The lab machines in THRN 2420 are now mostly end of life. There are three different batches of machine. ~10 Machines from 2013, ~20 machines from 2015 and ~10 newer intel based machines. The older machines are unable to run MacOS versions newer than 10.15 Catalina which is out of support.

To ensure that all machines have a common platform, new Apple ARM based machines need to be purchased. All machines in the lab should be on the same refresh cycle going forward.

There is currently debate in the department about how many machines need to be purchased. Whether a full compliment of machines is needed, or only a subset of stations require a machine with some stations available for BYOC computing.

The CIC will make a recommendation with purchase recommended for S24 and commissioning in time for F24.

As part of this decision we also need to consider purchase of server mac minis for system programming.

We should also add documentation for lab refreshes to the procedures section of the wiki.