Commander Tansin A. Darcos wrote:

All you've ever used, apparently, are laptops, and then you proceed, without ever having used one, to complain that a desktop is worthless.

Further, the older Macs use PowerPC processors, clearly you can't develop for Intel processors on a PowerPC.

Therefore, you're complaining that a machine that is not an Intel processor machine is worthless because it can't run or develop code for an Intel machine.

That's like saying a $75,000 IBM z/System B81 Mainframe that handles upwards of 100,000 transactions a second is worthless because you can't run Halo 3 on it. They have different uses and if the machine you have can handle what you need to do on it then it's a perfectly good machine, no matter how new or old it is.

Speaking of Mainframes

Of course you can't develop for the latest Intel Mac on a PowerPC. That's not its purpose. Never was, and if it wasn't for the fact that most (consumer) development is for Intel/Amd x86-64 processors we might still be using them. In fact, IBM still manufactures the PowerPC chip, it still has a following for some environments.

The older Macs are good for two important niche points where they can be extremely useful.

(1) For someone who wants a computer for light to medium workloads of more-or-less stable environment, where they might not have a whole lot of technological support and wants a machine that is essentially invulnerable to virus attack.

(2) Someone who wants an inexpensive way to learn the OS X operating system. Again, say what you want, you are not going to get anything cheaper than $120.

I mean, if you criticize a jaws of life or a hand drill and call them worthless because you can't use them as a hammer, you just show you're too incompetent to operate a blanket.