Hey everyone!
It has been a good while since I last posted, but I have still been tinkering with old Macs in the background. Some things never change.
This post is really just a catch up on what I have been doing over the past month and, more importantly, my latest Mac purchase. I am still not entirely sure whether I have lost my marbles 😁
About two years ago, I replaced my Lenovo Miix 520 with a Lenovo V130. The Miix had terrible battery life, usually an hour and a half at best, and I kept drifting back to my 2012 MacBook Pro. It was slower, but it gave me around three hours on Linux Mint and felt far more dependable. So the V130 became my new laptop, except it did not.
Last week I was walking through the park with my rucksack and thought, this MBP is not exactly light. But whenever I head out to Costa to do some writing, it is always the MBP I grab. I know it will give me a solid three hours on a charge, so I am not constantly watching the battery percentage drop. The V130, even with better battery life than the Miix, still only gives me about an hour and a half these days. The battery is at roughly sixty seven percent health. After looking into replacements, even a brand new battery would only push it to around two and a half hours. The old MBP wins again.
A few of my friends have Intel MacBook Airs from various eras, and I think that nudged me toward considering one. As one of them said, and I have to agree, they make genuinely good Linux laptops, just like my MacBook Pro does. I apologise in advance to any macOS purists.
So I spent the past week watching videos. Most of them said do not buy one, get a newer laptop instead. I even watched a six year old LinusTechTips video where, to be fair, he said the 2017 Air was not a bad machine, but still recommended buying a modern budget laptop. The thing is, when I looked up his suggested alternative, the Dell Inspiron 7000, the battery life was nowhere near as good as the Air.
My needs are pretty simple. I want long battery life, light web browsing, OpenOffice, and maybe the ability to run RetroArch. My MBP can already do all of that, and the 2017 Air has a better CPU. So I am hoping I have not done anything too daft by finally biting the bullet and picking up a 2017 model.
Anyways, if you're using a MBA, let me know as it would be reassuring to know I'm not crackers, buying a nine year old laptop that was considered out of date at the time it was released. I'm not panicking honest 😄
It has been a good while since I last posted, but I have still been tinkering with old Macs in the background. Some things never change.
This post is really just a catch up on what I have been doing over the past month and, more importantly, my latest Mac purchase. I am still not entirely sure whether I have lost my marbles 😁
About two years ago, I replaced my Lenovo Miix 520 with a Lenovo V130. The Miix had terrible battery life, usually an hour and a half at best, and I kept drifting back to my 2012 MacBook Pro. It was slower, but it gave me around three hours on Linux Mint and felt far more dependable. So the V130 became my new laptop, except it did not.
Last week I was walking through the park with my rucksack and thought, this MBP is not exactly light. But whenever I head out to Costa to do some writing, it is always the MBP I grab. I know it will give me a solid three hours on a charge, so I am not constantly watching the battery percentage drop. The V130, even with better battery life than the Miix, still only gives me about an hour and a half these days. The battery is at roughly sixty seven percent health. After looking into replacements, even a brand new battery would only push it to around two and a half hours. The old MBP wins again.
A few of my friends have Intel MacBook Airs from various eras, and I think that nudged me toward considering one. As one of them said, and I have to agree, they make genuinely good Linux laptops, just like my MacBook Pro does. I apologise in advance to any macOS purists.
So I spent the past week watching videos. Most of them said do not buy one, get a newer laptop instead. I even watched a six year old LinusTechTips video where, to be fair, he said the 2017 Air was not a bad machine, but still recommended buying a modern budget laptop. The thing is, when I looked up his suggested alternative, the Dell Inspiron 7000, the battery life was nowhere near as good as the Air.
My needs are pretty simple. I want long battery life, light web browsing, OpenOffice, and maybe the ability to run RetroArch. My MBP can already do all of that, and the 2017 Air has a better CPU. So I am hoping I have not done anything too daft by finally biting the bullet and picking up a 2017 model.
Anyways, if you're using a MBA, let me know as it would be reassuring to know I'm not crackers, buying a nine year old laptop that was considered out of date at the time it was released. I'm not panicking honest 😄
