I find it funny how badly designed 2011 MacBookPros were, I'm cross-compiling cups for my PowerPC machine now and as there is no Void binary repo for PowerPC it involves building a lot of stuff from source, right now it's building LLVM so it can truly utilize 100% CPU. And guess what? Its running off the battery! 🤯
They've put a CPU in this thing that 85W power supply can't sustain! And I'm not using the discrete GPU now — because it's fried, theoretically it could be even worse than that!
This is not new for Apple.
Apple's business model is this: we ship you older hardware, but we totally control the ecosystem, so doing simple tasks is de-enshittified.
It is great for 90% of the people 90% of the time, at a markup that few really should pay.
In addition, older hardware is more stable.
@amerika At that time hardware was decent, I'm typing this on a Mac Pro only 2 years older than this laptop and it's an amazing machine, it's been running all these years and I've never even changed thermal paste in it😅 Still runs perfectly!
These "unibody" laptops were the beginning of their dimise, MacBookAir was the harbinger of course — never got what this model was for, you coulnd't plug a soundcard into it, there was no Firewire, basically just an overpowered netbook, but people loved it 😏
@amerika This model was particularly bad because they came with faulty GPUs, Apple refused to acknowledge the problem for five years (!), then,had started a replacement program. Mine worked perfectly despite me using it a lot, but in a month after the program was over… We were doing something in the studio and I had noticed some graphical artifacts — didn't pay attention, and the next day it was dead 🤦
Well, it still kinda works with Intel integrated card, but I still hate it 🤭
There's a pattern here, and it is why I left Apple decades ago.
Their userbase is fanatical and tolerates abuse.
Therefore, the abuse continues.
They make some cool stuff, but one must be careful not to get roped into their product model entirely. It's much, much more open now than it was in the 1990s.
@amerika Year, exactly, it's the rule of thumb in general — to avoid vendor lock-ins. This particular model was the last straw for me dealing with Apple😄
Thunderbolt display I've bought with it was also bad, not exceptionally bad like the laptop, but still had problems that never got fixed, like not waking up from sleep together with laptop it was connected to — so you had to re-plug it… For this price? How about no, thank you! Got rid of it when GPU died, didn't work with integrated one anyway.
@amerika I've got rid of most of my Intel Macs, this one was considered completely dead by me until I revived it a couple of months ago. I still have Mac Pro though and two 30" display — these work perfectly.
And I still have a couple of PowerPC ones — late PPC Macs were the best computers ever, my Pleroma is hosted on a G4 MacMini — it runs 24/7 and the only thing I have ever replaced in it was the hard drive.
PPC Macs had issues too like leaky cooling in G5 quads, but most were rock solid.
@amerika Brand loyalty is a bad thing, one of the major things that had made Apple attractive was that all models had Firewire — it was the only good interface for serious audio as USB cards were eating up CPU and those weren't yet so powerful. Nowadays it's no longer a problem — there is Thunderbolt and USB isn't as bad as it used to be anymore. But it used to be like a lock-in, when you start thinking of getting another audio interface, you were usually like: "Oh, fuck it, Apple it is" 😄
PPC had a lot of potential, sort of like the DEC Alphas. Funny how we are still running 8086...
@m0xee
I sort of want a user bill of rights for hardware.
Gear should be repairable, parts should stay in stock, and software/data should not disappear from the internet.
Companies think this loses them money, but I doubt there is much to that.
Having people see your older gear still running may be the best advertising you will ever get.