Too many hobbies, not enough focus
The long-rumored low-cost MacBook was released last week as the MacBook Neo. It’s a 13” laptop based on an iPhone chip and offers 8 GB RAM, 256 GB storage, and four color options starting at $599. I’ll post my thoughts about it in a bit after some of the reviews come out, but today I’d like …
I bought an M1 MacBook Air in 2020 for $1,249. It provided a significant performance boost over my 2016 MacBook Pro, even when running applications that weren't optimized for it. Since then. Apple has released four more generations of its M-series Apple Silicon, nearly doubling performance, but that M1 MacBook Air is still on sale. Not on Apple’s website …
As summer winds into fall I've been doing a mix of things: a bit of organization and a lot of customization. Notion I’ve been using Google Sheets to keep track of my retro museum for at least a decade. I inventory what I buy to understand what I own, what I want to own, and …
I really love a small laptop. I’ve owned many Apple laptops and my favorites have been on the smaller side - the 12” PowerBook G4, 13” MacBook Pro, and 14” MacBook Pro. I never owned any of the MacBook Airs because I always wanted the higher performance of the Pros, but I always found them …
It's becoming a busy season again for the Mac Museum. Here are some of my recent finds. 2009 MacBook Pro - $FREE I found this at the Dover Recycle Center in a bin of miscellaneous electronics including TVs, printers, and some microwaves. It was very dirty and looked as if it had been kept outside …
I have a growing collection of retrocomputing equipment – desktops, laptops, displays, disk drives, storage media, PDAs, music players, phones, tablets, CPUs, memory, books, marketing materials, magazines, and more. I go through phases of acquiring , phases of experiencing, and phases of sharing. I’ve been acquiring and experiencing recently, and now it's time for sharing. This …
A couple months ago I posted about my 2013 Mac Pro serving dual purpose as a museum item and my cloud backup machine. It’s done that job extremely well but it’s already being replaced by another Mac mini, one with an M4 chip, in fact. It's like an Apple TV... but wider... and taller... and …
I bought my MacBook Pro with a M2 Pro chip less than 2 years ago and I'm replacing it with a new one. Why? I'm trying out a new service called Upgraded, which is essentially the iPhone Upgrade program, but for Mac hardware. Upgraded isn't run by Apple, but it might as well be. It …
There are times when items in my Mac Museum cross over and provide function in my real life. One example is the Mac mini I bought as a backup server – I didn't have the 2010 design in my collection yet and I actually use it for regular tasks. It runs the Backblaze client on macOS …
I've had success installing both CF-to-IDE adapters and 2.5" SSD-to-IDE drives in my older computers, but those only cover about ⅔ of my collection. The rest of my machines, Macs from the late '80s and early '90s, don't use IDE at all; they use SCSI – an older and more expensive interface. Replacing SCSI drives …
Relatively Ambitious 