Mac

My old MacBook Pro had a serious case of screen mange. The anti-reflective coating had started to peel off, leaving the screen sort of mottled. They called it staining, but I thought it looked more mangey than stained. Anyway, after I got the battery replaced and started to use the MacBook again, the screen started to bother me. I found a couple of articles online about how to fix it and this one seemed to be pretty comprehensive, so I went ahead, got some baking soda and started scrubbing.

Last week, I had a new battery installed in an old MacBook Pro. The battery was swollen and didn’t hold a charge so I took it over to Mr. Fix and they replaced it for $135. I probably could have done it with a kit, but it was much easier to have someone who does this all the time do it. My new MacBook Air M2 is great, but sometimes it’s nice to have a beater that can be used when you need a computer to use somewhere where it might get damaged (e.

I installed OpenCore Legacy Patcher on my ancient MacBook. Updates to MacOS from Apple for that system had stopped some time ago and they were just doing the occasional security patch. I’d read about OpenCore before and thought it sounded interesting but until I got my new MacBook, I was a little hesitant to use it on something that was a daily driver. The installation process was as documented and went fairly smoothly.

I bought a new MacBook Air to replace my very old 2015 MacBook. I didn’t want to break the bank and M2 model was very reasonably priced at Best Buy so I picked one up. I’ve had it for a couple of days and it’s been great. One of the reasons I replaced my old MacBook was that the battery was very weak and would only last an hour or so.

My old 2015 MacBook Pro has finally been retired. The battery was looking suspiciously bloated and I’d rather not start a fire on my desk (or worse, on an airplane). The replacement is a 2020 MacBook Air M1. I debated whether or not it was worth going to a higher end model, but I don’t do much beyond Office apps. My calculation might have been different if I did video editing or something but the most I’ll do is compile a project in XCode and that’s pretty quick.

The new M2 MacBook Air looks very good both aesthetically and perfomance wise. I like the new midnight blue color and the squarish profile just looks solid. However, it’s 20% more than the pretty good M1 MacBook Air. Normally, you would think that the 20% would be money well spent for the newer system, but apparently the M2 has some performance shortcomings so you probably want to spend another $200 for the bigger and faster SSD.

While I soldier on with my 2015 MacBook Pro, I got my daughter a M1 MacBook Air for Christmas. She likes it and it’s a nice upgrade from her vintage MacBook Air. I’m not the only one who did this as Apple had an absolutely great quarter.The most interesting numbers in the report are how strong the M1 Macs have been. Truly stunning performance for a fairly risky (no pun intended) replacement of Intel chips with the Arm-based M-series.

Many things are beautiful or impressive but impractical. A beautiful thing that I’ve been casually following is the Ashahi Linux project to bring Linux to the Apple M1 platform. Progress is being made but there are some stumbling blocks with the graphics drivers. The skills and dedication of the people involved are impressive. The idea of creating a virtual machine to intercept the calls to the subsystems and mimic them without looking at the source is brilliant.

As I’ve written before, I’m interested in the Apple M1. I’m due for a new work computer so maybe I’ll get one sooner than later. It seems that progress is being made (or at least a start is being made) on Linux on the M1. The Registry has an article about the Asahi project. It’s a crowdfunded effort to get Linux working on the M1 by Hector Martin who has quite a history with Linux ports to closed systems.

The recently announced mac1.metal instance type on AWS is interesting. I can imagine it would be very useful for building iOS apps and the like that require a Mac or running site tests with the Safari browser. The aren’t running the new M1 chip, but are on some pretty decent Intel i7 processors, so they should be plenty fast. I don’t suppose you care too much about power consumption if it’s in the cloud.