No. Yes. Maybe.
I have a 2009 White MacBook. I jacked up the RAM to 8 GB, and I installed a 250 GB SSD. I’ve got older versions of Logic Pro, Reason, and MainStage on it, and they mostly run fine. I can connect my Tascam US 16 x 8 to it and record 16 channels of audio at the same time with no issues. I can use all the stock Logic plugins. It’s good enough to record an album, and I did – I recorded my first two albums on a machine with very similar specs.
But while I can record 16 tracks of audio and mix and master on the thing, I couldn’t type this blog post on it. Why? Because a modern WordPress website is too bloated for a Core 2 Duo processor, and because the only web browsers that will run on it are too old to actually work. They can’t adequately handle the modern web certificates.
When the web was new and HTML was king, the promise of the web was that as long as you could read a text file, you could access the content of all websites. You might not see the images, but you’d be able to read the text. But in modern times, a 15 year old computer which can still do amazing things in audio production is incapable of giving you a decent web browsing experience.
The Core 2 Duo processor in my 2009 White MacBook has more horsepower than my Apollo Solo. But the modern world of bloat has rendered it almost useless online. People want to say that a 15 year old CPU is slow. No, it isn’t. Given the appropriate interface, it could probably record 32 tracks of audio at once. But it can barely play a YouTube video.
There’s no good reason to run an old computer for audio – not when you can buy a refurb M1 Mac Mini for less than $400. But I still can’t help but feel a little sad for the old computers. They’re still fast. It’s just that the modern world has become so bloated, they can’t be used for basic tasks like browsing the web.