A Geek Goes Flying

The circa-2011 Crucial M4 SSD in the 2012 Core i5 Mac mini I picked up used (and cheap!) for the office failed. It was running really slowly the night before, the next morning no application would open (the icons would just bounce in the dock, forever), and when I finally lost patience and power-cycled it, I got the dreaded blinking question-mark folder. Oh well. Picked up a Crucial MX500 ; 1TB seems to be the price-capacity sweet spot ($90). (Side note, the 256GB drive I was replacing was $299.99!) Swapping the same drive into the 2012 Mac mini server was a non-event, I could slip the old 500GB spinning rust mechanism right out. But the base model desktop was another story . Turns out I needed a simple, inexpensive, Mac Mini Logic Board Removal Tool to scoot the motherboard aside just enough for me to get the dead drive out. As long as I was ordering tools, I finally broke down and got a Wiha set . That, plus a set of cheap Chinese spudgers etc. I picked up a while ago ( Kaisi Profes...

Working. I successfully installed Big Sur on a “mid-2010” “classic” Mac Pro ( MacPro5,1 ). This required upgrading the video card (I went with a relatively inexpensive GTX680 I flashed with an Apple ROM) , but was otherwise pretty painless and a lot less involved than I’d been reading - which has me wondering if I’ve missed something? Obtaining the Installer Used a great script to obtain the Big Sur installation app directly from Apple, even though the computer I was using (Late 2013 iMac) isn’t supported: $ curl -o ~/installinstallmacos.py https://raw.githubusercontent.com/munki/macadmin-scripts/main/installinstallmacos.py $ chmod +x ~/ installinstallmacos.py $ sudo ./installinstallmacos.py  ...  #      ProductID    Version    Build   Post Date  Title  1      071-14766     11.2.3    20D91  2021-03-08  macOS Big Sur  2      001-68446    10.15.7  ...