Back at the end of 2015 I blogged about my iMac starting to develop some graphics artifacts and being slow. Somehow, the graphics artifacts abated enough for me to get another couple years of life out of it. I managed to speed up the system with a shiny new SSD, which made it feel like a brand new computer.

This past week though the graphics artifacts got to the point where things are almost unusable. It appears to have something to do with heat, as I didn’t seem to have many issues in the summer, but now that it’s colder outside it’s struggling more and more. I have an appointment on Thursday to get an estimate on how much it will be to get it fixed.

I’m not sure how much it will be, but if it’s more than I want to bite off, then I’m back to making a decision about where to go next. New iMacs that have SSDs (and are of comparable performance) are $1500+. A Mac Mini might be an option, but I’d need to invest in a decent monitor as well. Plus, the Mac Mini isn’t really value priced when you add in a decently fast chip and SSD. And, before anyone asks, no, I’m probably never going Windows.

One option that I’m considering is using my 12″ Macbook as my replacement. It’s not a powerhouse, but I already own it. I’d need to figure out a nice docking set up, with a decent monitor, but it would probably be the most economical of all the solutions. The lack of ports beyond just USB-C isn’t a big deal, until you need to start hooking up a lot of devices, including video. I have a concern that transmitting video data, as well as other I/O might bottleneck the single port. One more thing to Google.

The silly thing is that I could probably go with a Chromebox, since 90% of what I do doesn’t involve anything that’s not online. If there was a full fledged version of Lightroom (not mobile or web app) for Chrome, I could go that way. However, for now I still need access to the full version (especially until the bugs are fixed with CC).

So anyone out there done the Macbook USB-C dock and have any advice on a good model? How about monitors that people like?