Too bad good hardware is wasted because of lack of software support.
I’ll admit it’s “good” hardware in the perspective of a 10 year old computer remaining functional and useful despite it’s age. But to me it’s no longer good hardware, it’s really old hardware. When he bought it, the machine probably came with OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) which will shortly be 8 OS upgrades from current Macs. In 2008 we were upgrading to Lightroom 2, since then there have been 5 upgrades. To me it’s pretty impressive the thing still runs as well as it does.
Dan is trying to upgrade to a newer version of software on a 10 year old machine that has reached the limit on how far the OS can be upgraded. He could have remained with the current version, probably until the machine died.
How long should vendors and hardware designers be expected to support outdated hardware/operating systems? As he found, his 10 year old machine is still supported and he is now running classic, and will be until Adobe drops support for Mac OS 10.11. To me when that happens (next month or 2 years from now) he’s gotten a lot of life out his Mac.
At this point even if Adobe drops support in Lightroom Classic 2019 or whatever they’re going to call it, everything should run just fine as long as he wants to.