My 7-year-old MacBook Pro is still perfect for my needs. No, it doesn't run as fast as it should considering my crazy workload, but it seems silly to replace it just so I can get things done a little faster. Besides, new MacBook Pros don't have Thunderbolt ports, "regular" USB ports, an HDMI port, or an SD card slot. You know, all those things that "professionals" need in their "pro" laptops to get shit done. New Apple laptops also don't have MagSafe power adapters, which is about as idiotic as it gets considering Apple beat us over the head with what an amazing innovation it was and how it keeps your laptop from being damaged...
Seriously, who the hell is deciding this crap? Tim Cook? Jonathan Ivy? It's as if they think that professional-grade laptops are just big phones with a physical keyboard that should look pretty. Instead of an essential tool that, by its nature, has to be mobile, powerful, and flexible so that it can adapt to work in numerous situation. Like, I dunno, BEING ABLE TO PLUG INTO A PRINTER OR A SCANNER THAT'S MORE THAN TWO YEARS OLD WITHOUT A DAMN ADAPTER!
If I didn't have everything invested in the Apple ecosystem, I would seriously tell them to go fuck themselves and buy a laptop which has the features a professional actually needs to do their job. It's not like MacOS X is vastly superior to Windows any more, so who cares? But, alas...
All that being said, you can understand why it chaps my ass that my old MacBook Pro is failing.
Used to be it would randomly reboot sometimes when I run a demanding app like Photoshop.
In the last couple of months, it's just randomly reboots because it feels like it.
I thought that replacing the hard drive would fix it (hey, it worked for my iMac), but that's not been the case. I think it may actually have something to do with the video memory being bad. Not entirely unexpected for a laptop that's 7-years-old and is worked to death daily, but given that I'm going to have to replace it with a pricey new MacBook Pro that has less features than what I have now (and will likely be of lesser quality*)... I'm more than a little upset.
One more thing to be mad about, I guess.
I just hope that I can get used to the new model and not be plagued with buyer's remorse.
And speaking of buyer's remorse... I read an article on CNN Business this morning: $1.3 trillion and 7,000 finance jobs are leaving Britain because of Brexit. That sounds like a lot. But look at that headline again. Those numbers only cover finance jobs and banking assets. The final tally will be vastly... vastly... higher once all jobs and all industries are considered.
When the measure to leave the E.U. was initially proposed, I thought that there was no way British citizens would ever agree to it. The benefits of staying in far outweighed the negatives. But lying liars duped the populace into voting for something that ended up fucking them over**, and now the consequences will be had. I have no idea what post-Brexit Britain will look like, but it doesn't seem like it's going to be pretty. I sure hope they can recover sooner rather than later, regardless of what ends up happening.
If only everybody would have known what was in store with their "LEAVE" vote. Maybe if they had just watched a video like this one before voting (and, yes, I know the video would have to fall through a time vortex)...
Oh well.
Time waits for no man. Or country. So the world will keep spinning regardless.
*Case in point... here's a guy who bought a FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR iMAC which was broken by an APPLE-BRANDED $80 VESA mount, for which he received abysmal support...
Used to be that Apple provided quality for the money. But anymore? Apple crap is just as shitty as everybody else's crap.
**Sound familiar, my fellow Americans?
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The Apple stuff—awful. I wanted to get a Mac Mini to use as a workstation with 2 monitors, like I’ve let my paralegals do for years, but the price has tripled for some reason! And the new MacBook Pros don’t have the ports I need to use multiple monitors. Ended up getting one a few years old and just upgrading the RAM and solid state hard drive; the only reason I didn’t keep working off my 2011 one is it won’t allow the latest OS, which my case mgmt software requires. Frustrating.
My iMac has been a little wobbly, and I”m dreading the day it bellies up on me (it’s almost 9 years old now, I think) because the new ones seem to have a LOT more problems. Actually, supposedly, the ones after mine started having issues (mine is a 2011). I just need it to hang on for 30 years, I don’t see why that’s too much to ask! 🙂
My 2011 iMac 27″ BTO died this weekend, though full “unrepairable” diagnosis did not occur until Tuesday. I’d already been contemplating replacing it and was struggling between a Mac Mini or another iMac 27″. The refreshed iMacs tilt things a bit more in that direction. For the configuration I’m looking at, the iMac runs about $750 more, but adding a nice 4K 27″ display to the Mini cuts that differential to $200. At that point, it seems like a no-brainer to splurge for the built-in 5K display. Additionally, this gives me the option of going for the 2TB Fusion drive, though I’m a bit trepidatious. I upgraded the old iMac to a 1TB SSD three years ago, which really breathed new life into it.
I had three iMacs with Fusion Drives. Every one of them had to be replaced after causing numerous problems. Now I spend the money and go full-SSD and buy a large external drive for storage (preferably a mirrored RAID so if one drive goes, I’ve got the data on another and don’t have to pay for my cloud backup to be sent).
Grumble.
I heard some rumblings about Fusion drives working better with the new filesystem, but I have no real data. I got the 1TB SSD from the old iMac moved to a USB 3 enclosure, so there’s that. I already have an external drive for most of my video content, but the 1TB internal was still close to full. I think I must still have my Photos library on there. Unfortunately, this leaves me uncertain how big an internal SSD I’d need. $500 extra (compared to 2TB Fusion) for the 1TB just doesn’t seem worth it, but another $100 for the 512GB is probably better than saving $100 for the 256GB.
I’ll probably order my new system today. I’m waiting until I got by the repair shop to pick up the old SSD as they indicated that they might be able to offer me a deal if I purchased the new system through them. I could have them put the old SSD in a new iMac, but that would void the warranty.
I pretty much put all my current work on DropBox so it will be available to whatever computer I’m using. I have the pro plan which means I can leave everything in the cloud and DropBox will download what I need automatically when it’s called for. The upshot of this is that my computers rarely have any data on them. Old projects are taken out of DropBox and archived… but are still available from Backblaze as a backup restore if I ever need them while away from the office. All my images (which comprise a massive amount of data) are on a RAID in two places. Having very little data on my machines has been liberating. It just doesn’t matter if a computer dies or a hard drive crashes. There’s nothing there that can’t be replaced… most times automatically thanks to iCloud, Backblaze, and Dropbox. Because of this, I always just get the 500GB drive and save the money.
I have the 2TB iCloud plus iCloud Photo Library, but I don’t currently have most of my video stored there and I’m not really using any other cloud storage or backup. Notably, my Time Machine drive crapped out last week, so having my iMac die before I resolved that was somewhat unnerving. I’m not sure there’s actually anything on there that isn’t in iCloud, though.
That said, I like having some semblance of a “canonical” copy of my Photos (and purchased Music, I guess) on my iMac.
FYI, I took your advice and went with the 512GB SSD.
I’m sure there are people who have great luck with Fusion Drives. I am not one of them, 0 for 3, so I don’t think that’s a bad decision! 🙂
Yes, my MacBook has really been slow as hell and I don’t know what to do about it. I get the spinning rainbow buffer thing so often it makes me twitch. And that’s just typing in my browser. I’m not even in the realm of doing anything like you’re doing. I’ve tried Googling ways to speed it up, but haven’t found anything that seems to help. Not even prolific and gratuitous swearing.