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?
Mad Blog Media 
So..what are the gear inches? Just asking for a friend.
Uhh .. lessee here, times 10, carry the π, n+1 … uhhh … 666?
Or you could go to the dark side…
O, Hurben, I’m way too far across the stream to change horses. I’ve never owned a Windows machine, or even worked on one, though Herself switches back and forth between OSes without a hitch.
But she’s younger, smarter, and more flexible than I am. I just start banging on shit and cussin’.
Sleeping 8 or 9 hours is a good thing at any age. We operate on different wavelengths. You have a collection of macs. I have two. when they can’t run the latest OS, I trade them for new ones. I think UofA students follow me into Simutech to get my trades.
I love a nice overlong stay in the sack when I can get one. But The Boss gets busy early around here and it’s rarely possible for me to stay abed much past 5.
I’m unhooking peripherals from the 13-inch MacBook Pro to see if that takes a bit of the hitch out of its gitalong. But I think you may be right about taking the plunge. None of my old Macs are trade-ins — they’re all recyclables, even though they still function, kinda, sorta — and even if I take that Great Leap Forward I’ll probably keep them around just ’cause.
New Mac? Most definitely. New you? Fuhgeddaboutit.
Can’t be long before Apple goes down that road, though. “Get a new You with your new Mac!” Like Lazarus Long moving himself into a fresh clone every thousand years or so.
“Mmm, don’t you just love that new-clone smell?”
I’m the opposite of an early riser. Since retirement, I may stir earlier than six, but I doze until the spirit moves me (the fact that my better half is also a late sleeper helps). So 7 a.m. facing the world usually works unless there is a reason to get up sooner, such as a plane to catch, the dog is looming over me with that look saying “open the damn door to the outside or else”, or the occasional trip up to the Dark Side, where I still show up now and then just to prove that I’m not dead yet.
Since I don’t do anything more complicated than spreadsheets, word, or online wasting of money and time on my computer, I suspect two soup cans and a string would be better for my frame of mind. Plus, with Soup Can 2.0, I wouldn’t hear or see all the crud going on around me. Speaking of which, I should probably finally croak my two blogs, which I haven’t even used lately. Seems soooo yesterday.
And in a final blow to old age, I guess Mike Tyson lost to youth last night.
Herself and a succession of cats made an early riser out of me. It was a heavy lift for them, and for me, too, because I was a night owl until I bailed on The New Mexican and the 4 p.m.-1 a.m. shifts common at the morning daily newspaper in the Before-Time.
Now I struggle out of bed about a half hour after The Boss and shamble around like a White Walker for a spell until I pour enough black coffee into my carburetor to start firing on three of four cylinders.
As regards tech, I’m pulling peripherals from the 13-inch Mac as we speak, and not having a mic and two-three USB drives plugged in seems to help the auld beastie with its brain farts. Keeping the Chrome browser in its cage seems a good idea too. That thing is a memory hog.
So I probably won’t let Tim Cook set my Visa card ablaze just yet. In my Golden Years I’m a web browser, blogger, and occasional podcaster, so I don’t really need the latest and greatest. Or so I hope, anyway. I was noticing some odd behavior from the blog while posting yesterday but that could just be WeirdPress acting out again.
And there’s always going previous-generation for a “new” Mac, or refurbished, which would keep the price down. But if I jump I’m inclined to jump high to future-proof my computing as much as possible. I got 10 years and better out of these old beaters, so maybe the next new Mac will be my last, eh?
Watch that “this is my last” talk. Giving in to the dark side of the force it is. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Buying two Macs to rule them all and recycling/discarding all the legacy stuff would be the smart solution. I suggest an iMac desk top for the heavy lifting, and a iPad pro for the on the go stuff. Plus the peripherals need to save your prior work off those external drives into the iMac. Want me to come up and organize your office/studio space? We can go to the Apple store while Herself is at work and get those credit cards smokin’. I work for beer and one free meal. Easy Sleazy.
I know, we will never be smart.
We recently bought an AirBook, which has been great for travel and everyday bullshittery. I still have this monsterous home PC Desktop, since for the last quarter century, I’ve had to use one at the Bomb Factory. I was a Mac convert all those years at the U of Hawaii but the national lab job wanted PC. Now I try to contain my schizophrenia, going back and forth between the PC and the AirBook.
Hm. Interesting approach. However. …
I’ve never really engaged with iOS. Yeah, I’ve had a few iPhones and two-three iPads (still have one, a 9.7-inch iPad Pro from 2016), but they’ve always seemed geared more toward consumption than creation.
I use the iPhone as a phone (duh) and a camera and … shit, that’s about it. I don’t use the iPad at all, though I just charged it up for the heck of it to see if it still worked. When last I used the thing it was mostly for reading e-books.
As for the iMac, Apple has positioned it as its consumer/entry-level Mac since I last had one (a 2009, billed as a “prosumer” deal). That thing went sideways on me early on and not even the Apple Store could save it. I’ve distrusted the model ever since.
Apple’s next step up from the iMac is now the Mini (used to be the other way around). I like the Mini — Herself has an M1, and an Intel model from 2011 is hooked to our TV — but they’ve just redesigned the little fella and I like to use early adopters as guinea pigs. Never buy the first iteration of anything, not even from Apple.
Hal has a MacBook Air that he speaks highly of, but like the iMac it’s a consumer-level deal. He pushes paragraphs through it and never really taxes the thing with podcasts, video, or graphics.
So I keep coming back to the MacBook Pro. I don’t need the biggest and best, but the midrange model — M4 Pro, 24GB memory, 1TB storage — would probably suit me right down to the ground.
But hijo, madre, it’s a pricey little dickens. $2,399 before taxes and AppleCare. I might could settle for the base model, but considering how long I hold onto these things it might be smart to buy more Mac than I need right this minute with an eye toward future-proofing the operation here.
All this being said, since I disconnected a bunch of peripherals and shut down Chrome this 13-inch MBP seems to be humming right along. So maybe I don’t need to rush into a purchase. Black Friday awaits! Muah haah haaahhhh. …
I was coincidentally PC shopping yesterday as my Toshiba from 199mumble-mumble lacks the horsepower to run Window 11. And since Microsoft is all saber-rattling about not supporting it sometime next year, and compatibilities seem to be getting shut down. I feel Borg assimilation is inevitable.
I am a platform mixer. I’ve a PC laptop, an Android phone and this via the IPad. I thinks it’s healthy. Or just maybe that I’m a cheapskate skinflint who’d rather his shekels on bike parts, and buy the cheapest solution.
That said, I’ve gotten my money’s worth outta the thing. I’ve gone through several batteries, replaced the keyboard, ditto the charger, and even replaced the onboard spinny disc with a solid state version. Won’t be able to do any of that in the latest skinny mini PCs as everything is welded in place and therefore unreplaceable.
Herself skips merrily along from Windows to iOS to Mac to iPadOS and never misses a beat. Me, I once had a teensy Asus netbook that ran on some stripped-down version of Linux and that’s about as far as I’ve strayed from the good old Mac since that first SE back in 1989 or whenever.
Macs used to be a breeze to work on. Now, not so much, and the trend just keeps accelerating. I rebuilt a 1999 G4 Power Mac that I got for $50 and turned it into a real screamer. It still works, too. And replacing the battery in a 2012 MacBook Air is like putting a new SD card in a camera. Two years later, it’s what Other World Computing calls “complex,” and not even a “Genius” can get it right.
I have a 1TB Aura Pro X2 SSD from OWC that I can drop into this 13-inch MacBook Pro without giving myself a stroke, so maybe I’ll try that, open up a little real estate in the sumbitch. If it ends badly, what the hell, Apple keeps making new ones, amirite? They’ll even sell ’em to ya. All you need is American money!
I’ve been using Macs for twenty years now. Started with the first mini as an experiment. It was a crappy piece of hardware running an obviously superior OS. For personal use it replaced my PCs, and that mini was soon replaced with an intel version.
My employment was writing code on Windows machines, so I was os-dexterous until blessed retirement 10 Years Ago. My last windows task was removing all evidence of my existence on a work issued Windows laptop.
The Apple hardware machines are marvels. I own two M1 machines that do all i need. A mini with a large SSD for music and photo use, and an Air for portability.
The current trend to Apple Intelligence does not thrill me. I keep turning off “helpful” features. No, I do not want this comment reformatted in corporate speak, I want it to sound like me, and I worked successfully in corporate environments for many years without writing in corporate speak. One glance at a suggested rewrite of an email was enough to know that is a no go.
I hear ya. Ain’t heard a good word yet about Apple Intelligence. I’m sure it’ll get better, and I’m equally sure that I couldn’t care less. I don’t even trust human intelligence, much less machine intelligence.
I stand as part troglodyte, part Magellan. I’ve boldly waded into new tech here and there (EV’s, solar fields, DAC audio) but not on bikes or computers. If those two things are working, albeit not at whiz-bang optimum, leave em the hell alone. As others, I have held dual citizenship for many years with various Acer laptops sporting more and more ridiculous Windows “features” which are mostly just plain intrusive. And on the other side, a steady parade of Apple devices which admittedly work damn well.
However, if you want a real deterrent to buying new e-devices, work at a recycling center as I do as a volunteer. Jeezus! The tonnage of electronics we give up on is staggering and I’m sorry to report that the actual pieces of any electronics that DO get recycled are sadly minimal.
But I totally get that when your laptop slows down to a pre-mediated crawl (from the fekking software weasels) it’s time to move on. At this age, the old adage “what ya waiting for….drink the good stuff!” applies.
Well said, sir. We try to be sensible about electronica, but lord, do the engineers ever make that difficult. Forever tinkering with this, that, and the other until some trusted device turns into a paperweight. Bah, etc.
Our TV is way old, like 2011 or so, but still works just fine, for now. Stereo’s even older, a mishmash of Sony and Yamaha. As noted my “newest” Macs date to 2014, and if I’d gone for 16GB of memory and a 512GB drive in this 13-inch MacBook Pro back when I bought it, using it 10 years later to replace its big brother would’ve been a walk in the park instead of an exercise in software/hardware management.
I suspect that a lot of our recycling down here just gets chucked into an arroyo somewhere. This will come in handy after the Apocalypse when feral humans are battling the Machines and need spare parts for their zap guns.
Folks on the lookout for fresh potable water will mine the landfills for a living. Plenty of stuff there worth digging up.
But, Herb is right. It’s time to move on. And you are right. Buy more laptop than you need and keep it until you’re forced to replace. This MacBook Air, 2020 model with 8GB memory and 256GB storage is good for at least a couple years more. But, the first time it can’t handle the latest OS security upgrade, I’ll replace it. The only spot of work it sees is a little Pages stuff like set lists and songs.
He said…👍
Being selfish I want you to get state of the art everything so’s you keep the blog and podcast humming. Since I am still boycotting the news I rely on you and the other posters. Gotta keep the chuckles coming and the blood pressure down ya know.
Now there’s a fine argument. I must think of The People. They need me!
I can definitely relate to the struggle of keeping up with both technology and life’s little curveballs. It’s amazing how our once cutting-edge devices start feeling a bit outdated, especially when we’re trying to squeeze a few more years out of them. Your tech shuffle sounds all too familiar—I’ve played that game of musical laptops myself!
The way you wove together the challenges of waking up early, dealing with aging tech, and the humorous thought of Apple selling a new “you” alongside a new Mac was both entertaining and relatable. Maybe it’s the time change, the full moon, or just the march of time catching up with us, but it’s comforting to know I’m not the only one feeling this way.
If only there were an upgrade option for ourselves as straightforward as updating our gadgets! Until then, perhaps treating yourself to a new Mac might at least ease the tech frustrations. Wishing you smoother mornings and even smoother computing ahead.
Cheers!