed as running well on his old Mac Pro is pretty old itself. The OP may not be aware that a number of these titles are years out of date, and superseded by newer versions with additional features and/or better security/fewer bugs.

As always, if you can get buy with contemporaneous software versions on your old machine, obviously they're going to run very well. It's when you try to run modern, more sophisticated software or connect modern, more sophisticated peripherals that you're likely to run into issues, in addition to the increasing security risk in using older software.

chas_m said:

It should be noted that much of the list of software sailor#1 listed as running well on his old Mac Pro is pretty old itself. The OP may not be aware that a number of these titles are years out of date, and superseded by newer versions with additional features and/or better security/fewer bugs.

As always, if you can get buy with contemporaneous software versions on your old machine, obviously they're going to run very well. It's when you try to run modern, more sophisticated software or connect modern, more sophisticated peripherals that you're likely to run into issues, in addition to the increasing security risk in using older software.

Click to expand...

Absolutely right, Chas. However, that wasn't the thrust of the original question which was about buying an older machine that would run his older software. My point was that this "legacy" software that in my case is only 2-4 years old works both on OS X 7.5 (and earlier 6.? Snow Leopard) AND OS X 10.1. Of course he could always go out and spend hundreds of dollars on the latest and greatest but it was my understanding that this was what he was trying to avoid.

I'm aware of the age of the software that sailor#1 provided in his post. I have CS6 for Windows, and that will likely last me for the next few years (not feeling the whole subscription fee deal Adobe is now offering).

The most up-to-date tools/software I'd actually be using is XCode.

I have my main PC rig for any modern software needs if there's something that I couldn't get to run on the Mac.

I do wish to get something that will provide me enough horsepower to multitask while still giving me a few more years of headroom in terms of usage without suffering the depreciation costs like buying a new car when purchasing a new machine (funny how values of "used" articles go up again when being resold through the same vendor/dealer ).

I'm set on a 2011-2012 system; now I'm just going to wait around for the right price/deal to pop up. All I'd really need is just the tower, no need for mouse and keyboard or monitors.