Tag: MacBook Pro

What solstice is this?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
This year’s solstice seems to lack a certain wintry flavor.

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Chri … no, no, it’s not, actually.

It’s 49° right now with a high of 58° anticipated, and we are remarkably light on snowmen in these parts.

Meet the new Mac.

The dearth of seasonal weather notwithstanding, I finally got around to unwrapping and wrestling with the solstice gift I bought for myself (with Management’s approval, of course). And this is the first blog post from my brand-new MacBook Pro, with the M4 Pro chip, 24GB of memory and 1TB of storage.

It’s hard to describe such a wonder as a midrange Mac, but that’s what it is. Anybody who’s priced the property in Cupertino lately knows how many Dead President Trading Cards you can flush down the loo if you’ve a mind to, and a life partner who’s willing to stand by and watch you do it. I tried to find the Middle Way between making do and delusions of grandeur.

And I think I succeeded.

With my old 15-inch Intel MBP sidelined by botched MacSurgery at the Apple Store, and the 13-incher hobbled by penury (8GB memory, 128GB storage), I needed something with more power, more memory, more storage, and plenty of ports for external drives, the LG display, a mic, SD cards, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.

Plus I wanted something I could snatch up and run with when the jackboots hit the front door come Jan. 21.

So, here we are.

I’ve got all the data transferred, connected everything I need to do my little bit of business to see that it all works, and downloaded fresh copies of a few third-party apps I use. Then I kicked the tires, lit the fires, and took her for a spin around the digital block.

I haven’t assembled a Radio Free Dogpatch podcast with the beast yet, and might not even publish an episode this next week. You may think of that as my solstice present to you.

Go fish

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
The latest iteration of the Pescadero from Soma Fabrications.

Ho ho ho, etc. The Santas at Soma Fabrications have a fresh catch of Pescadero road framesets for all you good girls and boys this Christmas.

The Pescadero is a “road-sport” steed, designed with 35mm rubber in mind but good to 38mm, my personal tire width of choice. And did I mention that it takes rim brakes? Your choice of centerpulls or dual pivots.

This was the frameset I wanted to review Back in the Day® for Adventure Cyclist, but it was out of stock. So I went instead for a first cousin from the Merry Sales family, the New Albion Privateer, which has become one of my favorite bikes for the mean streets of The Duck! City. (You’ll see mine, black with silver rack, in the photo carousel.)

Hm. Decisions, decisions. I need a new MacBook Pro to carry on The Work, but another resident of the San Francisco area has annoyed me by leaping clear across the country to kiss the Pestilence-Erect’s ring (hope you packed plenty mouthwash, Timmy me lad).

Maybe I need to redirect my holiday spending. Some might say I have too many two-wheelers already, but I have plenty of Macs, too. And as we all know, the proper number of bikes for a man is n+1.

Mac Van Winkle

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
Even the tree seems to be reaching for something out of its grasp.

Anybody else having a hard time waking up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?

Maybe it’s a side effect from 10 days of snotlocker drugs. Could be the time change and tonight’s Beaver Moon. But my eyes didn’t open until after 6 a.m. this morning, which is a rarity in these, my Golden Years.

I know it’s not the avalanche of inanities we call the news, because I’ve been ignoring that shit. Oh, I’ll lift the lid for a peek now and then, but the smell is usually a dead giveaway. There’s something down there you don’t need to see.

Speaking of things best left unexamined, after the Great Power Failure I decided to rearrange the tech around here rather than buy a new Mac to replace the 15-inch 2014 MacBook Pro that our local Apple Store “Genius Bar” demoted from a functional laptop into a half-assed desktop while replacing its battery.

So, now, the 15-inch MBP awaits teardown and recycling. The 13-inch 2014 MBP has replaced it in my office, hooked to a 24-inch LG external display and a couple external drives because it has next to no internal storage (I pinched pennies on memory and storage because it was my road-tripper in the Before-Time). And the 11-inch 2012 MacBook Air, which was for traveling seriously light, has replaced the 13-inch MBP on keyboards in the world-famous Infernal Hound Sound podcasting studio.

Both have been updated to the latest versions of macOS they can handle (Big Sur and Catalina, respectively). But man, I gotta admit, these Macs were price/performance compromises from the get-go. And in 2024, it kinda shows.

The MBP rocks a 2.6 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 chip, while the MBA runs a 2 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7. Both have just 8GB of memory, minimal on-board storage, and a shortage of ports. And they’ve been rudely awakened all these years later to find that things have … changed.

Hey, I can dig it. Shit looks a little different to me, too. And I can’t always keep up, either.

Y’think Apple will sell me a new Mac and a new me?

Lost in time, like tears in rain

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
We got 0.38 inch of rain in about 0.38 minute last night. Unlike Apple’s customer service, it was excellent.

Time to die. For my mid-2014 MacBook Pro, anyway.

I should’ve signed a DNR instead of the usual shit-happens waiver when I dropped the 15-inch MBP off to have its swollen battery replaced and overworked fans checked out, or just pulled the SSD and recycled the remains. At some point between handing it over to the “Genius” and paying $267.99 for the battery replacement the display managed to get itself FUBARed and now I have a laptop that can’t be used as … well, as a laptop.

Looks brand-new, dunnit?

One sees little need for a $267.99 battery in a 10-year-old MacBook that requires an external display to be useful. Mobile this is not. My lap isn’t that big.

Straight answers regarding just what occurred were not forthcoming. There were only the shrugs, the averted eyes, the mumbling about the advanced age of the MacBook. And the “give us your money” part, which — unlike the MacSurgery — proved successful.

But that shit’s on me. I knew replacing the battery was a real job of work — which was why I handed it off to the “Genius” instead of tackling it myself — and I wanted to keep the old MacDawg hunting. Should’ve saved my pennies for the new smaller-and-better-than-ever M4 Mini said to be coming down the pike later this year.

At one memorable point in my inquest, the local “Geniuses” were not answering their phone and Apple’s phone-answering droid punted me to global customer service, where a human lateraled me back to the ABQ Apple Store, where after 10 minutes on hold the person who finally picked up thought I was customer service.

“I can help them with that, go ahead and put them on.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I can help them with that, put them on.”

“I am the customer.”

“Oh….”

I briefly considered going Full Mad Dog on these rotten Apples and their Samsung-level customer service. But what the hell? Even counting its two battery replacements that old Pro earned what I spent on it a hundred times over. Nothing lasts forever, though I have other MacBooks from 2014, 2012, and 2006, plus a G4 PowerBook from 2005, whose displays —¡que milagro! — still display. I can still use this one as a desktop until when — or if — I decide to modernize.

Tell you what, though. I’ll be shipping any future repair jobs to Apple’s main fix-’em-up plant, and buying any new product directly from Cupertino. I remain a firm believer in supporting local businesses, but our local “Geniuses” have seen the last of Your Humble Narrator.

Sometimes a hero is just a sandwich

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments
Well, maybe not so much.

One of those weeks, I guess.

We watched Joe Biden’s presser and I felt as though I should weigh in, but Charlie Pierce beat me to it with his remembrance of how Laughin’ Joe knuckle-chuckled Lyin’ Paul Ryan right off the stage during their 2012 veep debate, in which “he effectively demolished Ryan as a political figure simply through good old Irish barroom bonhomie.”

Like Charlie, I always had a soft spot in my heart for José after he gave that empty suit the old one-two, the hee and the haw.

Next, my APC Back-UPS NS 1080 went loudly sideways, presenting various error messages overlaid by a soundtrack from the Nostromo on self-destruct in “Alien.” This caused me to spend the better part of quite some time online with tech support, trying to diagnose what I suspected — and the tech eventually confirmed — was a terminal case of old age, the unit being 7 years old, the short end of this battery backup’s lifespan.

Speaking of old age, in the course of unplugging and inplugging laptop, monitor, dock, speakers, backup drives, backup battery, and what have you during the diagnostic process I was reminded that the fans in my 2014 MacBook Pro 15-incher seemed to be running all the time, no matter how light the workload. Also, its trackpad was largely inoperable again.

The first time the trackpad issue cropped up, the cause was a swelling battery. I had Apple replace that and give the innards a wash and brushup. But this time I didn’t see any telltale bulge in the case, and some casual nosing around the Innertubes led to the usual potential suspects — old, dried-up thermal paste, other failing critical bits, filth and clutter, demonic possession, Cthulhu awakening, and why not just buy a nice new MacBook and shitcan that 10-year-old relic, you penny-pinching eejit, etc.

Well, we’re not quite there yet. I unplugged all my gear again, set the 15-incher aside, and swapped in its little brother, the 2014 13-incher, which has gone mostly unused since I sidelined my Radio Free Dogpatch podcast and seems as quiet as a mouse.

Naturally, there’s a downside to that maneuver. When I bought the 13-incher I went for 8GB of memory and the 128GB SSD for reasons that elude me now (possibly penury; more likely stupidity). And that drive is pretty close to full. Happily, I had a 480GB OWC Mercury Elite Pro Mini external drive lying around doing not much, so, yay, problem solved. Or at least avoided. For now.

I know, I know. I should sack up, crack the Big Mac’s clamshell, get in there with my little toolkit and root around like I know what the hell I’m doing.

But I’m gonna take my cue from Joe here. Pass the torch to the Vice-MacBook Pro. It’s not so much the big fella’s age; it’s the hours it’s been on and running hot.

There may be a better candidate out there somewhere, but so what? I got shit to do, man.