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One of the things I love about Macs is their longevity. It's not at all rare to see a 10 year old Mac (or older) still being used. With Apple's continued move towards industry standards, I suspect this trend will continue, as hardware and peripheral options remain available.

Starting with the PCI based Macs (the likes of the 7200, 8500 & 9600 PowerMacs) Apple opened the door to such popular options as USB and FireWire upgrades. Neither of these were found on Macs of the day nor were they in common use when these computers were manufactured, but now they can be retro fitted extending these computer's usefulness (matched with the appropriate operating system).

Once the G3 series was released, Apple made their next major move towards industry compatibility -- IDE based drives (both optical and magnetic). Now it is possible to put the largest and fastest optical and hard drives on the market into an older Mac and it can either be connected directly to the motherboard (G3 series and newer) or to an IDE daughter card in a PCI expansion slot, in older Macs.

While it is true that newer Macintosh operating systems don't support the older machines, it has to be pointed out that those older Macs don't stop working because a newer operating system is released. Often, they work very well indeed with Mac OS 8, 9 or X 10.2, so why worry?

It is with this in mind that I have focused on owning pre-loved Macs in recent years. Between my wife and I we have an Indigo iMac, Tangerine iBook, G3 Series PowerBook and a Blue & White PowerMac in regular use. All of them were second-hand, and all of them still run fine (although the screen on the G3 Series PowerBook has developed an occasional hinge related issue, but it still works well with an external monitor).

All of these computers are pre-OS X in manufacture, yet all of them are running OS X now, either 10.2 or 10.3. In fact, the newest machine is seven years old! That's getting pretty geriatric in computing years, yet it does a fantastic job! This is my workhorse Blue & White PowerMac.

When it first shipped it had a paltry 64Mb RAM, 6Gb hard drive, 100Mb internal Zip Drive, 32x CD-ROM, 16Mb ATi Rage Pro video card, two FireWire and two USB 1.1 ports and a 350Mhz G3 CPU. Today it sports a substantial 704Mb of RAM, a 40Gb hard drive plus a large 120Gb hard drive, the same Zip Drive, a genuine CD/DVD burning Superdrive, 32Mb ATi Radeon 7000 video card plus two 16Mb ATi Rage Pro video cards, two more FireWire and three additional USB 2 ports, an internal 56K modem and a 400MHz G4 CPU.

This gives me a total of five on board USB ports, four FireWire ports, three monitors, ADB, two 7200 RPM hard drives, a 56k Modem, 10/100baseT Ethernet and supercomputer CPU performance.

Is there anything that this old Mac can't do? Well, not that I can find. Sure the latest games are not going to run well -- I'd need to find more recent CPU and video card upgrades, but for everything else, this Mac does the trick.

The icing on the cake is the G4 CPU and the SuperDrive combination. This allows iLife '05 to function completely. So along with the usual email, Internet and word processing tasks, my old Blue & White can produce amazing audiovisual work. Given the price of any Mac with a SuperDrive installed as standard (new or second--hand), the upgraded Blue & White represents fantastic value. The only catch with this model is that it came in two revisions, and the first one (Rev 1) had a bug in the IDE controller that makes upgrading the hard drive a no go.

The Blue & White has one or two tricks absent on newer Mac as well. It still carries an ADB port -- so you can plug in an old Apple keyboard. For serious typing, the new Apple USB keyboards are not nearly as popular, and the Blue & White gives you the choice. Unlike brand new Macs, it can boot into Classic (Mac OS 8.6 -- 9.2) and hold as many as four internal hard drives. It also has motherboard switches controlling the CPU and bus speed, so it is easier to upgrade the CPU than on almost any newer Mac.

So what do I do regularly with this revitalised Mac? Word processing, email, Internet surfing, website writing with a good text editor , image manipulation with Photoshop 7, managing my music in iTunes (1500+ tracks), managing my digital photos in iPhoto (1800+ images), producing video (usually from still photos) in iMovie and making DVDs to present my work. My two indulgences are Age Of Empires, which runs in Classic, and X--Plane, a sophisticated flight simulator, which runs in either Classic or OS X.

Hopefully the Blue & White will live on as my primary computer for a few more years yet. The only thing that has impressed as much as this Mac was my previous machine, a Beige G3 PowerMac. Almost all of the component upgrades I've installed in the Blue & White were originally installed in the Beige (excluding the internal modem and SuperDrive -- it had a high speed CD burner instead)! I only upgraded to the B&W for some additional software and hardware compatibility.

Are Apple Macs more expensive to buy than Wintel machines? Sometimes they are. Are Apple Macs more expensive to own in the long run than Wintel machines? Not often. The range of upgrade and expansion options for them is only increasing, allowing upgradeable Macs to last a long time and be a particularly good investment.