About a month ago, I had the opportunity to trade work for my client’s early 2015 13” MacBook Air that I’d been suggesting my client upgrade for a couple of years. This particular client was running Windows 10 in a VM despite the host only having 4 Gigs of RAM. We found an Apple Silicon replacement for the one app they needed to use a Windows VM for. She wound up upgrading to a refurbished M1 MBA with 16 Gigs of RAM and is very happy with it. It’s a pleasure to work on too.
I fully expected this to be a Linux machine in a year or so. I was going to ride out the last year or so of support for the latest installable MacOS version then I would blow out MacOS all together for either Bunsen Labs Linux or Elementary and have it around the house as a spare computer.
That is until I discovered OpenCore Legacy Patcher! Which is a point and click simple way to get the latest MacOS on a machine that isn’t blessed by the Apple gods.
Battery is still good despite being listed as “Service Recommended”. It easily runs as long as my 2023 Windows 11 laptop.
For a nearly decade old machine with only 4GB of RAM, I’m really impressed by how smooth it is. It’s perfect for browsing, document editing, and other light computing tasks. Of course there is a lockup and a little lag here and there but it’s much smoother than I expected even when swapping.
I don’t see myself buying a brand new Apple computer off the shelf. I refuse to pay the Apple tax and deal with their utterly ridiculous prices for RAM upgrades. It’s fun to see how the other half lives and experiment on MacOS.
Pretty much ALL of the Apple Silicon devices - you CANNOT upgrade the RAM period - it’s soldered in place and not upgradeable… And yeah - going from an 8 GB to 16 or 32 GB model - the price differences are ridiculous, and almost tantamount to price gouging…
I have two 2020 MY M1 MacBook Pro’s … an 8 GB personal one, and a 16 GB work one… MacOs does run perfectly fine with 8 GB of RAM… But - if I was to ever buy another MacBook for myself, I WOULD NOT go MacBook Pro - I’m regretting it - 'cause the touchbar is a piece of crap that’s died out of warranty, and hardly ever works - rendering the device next to useless (e.g. no F1-F12 keys - never mind media control!).
I changed jobs briefly in 2022 - and the new employer sent me a shonky intel i5 quadcore MacBook Air - with 8 GB of RAM - and - they expected me to run a Windows 10 VM in VMware fusion in that? It would take 45 minutes to start up, and render the host O/S unresponsive, and set the chassis fans to max RPM… Anyway - I only lasted ~5 months - and went back to my old employer, and they issued me the MBP M1 with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD…
BTW - I have zero plans to run Linux on ANY apple devices - for my money, MacOS is a UNIX operating system and I have a native shell (zsh) and terminal apps…
And my daughters both run apple silicon MacBook Airs (and one daughter has an M1 Mac Mini too) - we have NO MS Windows in my house…
If the pricing on the RAM upgrades wasn’t so ridiclous I can understand soldered RAM savng space and being faster. As it stands now, you have to add a $200 upgrade to their base models to future proof your machine a little bit (16 vs 8 GB of RAM)
I used to remote into this machine when my client had it. If she was running her Win 10 VM the lagginess was almost unbearable although MasOS did an admirable job trying to manage it.
I agree with you 100% about MacOS being Unix and there’s no need to install Linux and dual boot. I love having the Terminal and proper *nix commands at my fingertips. I still need to learn the differences between ZSH and BASH or switch back to BASH.
One of the first things I installed on here was Brew which really gives it a nice Linuxy feel. The only reason I’d install Linux on this machine’s bare metal is to get newer software and security patches after Apple drops support later this year but the OpenCore Patcher fixed that problem!
Unfortunately there’s no 32 bit armhf version (of fastfetch)… I wanted to install it on my Pi Zero 2W systems (capable of 64 bit - but I’m running bullseye 32 bit raspbian on them…
Woops! I forgot screen / neo / fastfetch all display your IP address - and I noticed my CIDR was wrong! i.e. /16 - I usually just go with /24 (i.e. 255.255.255.0 netmask)…
About a month back i swapped some work on the promise of 2 apple computers taking a chance unseen they would be ok. But as it was only a few hours and nothing challenging also my client is getting on a bit …
She deliverd the mac’s in cases both portables but of course i forgot to ask which model. On opening they are both apple powerbook 140.
1991 models with 30 mb disks, 4 mb ram and 68030 processors, yes they shipped with apple mac system 7.5. Having worked at apple during that time it was just like going back to my youth booting them both up to heat the music and see the black and white screen come alive.
Question now is what do i do with them ?
Pre modem models, pre netscape navigator. Almost imposible to upgrade without total strip down and then getting parts is hard.
No way running system x and linux on that processor no longer exists, and even if it did not sure it would help.
I did have a mac SE 30 in the corner of my workshop for years which i booted every morning and left it running a fish screen saver, just for entertainment if clients came in and asked about my mac knowledge. When moving home I donated to a local university who had a history corner.
Up to last year I had a macbook pro from 2010 running linux mint with 16 gb memory but it finally died and cost of repair fault diagnosis too expensive. Hard disk transfered to a net book which is my daily tool.
Yes I would buy a new mac but it would be the mini which I think is a good beast to use on a daily basis but not in any rush to spend the money.
I gutted my SE/30 and have a 4:3 LCD monitor in it - intention to run a Linux distro with a retro theme (probably a Pi3 with XFCE and a System 7/8/9 theme… (I kept the guts of it - I’d like to buy one of those transparent SE/30 chassis and rehouse it).
I have a PowerPC 601AV in my garage - quite a beast in it’s day… the “AV” means it has a video “in” card in it. I used one at Uni circa 1993/94 - impressive… I actually tried MkLinux, which was semi-supported by Apple for “Old World Mac” (i.e. pre PCI and OpenBoot)…
Have a small foot print beige Mac - can’t remember the model - 68020/30 with 16 MB RAM - went to power it on about 10 years ago and it went bang and all the precious smoke escaped out of it.
I also have “Bronze Keyboard” “piezo” era PowerBook - PowerPC G4 (or G3) - I slotted TWO 512 MB SoDIMM into it - but it’s double sided, and the Mac only sees half of each (so 512 MB total) - the modules were out of some ancient chunky Thinkpads (wish I’d kept them!). Anyway - it runs both OS X and System 9 - and upgraded (used DD on a Linux machine) to clone the 6 GB HDD to a 40 GB HDD - but can’t do any other O/S on it - 'cause the optical drive seems to be dead - and - get this - it’s PRE-USB (well I think it supports HID on USB, but not storage - the external storage BUS on these was a wonky square shaped “SCSI” port).
I would LOVE a really BEEFY G5 dual CPU PowerMac those things with the aluminium chassis… Maxed out with GPU and RAM… RISC UNIX workstation (yeah I’m a tragic fanboi of UNIX workstations - also have some Sun and Silicon Graphics hardware lying around).
All the above are probably for hobbies when I retire in a few years…
Suspect your computer workshop is much b8gger than mine to stock all this technology and your power consumption greater.
In my last home the garage was attached so i could have massive storage, plus a office to work in. After retirement and health issues we now live in an apartment and the garage is 1km away with no power hence most of my stock went to museum or scrap which occasionally i regret especially when i do a repair and know i had that power supply in my bits box but no longer.
We found an Apple Silicon replacement for the one app they needed to use a Windows VM for. She wound up upgrading to a refurbished M1 MBA with 16 Gigs of RAM and is very happy with it. It’s a pleasure to work on too.
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