Goodbye to my Old Mac Pro trash can

A little while ago I decided it finally was time to replace my old Mac Pro from 2013, also known as the trash can. The model got a lot of negative criticism because of the radical design which limited ‘upgrade’ options severely compared to previous and subsequent Mac Pro models. As I can hardly be called a power user I never had problems with these limits. It is small, fits behind my screen on my desk and is absolutely silent. I upgraded the RAM to 64Gb and installed a larger Aura Pro X2 SSD from OWC, 500Gb was definitely not enough. Although not a power user I did benefit from the power when I made a very large image in photoshop consisting of 400 small pictures for a sound absorbing panel in our kitchen. The file was enormous, so big in fact that I first had trouble getting to the printer via the internet (I used Microsoft storage space from office 365 in the end). And then the printer could not open the file because it was too big. Kind of funny that was. The unsanctioned SSD upgrade finally led to the beginning of problems when I had to upgrade Mac OS at some point which also required an EFI update. This was blocked by Apple at the time if an unofficial SSD was installed. It kind of worked for a while but then the OS partition got corrupted and I ended up having to reinsert the original SSD and do the EFI upgrade + OS upgrade. I switched back to the larger SSD and could continue until it stopped working again and I had to switch back to the original SSD and spent hours retrieving some data from the Aura Pro. With the original SSD I continually got messages I was running out of space and when I reached the final supported OS update I decided it was time to get myself something new after 12 years. Looking for a good replacement I picked the Mac Studio M4 Max. Equally small and equally silent. And definitely a lot faster at startup or when installing and upgrading software. What takes many minutes on the old Pro takes seconds on the Studio. To be honest, I have not completely said goodbye to the Mac Pro, I still use it when my wife needs the Studio. With only myself using the Pro I could clean up a lot of disk space and now the 500Gb SSD is fine as it is serving as a second computer with only a limited amount of software installed.