I don't know why there would be any specific word for it. I just use it.
Have one at work and doing everything I can to avoid the upgrade-bulldozer-team finding me.
Bought many refurbished in perfect state. I plan to hoard them till I die, one every ten year (worst case). Need to up my battery cell expertise level for that...
Heirlooms maybe.
Oh the glee of taking it /by the screen/, to not worry the thing's gonna break...
The 25-year-old car still takes a driver's time and some fuel, and moves stuff around just like a brand new one would. There's no hope of using a 1995 computer for compiling a big C++ project from a fancy IDE, while video chatting over WiFi. Remember that a computer from 1995 would've seemed a bit old in 1997 too.
A top of the line 2008 desktop (especially if it had been occasionally upgraded but even if it hadn't) will still be faster than a low end laptop as described above (the kind you can buy for €200-300 at Lidl) & perfectly good for front end web dev (what I happen to be doing for a living currently).
It would upgradable be something like 3ghz core 2 quad, 8gb ram and reasonably fast (non-m2) SSD. I've certainly done web dev on less than that.
The risk/reward of car travel in 1996 was OK with me at the time... It's great that cities are considering banning vehicles over emissions - I bike, walk, bus, or take the electric car (recently bought a Leaf) when just moving myself. The van is for moving big stuff and/or longer rural trips; it's an example of a tool that still serves my purposes and is not something that I want to be identified by.
There's nothing technically wrong with the laptop either, it's got max RAM, as much as the CPU and logic board will support, the drive, battery and wireless card are all replaceable, you can take out the optical drive and replace it with either one that supports Blu-ray or replace add another SSD, no USB3 ports but it does have Thunderbolt, Gigabit Ethernet, IR for an Apple Remote and an SDXC slot. Apple's just up and decided they're done supporting this laptop from 2012. A few forum posts I saw indicate if you were to force Big Sur on, everything but the wireless card would work. The only major silicon difference between this computer and models that are still supported is the integrated graphics, but without working wireless it's a bit of a non-starter.
I could buy a couple of replacement parts and easily keep this thing going for another 5 years or longer, which I still can if I'm willing to give up on Mac OS X entirely. What I'm probably going to do is keep it going another year or two and replace it once the dust has settled a bit on ARM Macs and Apple has proved they're not going to take their Mac line down a ridiculous direction in the next few years, then maybe replace the operating system and find another use for the machine.
Unless you're pushing the bleeding edge of performance, machines like this are still plenty good, especially if your RAM floor is 16GB. It's not the fastest, another machine I use for work screams by comparison, but there's not really any good reason a 2012 machine couldn't still be ticking along in 2037 if you've parts to service it with. Serviceability is really the only limiting factor at this point. That said most Macs that came after mine lost a lot in serviceability, so that's the caveat.
Yes, it's called old tool that still works ;)
