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...

My 2015 Core i7 2.2 GHz 8GB MacBook Air 11" still had the Apple SSD AP0128H card, which was getting very cramped. This otherwise maxed out machine natively runs Monterey (and will r un Ventura under OCLP ). As such, and with a 91% original capacity battery, it's still a pretty viable totable workstation, especially now that I’ve got it recharging via USB-C . So I decided to swap in a larger, newer storage module. Opted to go with the best bang for the buck: Crucial P3 1TB PCIe Gen3 3D NAND NVMe M.2 CT1000P3SSD8 (PCIe 3.0 2280) $48 Sintech NGFF M.2 NVMe SSD Adapter Card $12 (The other options were the OWC Aura N2 or Pro, but for this already 8 year old machine, I didn’t want to put much more than $60 into this project.) It’s been a few months since I’ve torn apart one of these 11" MacBooks, but iFixIt reminds me it’s pretty straightforward . Removed the (8) pentalobe screws from the bottom plate with a PL4 driver from my Wiha set , and then removed the OEM SSD drive ...