A Geek Goes Flying

coconutBattery report Early 2020 MacBook Air , I think the max spec vis-a-vis RAM ¹  (16GB) and CPU ²  , and a 512GB SSD ³  (it could have been upgraded to 2TB at the time of purchase). Apple claimed up to 11 hours of web browsing, but Google’s AI reports “many users find that active, mixed-use workloads (especially video calls) drain the battery within 4–6 hours.” I’m not getting 6 hours. With 81% battery health (after 280 cycles, but also 72 months), I should be getting about 3:14 from 100% to dead battery. I think I’m actually seeing ~2 hours, but I’ll measure eventually. Anyway. The question I’m pondering: Do I swap the battery ( $110 for the kit from iFixIt ), and it’s described as a “moderately difficult” replacement . Could probably also have Asurion do it; they did a good job with the MacBook Pro . I know Intel is a dead end, but this is probably the most capable Intel Mac I own, and there will likely be edge cases that I still need x86 support for, for a lo...

After having uBreakiFix (Asurian) swap out the spicy pillow OEM battery for ~$100, I dropped another $60 or so into this mostly pristine 15.4" MacBook Pro (bought new just as they were f inally discontinuing them in 2018 ) to bump the SSD from the stock 256GB to a cool 1TB using a Western Digital Blue SN580 drive and a Sintech NGFF M.2 nVME SSD Adapter . With some room to play, I decided to triple boot the thing: macOS Monterey, the last version officially supported by Apple. (Debating using OCLP to bump it to Sequoia...) This occupies the bulk of the storage, with 617 GB allocated. macOS High Sierra, the OS it shipped with. This lives on a relatively tiny 128 GB partition and really only exists for legacy software. (Might make sense to bump this to Mojave, which will still run 32-bit software?) Linux (255 GB partition). I’m going to try Ubuntu Budgie LTS (24.04.1). I setup Monterey first using Apple’s over-the-Internet restore functionality. I then built a High Sierra insta...