windowsrookie

My grandmother with a 2015 27" iMac and a 2017 12" Macbook just replaced both devices with a 13" Macbook Air and a 27" Dell USB-C monitor. She would have preferred buying a MacBook Air + a 27" iMac, but Apple stubbornly refuses to make one for some reason. The studio display has an A19 chip in it already (more powerful than a MacBook neo!) why not just make it run MacOS?

Opencore legacy allows you to install newer versions of MacOs on old Macs. Or Linux runs just fine on the older Intel Macs.

I’ve been using Time Machine with my synology nas for ~5 years. Works pretty well. I’d say once every 2 months it looses connection but seems to re-connect itself after a few minutes.

Have you considered open core legacy? I am running macOS Sonoma nearly perfectly on a 2010 iMac.

1. I always know where my box of cables is, because it’s never moved from its location . 2. It takes up less than two shoeboxes of space, which is hardly anything in my home. 3. If I need the cable right now, I don’t have to wait 24 hours. 4. It costs me nothing to keep them.

Interesting how people view shopping at Costco differently. My goal is to spend the least amount of time as possible in there.

What? Like you plan a day of shopping at Costco? That's insane to me.

I have never spent more than 30 minutes inside a Costco.

I do a similar thing. Stop at Costco to fill the gas tank, then buy a few things with no shopping cart.

Prevents wasting money on things I don't need, and makes the trip quick.

"most americans" absolutely do not have "an order arriving every other day".

I order amazon on average once every 3 weeks. My mother (who has full time career and is under 60 years old) has never used amazon. Other members of my family also seem to rarely use amazon.

Also, having an order arriving every other day is incredibly wasteful.

I also agree. I'd say we're at the last few years of Core 2 Duo machines being usable. Anything before them is just not worth keeping around. Not only are earlier machines slow, but are going to be pretty energy inefficient. Buying a newer system might actually save you money when you factor electricity costs.

For example, a 2009-2012 era Mac Pro draws more power in sleep than a modern Mac mini/macbook Air draws under full load.

They would work but I'm not sure it's worth it. The 11" Air had a pretty terrible screen, and the models with 8GB of RAM are more expensive than I think they are worth. Plus Macbooks of this era are going to need a battery replacement, so your going to have to invest $70-100 on top of the price of buying the Macbook. You're likely going to be $200-300 invested into a 10 year old macbook.

Also keep in mind the 11" MacBook air wasn't that small. The Macbook neo with a 13" screen has almost the same dimensions.

For $300-400 you can buy a decent brand new chromebook, and running linux is officially supported on them. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en

The chuwi minibook is also an option, but I don't know how well linux is supported.

With laptops of this era you only have two sodimm slots and DDR2 4GB RAM modules were quite expensive when they were new. So even still today they are more expensive than you would think. I sold mine for $25/each a few weeks ago.

Also some laptops of this era didn't support more than 4-6GB of RAM in the firmware. I know there are several models of early intel macbooks that you can physically install 8GB of RAM but they will not recognize it.

On the other hand, I have a 2010 iMac with all 4 DDR3 sodimm slots full giving it 32GB of RAM. It was a "just for fun" project before the AI prices. Those era iMacs are fully upgradeable (CPU, RAM, and GPU). Swapped in an i7 CPU, AMD m4000 GPU, and an SSD. Runs linux mint great.

Tim Cook stated Apple is eating some of the price increases. I'm guessing they chose not to with the Apple TV.

Apple has been using LPDDR in the MacBooks since at least 2015. I remember it was one of the complaint of the 2016-2017 MacBook Pros. They were still using LPDDR3 because LPDDR4 wasn't ready for production yet (despite regular DDR4 being available). The 2018 MacBook Pro's finally switched to LPDDR4.

Most of the Red Hot Chili Peppers hit songs are pushing 30 years old. Their songs have already hit their peak popularity and will only be declining from now on.

This along with AI generated music flooding the market. An AI generated song has already been #1 on the iTunes Charts. AI generated music is only going to get better and more popular.

Future TV shows/movies/etc. will likely just be generating their own music, rather than paying royalties for "hit songs".

AI companies bought up all the NAND manufacturing capacity, limiting the available manufacturing capacity for consumer products. These data centers also use hard drives for some of their data storage.

Ars Technica Made a guide:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/what-i-do-to-clean-u...

I'm not really sure why your neo is performing better than the M4.

The M4 and the neo share the same CPU architecture but the M4 has 4 performance cores at 4.4ghz, while the neo has 2 performance cores at 4ghz.

The neo also does not have any CPU heatsink so it thermal throttles after only a few seconds:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/MacBo...

There's really no reason to be scared working on your car. I have no formal training and I have never paid a shop to fix my car in my 20 years of car ownership.

The mechanical parts of a car haven't changed much in the last 25 years, and are easy to understand just by watching a few YouTube videos.

The electronics have certainly gotten more complex, but if you can understand basic computer networking and low voltage electronics it's still quite simple.

If you are interested in learning how to fix your own car, there is a great guy who runs an auto repair business on YouTube and his tagline is: "Remember folks If I can do it, you can do it."

https://www.youtube.com/@SouthMainAuto/videos

Seriously, I have several mac laptops dating back to 2004 and they all have less wear than that.

People making $80-90K can live a similar lifestyle to the people making $125K+, they just aren't saving any money. I know people that do this, live their whole life with less than $5k in the bank.

The reason it is thick is because it supports 65W charging. Apple did the same with the USB-C cables that shipped with the pre-MagSafe MacBooks. It was a thicker cable that supported 100w charging but was only USB 2.0.

Black Magic gives video editing software that actual professionals use away for free. They sell professional grade equipment that regular consumers can afford. They also offer a ton of training videos teaching you how to edit professionally....for free. A ton of independent filmmakers have started their career using Black Magic software/devices.

They are absolutely not anything like oracle.

The profit margin is probably better than you think. The iPhone 17e sells for the same price, and the neo is certainly less expensive to manufacture.

"How many M1 mac will still be functional in 20 years?"

Probably quite a few, MacBooks have had soldered SSD's for over 10 years now. My 2018 McBook Pro still has a perfectly functioning SSD. I still see people using 2015 and older MacBooks all the time. There is no widespread SSD failure issue after 10+ years of Apple soldering the SSD's.

For most people the SSD's are lasting longer than the useful life of the device.

The reality is most 8GB M1 Macs are still working just fine 6 years later. Power users know they need more than 8GB of RAM and will buy a MacBook Air or Pro with 16GB+.

The MacBook neo is for students, grandparents, travel, etc.

Hell, even if it dies after 6 years it was still a better experience than using a $500-600 windows PC and the cost comes out to ~$8/month spread over 6 years.

You originally stated "Also there are countless reports of bricked M1 8GB MacBook Airs that are bricked because the SSD used up it's write cycles"

Do you have a source for these "countless bricked SSD's"?

Apple has been soldering the SSD into MacBooks for over 10 years now, and most 10 year old MacBooks still have a working SSD.

I replied to somebody else earlier, but the 11" air and the new neo are very close in physical size.

The 11" MacBook Air was 11.8" x 7.56" the neo is 11.71" x 8.12".

Definitely not typical, the 11" MacBooks had terrible screens by modern standards and have no hardware acceleration for modern video codecs.

It really is too bad they never upgraded that 1366x768 LCD in the 11" MacBooks otherwise I think they could be great linux devices today.