A Geek Goes Flying

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...

MacBook Air charging via USB-C to MagSafe 1 cable This is a concise summary post; if you want the details of how I got here, and the technical specs beneath everything, click here . My setup: Zendure SuperTank Pro or Shargeek Storm 2 , each of which can supply up to 5A at 20V, for up to 100W. (Any battery pack that can deliver at least 20V ⎓ 3A (60W) will work.) These are about $170 on sale (which happens regularly). AreMe USB C to Magnetic L-Tip Charging Cable (MagSafe 1 for my 2010 Air) $13. AreMe USB C to Magnetic T-Tip Charging Cable (MagSafe 2 for my 2012 13" Air, 2015 11" Air) $13. Works better than I’d expected, charged from 71% to 100% (as reported by macOS) in about 40 minutes. It took a bit longer to trickle-charge up to an actual 100%, at least as reported by coconutBattery. This is definitely going to be a “go-to” travel solution, especially for higher risk environs (theme parks...). The one caveat, opposite to the Amazon listing and the usual operation of Appl...

And we come ’round full circle ... My foray into USB-C battery packs (and upgrading to 2020+ Apple hardware, decent keyboards and USB-C charging without an intermediate inverter and AC adapter) all started with wanting a portable setup for a full day of (at least intermittent) computing without access to a 110V socket. Back then, a USB-C to MagSafe 1/2 adapter seemed like a not great idea (ignoring all the negative reviews), as I didn’t have a battery pack that could deliver 60+ watts continuous. But now I’ve got several ( Zendure SuperTank Pro , Shargeek Storm 2 , etc). The MagSafe connector actually has a bit of intelligence built in: Teardown and exploration of Apple's Magsafe connector . Meanwhile, the power profiles appear to be pretty straightforward: MagSafe 2 85 W: 20V ⎓ 4.25A MagSafe 85 W: 18.5V ⎓ 4.6A / 16.5V ⎓ 3.65A MagSafe 2 60W: 16.5V ⎓ 3.65A MagSafe 60W: 16.5V ⎓ 3.65A MagSafe 2 45W: 14.85V ⎓ 3.05A MagSafe 45W: 14.5V ⎓ 3.1A The two 100W ports of the SuperTank Pro su...