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Why I left macOS – and what my 2013 iMac can still do

An iMac with 32 GB of RAM and a good display is not junk after twelve years. Why I switched to Windows and Linux anyway – a personal field report, not a benchmark.

Serge Zabolotny · 2026-10-26

• macOS
• Windows
• Linux
• Boot Camp
• OpenCore Legacy Patcher
• Nachhaltigkeit
• iMac

The hardware: anything but old

My workhorse is an iMac 27" (Late 2013) with 32 GB of RAM, a graphics card with 2 GB and a display I still find very comfortable. For web development – editor, browser, terminal, Docker – that is plenty. The hardware was never the problem.

I had already upgraded it earlier: swapping the hard drive (HDD) for an SSD made the iMac several times faster back then. Upgrades like that show how much life is left in this hardware.

Where official support ends

The last macOS Apple releases for this model is Catalina (10.15.7). After that there is officially nothing. That is almost nine years of updates – not little, yet the machine is still technically very capable. For developers this has consequences: software vendors eventually drop support for old macOS versions, and security updates are missing.

The attempt with OpenCore Legacy Patcher

I wanted to keep using the machine with the unofficial community tool OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) and installed macOS Sonoma. So that nothing would happen by itself, I switched off automatic updates and blocked the update servers via Terminal.

Still, macOS Tahoe got half-installed – and afterwards the system was broken. I do not know exactly which mechanism triggered it; I only describe what I experienced. For me that was the moment I decided to leave this ecosystem.

My solution: Windows and Linux

• Windows via Boot Camp runs on the iMac.
• Linux runs side by side on my MacBook Air; on the iMac it is the next step.
• My subjective impression: everything runs faster. Lightweight Linux distributions get by with about 1 GB of RAM, so plenty of the 32 GB is left for Docker and virtual machines. This is not a benchmark, just my everyday impression.

My view on sustainability

Apple talks a lot about the environment and conserving resources. For me that does not fit with a fully working computer that no longer receives official updates. I am not assuming intent – I cannot prove that – but the effect is the same: the hardware outlasts the software support. With Windows and Linux I can keep using the same machine instead of replacing it. This is my personal opinion.

Conclusion

Thank you, Apple, for twelve years of hardware that still works flawlessly – which is exactly why it annoys me that I can no longer use it officially. I am continuing my path without macOS.

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