Literrata: MacBookPro journals

Thursday, June 10, 2021

MacBookPro journals

A couple of months ago, I managed to find a mid-2012 MacBookPro I planned to soup up. I was just about to buy one last year when COVID-19 struck. That put a big wrench in things. No one wanted to meet up. Not for love, nor money—and certainly not for old MacBooks.

After a few Marketplace deals fell through at the last minute, I despaired. One seller gave her MBP to her brother at the last moment—as I was leaving to pick it up. But the real asscake was the guy who sold the MBP I had planned to purchase—during the time it took me to drive down from Sonoma to SF.

He then tried to fob off another dead MBP in its place, saying, Yeah, it works fine but the battery is dead. Yeah, no. I felt like I was in the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. I tried all the restart tricks in the book, including attempting to jumpstart it with a portable hard drive with an OS. Dead motherboard, and the battery indicator was green. After trying to sell it to me for parts, he handed me the dead MBP as a doorprize—but, hey, at least the battery was good, I swapped it out.

I am amazed by all those oily Marketplace guys offhandedly trying to fob off their lemony laptop’s age, or obfuscate its speed, or hide its lack of memory. As if I wouldn’t notice. After months of scanning ads for overpriced MBPs on Marketplace (Craigslist was useless), I finally found a likely candidate. It had to be a faster mid-2012 MacBookPro, not early-2012, not late-2012 (non-upgradable Retina). And not too expensive.

I met this guy in the Richmond Costco parking lot, he was solid, not trying to hide anything. After a cursory check, I didn’t even barter—I paid more than I wanted for his MacBook Pro—$300. But it had good bones and a fast GhZ speed. My fastest used Mac purchase ever. I didn’t even need to run the usual checks.

Besides, he had also upgraded it to Catalina at my request. That was the deal clincher. He had no idea that it would even run Catalina. As I put it through its paces, he looked at it anew. I was afraid he’d change his mind right there in the parking lot. I paid him off so fast, I forgot to get a bill of sale. Alas, I needed Catalina to run TurboTax. It seem the only reason I ever upgrade my MacBooks is to run tax software. A sad state of affairs.

I bought the mid-2012 MBP knowing I would immediately toss both the memory sticks and hard drive. The new MBP was more than a tad sluggish with the original hard drive—maxing out the memory did not speed things up as much as I had hoped, Gawd I hate those cursed spinning beachballs. Crashed Finder. Probably why the guy was selling it, it was rather sluggish as well as long in tooth—also it can’t run the latest OS, Big Sur.

So, I swapped the OEM Toshiba drive for my old hybrid Seagate hard drive from the 2010 MacBook, and got a significant speed boost. Besides I abhor Toshiba hard drives. Circa 2000, I lost significant data—seven months worth of poems and photos as I was backing them up—and it was a NEW Toshiba drive, one day under warranty expiration. But I digress. I swapped out the old memory on the 2012 MBP as well—it was definitely better—but not great.

So, I opted to buy faster memory from OWD, and treated it to a 1TB 6G solid state drive as the price had dropped significantly. If the year 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that ya only live once. You can never have too big a hard drive, or too much memory. Both upgrades were under $200. So a blazingly fast MBP with last year’s OS was had for under $500 which is still well under current market price—plus I had the satisfaction knowing that the MBP was solid.

I partitioned the solid state hard drive to support three operating systems: Mountain Lion (it came with Loin—the worst OS ever, because of the 64-bit architecture, it can’t run Snow Leopard…I tried and got a white screen of death), High Sierra, just in case, and, Catalina. I could’ve eliminated High Sierra, which I actually like. But I prefer Catalina. Sweet OS. The single-most significant speed boost was from the solid state drive, not from maxed-out memory sticks. Surprise. I had proof positive.

The very last OS that the mid-2012 MacBookPro can handle is Catalina, no Big Sur, and it’s also the very last MacBookPro you can upgrade yourself. At the end of 2012, Apple began incorporating the solid state MacBook Air technology into the MacBook Pros—hard drives and memory sticks are soldered in. No more tinkering under the hood. Catalina is the first OS I’ve actually liked since Snow Leopard. Ironically I’m still using my souped up 2010 MBP, because, well, it has Snow Leopard.

Margretta’s drunken headless 2011 MBP that I mentioned earlier in this blog, is still functioning as a quasi-desktop, but it sometimes hangs, and has seriously weird mouse quirks, it also seems to want my glass of chardonnay, so I mostly use it from afar—for watching movies on the big lavender tinted Apple LED screen. I keep a flyswatter handy for when it tries to snag my wine. It’s like Cthulhu on a dry drunk.

The latest Apple iteration, the 2020 MacBookPro is half the weight of its predecessors, it’s more like a MacBook Air—everything is solid state. I will eventually need to adapt and adopt. Yes, I am already eyeing my next MacBookPro purchase. But I will also mourn, as I will need to leave my tinkering ways behind. But not this year, and maybe not the next year either. Keeping obsolete technology alive long past its death knell date is what I do best. Right, Steve Jobs? Take another bite outta that, Apple.