When I was in college I remember some fellow students being overjoyed to find quality older hardware on Offerup, in order to keep up with the schoolwork we were learning, and practice on their own.
I personally find that Mac hardware holds its utility far beyond its value, and that's even recognizing that most Mac products hold value in the second-hand market.
I saw a Mac Pro 5.1 ( same generation as your mini ) on craigslist recently, refurbished, but selling for four figures.
its getting pretty hard to run OSX that far back. does anyone have any recommendations for an open operating system to put on them? freebsd used to work ok, but the page that tracks it hasn't been updated in a decade.
I was just looking into this today, and I found that https://elementary.io/ is the most popular Mac OS lookalike. It's based on Ubuntu under the hood, but I need the look and feel to be similar to what the users are familiar with.
I haven't installed/tried yet, but it looks promising. I can report updates here if you're interested.
I have Ubuntu running on a 12 year old MacBook Air. everything works, webcam included, although it's a bit of a pain to get it going, you have to extract a key from m the hardware and compile a binary after setting it in the source.
> I personally find that Mac hardware holds its utility far beyond its value
I've often seen broken Macbooks and iMacs (mostly issues with screen or hinges) in the hackerspaces i've visited. Maybe it's a selection bias where the functioning hardware is resold not donated, but it doesn't exactly inspire me confidence.
It's not specific to Apple though, modern day Thinkpads are just as "bad" (but the older IBM ones will probably outlive us all).
I personally find that Mac hardware holds its utility far beyond its value, and that's even recognizing that most Mac products hold value in the second-hand market.
I saw a Mac Pro 5.1 ( same generation as your mini ) on craigslist recently, refurbished, but selling for four figures.