What a coincidence! Yeah running CS6 vs Creative Cloud is a no brainer rea
I had a connection w/ someone who worked at Adobe back in the day, so I
scored (a legit) CS6 box suite for like $100 when normal retail was around $2000! When he told me the next version was going to be subscription based, I was so upset.
 
if you're only going to be an occasional user. Have you looked into any op source products that you could move your work flow to and ditch Adobe
I have used open source apps like Gimp and Inkscape. They work, but not as
well as the tools I'm used to :D I did a lot of vector / motion
graphic work back in the day, but now I mostly code. (I heavily use a lot of FOSS sofware dev tools)
I really dislike the trend of no longer owning your software and everything turning into a monthly subscription. I love Open Source and generally try to use it whenever possible. However FOSS alternatives don't always suffice.
I've heard about efforts to get Linux running natively on M1 w/ the "Asahi" project. Unfortunately as Apple will not provide any support, we're at
the mercy of devs being able to reverse engineer everything themselves to
get it working. If they somehow manage to make it useable and actually take full advantage of the M1 chipset, I'd 100% get an M1 and settle for running
my old apps in a VM.
Yeah the battery has deteriorated some what and although a pain to change, sure I will get on that soon-ish. It just seems a waste to ditch it when
I'm gonna send my machine to Rossman Repair Group. I have followed his
channel for quite some time over the Right To Repair movement. I respect the work he does and will happily do business w/ his company.
My Mac is definitely old, but I have used some newer Windows PCs and I'm
amazed at how well it has held up. Performance is still good, the design + screen are great (and still surpass some cheaper Windows PCs of today)!
everything else works seemingly flawlessly. And as you say, HDMI, SD, and  are a free-be with the 2012, why now they're costing a premium to "upgrade
Oh and I forgot MagSafe. Don't know why they ever removed that. Regardless,
I'm glad they've "backtracked" to make the machine more usable, than just shaving off mms of thickness.
--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Sent from Al's Geek Lab 1337:2/104 (1337:2/104)