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diff --git a/html/blog/2024-11-18+My_Mac_Journey+computers+lifestyle.tmpl.html b/html/blog/2024-11-18+My_Mac_Journey+computers+lifestyle.tmpl.html index 66669ee..aba4677 100644 --- a/html/blog/2024-11-18+My_Mac_Journey+computers+lifestyle.tmpl.html +++ b/html/blog/2024-11-18+My_Mac_Journey+computers+lifestyle.tmpl.html @@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ <p>And like the devotion to a God in religion, I was steadfast in my thinking and position regarding computer hardware and operating systems.</p>
<h3>Passage of Time</h3>
<p>As the old phrase goes, time heals all wounds. And in the case of relentless consumerism, time makes the old worthless. And this worthlessness is good news for people like me who look back on "the good old days" of tech and try to recreate them by collecting various bits of hardware. I was able to purchase a 2008 MacBook for under $100, and it was my first venture into macOS. Of course, it was old, pretty slow, and did not run the latest version of the operating system. What it did, though, was bring me closer to the reason Mac users are devoted to their machines. The hardware experience, even on that "low-end" model, was superb. No touchpad felt as good, and only a pre-chicklet ThinkPad keyboard could top the typing experience. Its precision and density gave the plastic product the feel of a PC double its cost, and that was just their low-end model. It only got better as you move up to the aluminum MacBook Pro models.</p>
- <p>Of course, I still envied my mentors' MacBook Pros with their Retina Display and slim chassis. My whithering MacBook couldn't be used for much more than web-browsing with its measly 4GB of RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo, and bastard Nvidia GPU (I don't mean this as an insult. The <a href="https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-what-happened.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Nvidia and Apple history</a> is a storied one). Apple has been incredibly effective at winning the consumerism model, though. Products that are no longer supported and actively kicked into the past by Apple's software development strategies are still sought after by end-users, keeping prices high years after a product's EOL. Good news for Apple. Bad news for people like me looking for extremely cheap, yester-year systems. I reverted to Hackintoshing, the act of installing macOS on unsupported hardware and EOL Macs. This wasn't quite as seamless as a true Mac, but even handicapped like my T460s with a custom reverse-engineered Intel WiFi driver (not by me of course) and hackitosh quirks, it was still a better experience than Windows.</p>
+ <p>Of course, I still envied my mentors' MacBook Pros with their Retina Display and slim chassis. My withering MacBook couldn't be used for much more than web-browsing with its measly 4GB of RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo, and bastard Nvidia GPU (I don't mean this as an insult. The <a href="https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-what-happened.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Nvidia and Apple history</a> is a storied one). Apple has been incredibly effective at winning the consumerism model, though. Products that are no longer supported and actively kicked into the past by Apple's software development strategies are still sought after by end-users, keeping prices high years after a product's EOL. Good news for Apple. Bad news for people like me looking for extremely cheap, yester-year systems. I reverted to Hackintoshing, the act of installing macOS on unsupported hardware and EOL Macs. This wasn't quite as seamless as a true Mac, but even handicapped like my T460s with a custom reverse-engineered Intel WiFi driver (not by me of course) and hackitosh quirks, it was still a better experience than Windows.</p>
<h3>Finally on Useful Hardware</h3>
<p>Fast forward a couple of years, and I was no longer using macOS on anything, including Hackintoshed computers. My design classes require stable, fast computers, and anything I owned that was Mac or Mac-adjacent wasn't that. I doubled down on the use of Windows to be able to use Autodesk Alias which can't be run on Linux. At the same time, however, this is an art school, and Mac is an industry standard for some disciplines, so there is an abundance of hardware around campus. If you know me, you know where I'm going with this. At an IT infrastructure sale, there were many retired 2012-2015 era Macs for sale, mostly under $200. I went and picked up my MacBook Pro for $100 and a 2012 Mac Pro tower for $10 because they thought it was broken (all it needed was an OS re-install). Finally, I owned a competent Mac, if not right on the edge of dropped support. Still, an i7-4980HQ, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and a decent IGP (Intel Iris Pro 5200) is nothing to scoff at for light digital modeling in Blender or Photoshop work.</p>
<p>I used the Mac tower as a supplemental PC for a while but quickly found it needed a more modern version of macOS. The MacBook ended up as the Liberal Arts computer, as I still needed certain applications on Windows and the GPU power for the project I was working on. The year ended, and the tower stayed home for the Fall 2024 semester.</p>
@@ -39,4 +39,4 @@ Intel Iris Pro 5200 1536 MB VRAM <p>All that said, this is still an impressive device for its age, and I'll report back when I retire it from daily use in about a week.</p>
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