Even though macbooks are 100x times easier to work on than their phones or tablets, in a matter of seconds you can either short something on the board, break one of those extremely fragile connectors or break the cooling pipe entirely (the cooling pipe should not be bent under any circumstances), resulting in you either trashing the device to point of no return, or searching later for local shops that have donor parts to repair your device.
If you feel that opening and changing the thermal paste is the only way, then find someone local who does phone repairs and ask them to do it for a couple of bucks.
I applied only noise cancelling headphones I don’t want to be fiddling with MacBook internals and I feel like it would be a temporary fix anyway.
But honestly, the noise is so annoying that it’s unbearable over several hours every day. I believe it ultimately drains your personal energy and makes you nauseous, it’s not healthy to be exposed to a constant noise like that.
Now my M3 is absolutely silent. Even though iStat says the fans are running at 1500rpm I cannot hear them at all. It’s a heavenly relief after the last couple of months.
I selected 2-3 years but in practice it’s that or when it breaks, whichever happens first.
I think I must have offended the hardware gods in a past life, though—I do use macs, but end up having some issue every 2.5 years or so where the Apple store tells me the price of fixing is greater than that of an upgrade.
Whenever a thread like this comes up, I guess. I had been perfectly content with my 12 yo desktop but ever since reading this thread I’ve been browsing newegg and amazon looking to build an upgrade.
I said before that I didn’t have plans to upgrade/change my current setup. But these last few days I was shopping for a mini pc to use for a home server, and man, these things are so powerful nowadays.
I’m considering now buying two of them and use one to replace my current desktop which uses a huge full tower (Thermaltake Core X71).
Has anyone used one of these new minipcs as their main desktop? I’m very interested in the Intel NUC 13 PRO and some with the latest Ryzen CPUs.
I settled for a meager Dell 3060 mini form factor PC (small thick book factor) for a NAS and a PiHole and it’s performing more than adequately. I am considering adding a media server and CI/CD to it because the i3 CPU and the SATA III SSD turned out to be performing much better than I expected (my ZFS pool is on external HDDs connected via USB 3.0 connectors).
That being said, I am still drooling over some of the R1000 / V1000 AMD mini PCs that have dual 10 GbE cards… But I am not willing to sink 2000+ EUR on a single machine.
My first mac(an M2 Macbook Air) broke after less than a month of use
Replaced it with an m2 pro for the same price and I’ve been using that since. Before that I used a Lenovo E15 gen 2, still works great except for the battery life and screen quality. Used it for work for 2 years(2021-2023).
I built my desktop pc in 2016 and it still works great to this day, I only had to upgrade the ram(16gb → 32gb) and only now the gpu(1050ti → 3060ti)
All of them work great and neither was fully replaced. I upgrade as often as I need and keep spare equipment/cash at hand because any of then can spontaneously break.
My personal machine? My last one (a MBP) I purchased in early 2015, and then replaced it with an M1 Max in late 2022, so I ticked 7-8 years I plan on keeping this Mac for a decade or “until it breaks” - if I had my time again I probably would have bought a cheaper MBP so I could justify replacing it a bit sooner (given there’s already M2s and M3s and…), but ah well.
Work seems to be three or four years - I got a new 2019 MBP when I started there in early 2020, and it got replaced with a downcycled M1 about six months ago.
Funnily enough my last computer before this one lasted me 8 years, although I never intended to keep it that long. From the 5 year mark I bought a new MBP every year but just didn’t feel they were a big enough jump (performance wise) and I just didn’t have that same feeling towards them, they were pretty uninspiring and lacklustre. It was only when they launched the refreshed 2019 model that I thought it was finally worth the upgrade. But that honeymoon period didn’t last long…
I think a lot of us got caught with the last of the Intel machines, but it was either that or wait another year for Apple Silicon to come out and then another year at least for them to be fully caught up/useable. That would have made my computer before it 10 years old and it had already slowed considerably that I don’t think I could have coped with another two years of it!
I currently have a new MBP on loan (not because my Mac has failed but because my monitor did - and I wanted to check compatibility of the new monitor with the newer machines) and from what I’ve seen, the new Apple Silicon Macs are not getting throttled (by that I mean becoming more obsolete with each OS updated) anywhere near as much as Intel machines were - so while I am annoyed that they didn’t care more about those of us with Intel Macs I can sort of see why they want to focus on Apple Silicon moving forward. I think my time with an M3 reminded how nice a good/relatively new Mac is - it definitely makes you feel a little
That’s actually a good idea, when I retired this Mac I may put Linux on it!
Make sure you don’t kill your CPU
Ah yeah, I forgot about the keyboard debacle!
How do you manage with them slowing down with each consecutive update? (Pre Apple Silicon anyway.) I am hoping we don’t see the same with their new Macs - and next Mac I get I am going to film/time it doing everyday tasks so I can compare with each consecutive updated
It’s the quality of life aspects they hit the most because they are the things that get people to upgrade. So not computational heavy tasks, but everyday things like opening and closing tabs (it takes a second to close a tab on my machine now!) how fast pages load in safari (lightning fast on the machine I have on loan, noticeably slower on my own Mac). How long programs and files take to load, etc - all the things that shouldn’t really change because they aren’t intensive tasks.
Sounds like a beast! How much does something like that cost?
My nephew has always bought Dell laptops and they’ve always lasted him a good while. I also really like Dell monitors - some of my favourite monitors have been Dell and touch wood they have never broken down. I still use one that’s well over a decade old for CCTV!
Ah nice! You should blog about how to do that/set it up for Elixir dev
I was going to suggest a power bank - surprising how good they are now! (Also glad to see you’re doing ok Artur!)
Nice! I loved my 11" MBA! It’s probably been one of my favourite machines and I used it for dev and design work and it was surprisingly capable! It was arguably the most ‘personal’ machine I have ever owned.
Are these big machines noisy? I couldn’t work in a noisy environment and it’s something I hate about my current Mac (when the fans come on).
That is not a bad strategy - you often find people upgrade continuously so you can find good bargains. Amazon warehouse is supposed to be excellent as well - I know someone who bought an iPad Pro and they said it was like brand new! (That inspired me to buy a SDS drill from Amazon warehouse as I figured it was going to get dirty anyway - and it arrived shrink wrapped in the original box and like new!)
What do you do with the old machines? Trade-in?
The new keyboards are pretty good imo… but quoting to ask, what kind of screen management bugs?
Same!
Though I don’t think Apple have been doing themselves any favours, and were a feasible competitor to surface a very large number of people would probably defect.
Yeah I’d only recommend it if you feel competent or if you don’t care about frying your machine. But if anyone is curious digital microscopes are fairly inexpensive these days (though I don’t think one would be needed for what’s in that vid).
If it’s on that much I reckon a clean format might have helped (where you wipe the disk and instal a fresh copy - and not use migration tools but copy everything over manually. I usually do this after the second update of every major version of the OS - and it almost always breathes life into the machine.
Do you travel a lot with your machines Chris? I can’t think why else your machines wouldn’t last beyond 3 years? Do you live somewhere very hot/cold/humid?
Whoops
Funnily enough I am also interested in a small/basic machine - something stripped down to the minimum just for writing highly confidential documents that can be saved onto a USB disk. No wifi. No BT. No way for it to be hacked. Just something that can connect to a monitor and a keyboard and mouse and run something like Vim (though a GUI text editor would be nice).
I have only ever had an AMD processor once - in a server - and it was the worst server we ever had! It was so buggy and unreliable. I hated it! That was well over a decade ago tho, I expect (hope!) they are better now!
I have manually removed the WiFi + Bluetooth module of my mini form factor Dell 3060 and put a lower-speed NVMe SSD on the now-vacant M.2 A+E key (via converter cable bought on AliExpress). It’s very doable and I did it for the same reasons, I wanted to minimize the risk of somebody trying to do funny business to my home server from below the balcony.
And I gained an extra storage slot in the process. Win-win.
I heard that many times but I’ve used several AMD machines for work in the last 3-4 years and they have all been objectively better than the corresponding Intel machines. More concretely, they emit less heat.
My Linux laptop is AMD both in CPU and GPU and is very stable and quiet. I love it for that.
So especially in laptops and mini PCs I’d say AMD has an edge in the last years. I encourage you to get a mini PC, they’re plenty enough for 99% of what we the tech people need.
AliExpress and eBay have a ton of very reasonable offers: very modern CPUs, decent GPUs, 16-64 GB RAM, usually 250-500 GB NVMe SSD, and some are coming with 2-4 slots with 2.5GbE network speed each! And we’re talking something like 400 EUR base model. If you pimp it a little bit and give it more RAM and SSD you can get a beast of a machine for maximum 1000 EUR, maybe even 750.
Frankly the only reason I haven’t gotten one is because I simply have way too many others things to do. (And maybe because I want much more expansion slots for hobby experiments in the future. And because I was poor for several months. ) If it weren’t for that I’d already have bought one. These machines are practically the best value for money nowadays.
I put them in a pretty little stack My last intel machine I gave a way to someone that needed it
Previousely I always aimed for the most powerful laptop I could get since I liked the idea of being able to take it with me… but in reality it just sat docked to a big monitor at home most of the time, so I have been rethinking my computing strategy.
I got a M3 Air as my portable laptop now, and the 14" M1 Max is now permanently docked at home…it will be replaced by something stationary when the time comes.
Coincidentally, I was working on a site just recently and discovered a Dell E173FPF, which according to a brief search, launched some time around 2013. It was still going!
That’s cute. I have a 17" VGA monitor as my second screen right now. It’s a Gateway product I bought in 2006 or 2007 (just before the company went poof).
It’s definitely not silent, but ultimately not too bad actually; there are mitigating factors many of which are simply due to form factor differences. The workstation itself (tower form factor) is behind things like the monitor which dampens the sound a bit (unlike a laptop being directly in front of you). I could go further to dampen sound, but for me its not really necessary.
Also, the fans are larger and can move more air at lower RPMs, so the sound frequency and amplitude is quite a bit lower than most laptop fans; so their noise is not very “whiney” like a lot of laptop fans can be. The fans are on all the time, but only rarely do they spin up above their lowest running RPMs. This means there’s a typically persistent white noise like hum in the background with some emphasis on the midrange, but attention on it fades away pretty quickly since it’s constant, not variable.
But… earlier in my career, my desk was in data center server room… so I got use to the hum of fans. Also, I use cherry MX green key-switches on my keyboard… I can’t say noise avoidance is high for me.
I powered it down, went to sleep, and when I came back to it, it never powered up again. I didn’t forget it connected to the outlet or anything, it just died and Apple support was like “we need to send it to the US to repair it and it takes 2 months”, to which I said “no, I want my money back”.
I use both MacBook Air M1 8GB and Dell Inspiron 5559 - 16GB RAM running Ubuntu i3wm
Tbh, if I have to compare performance side of things my 8 years old Dell machine performance better than MacBook. Yeah, Dell laptop has bit of heating issue but can be easily solved by putting on top of cooling pad or something.
Another issue is every winter there will be a pile of ants live inside my Dell laptop. No, not because of snacks nearby. This is a global issue. You can Google “Dell laptop ants problem”
On the other hand, with M1 there is a huge kernel panic issue after upgrading it to Sonomo.
From my view, Mac is hyped as productivity machine.
I don’t want to be fiddling with MacBook internals and I feel like it would be a temporary fix anyway.
I plan on keeping this Mac for a decade or “until it breaks” - if I had my time again I probably would have bought a cheaper MBP so I could justify replacing it a bit sooner (given there’s already M2s and M3s and…), but ah well.
My last intel machine I gave a way to someone that needed it 
