My first experience using a Mac was in 2021 when I purchased a used Macbook air 2017 for the exorbant price of $573. Looking back on it I feel disgusted with it, but at the time it made sense for me since I was fully in the apple ecosystem. I had the phone, the watch, the whole inflated sense of “wow look at me I really made it!” with regards to my post college career. During the pandemic I figured I needed a new laptop since my old Thinkpad T530 was limping along feverishly, along with being terribly heavy and an inconvenience to carry around.
This isn’t to say that I was a fool or to denigrate myself, but to say that I had a sense of naiveity with regards to the Mac experience. I figured I’d be more productive and that the laptop would last me a good long while. For the first long while after purchasing it and daily driving it, I was hooked into it. I liked the interface and the ease of using the terminal to get my programming tasks done. I didn’t mind the proprietary nature of the system or the eventual sluggishness that came when trying to load newer programs. I was hooked into thinking that Mac OS was the superior system and that all of my future hardware purchases would be to keep trucking along with it. The problem that I found with it eventually was that this 2017 Macbook eventually became too unwieldy for me. The startup times on software that I had been eager to keep up to date eventually started getting slower and slower. Not to mention the incessant notifications about updating the Macbook or the eventual end-of-life for it due to forced obsolescense.
I started wondering whether I was doing something wrong as well, that my daily driving was just wearing it down and it was the natural passage of time that was doing it dirty. I suppose because it was a used product as well that there could be some truth in that. The problem is that because everything inside the laptop was soldered down and nothing could be removed, I couldn’t do any further hardware diagnoses or explore whether I could do anything to futureproof it. Basically, Apple expected you to cave and buy a newer product in order to receive the latest updates and features or to receive the kind of speed you’d expect from the hardware. Now by this point, I had started falling down the linux rabbit hole. I was looking into different flavors starting with Ubuntu and learned about Pop OS. I chose to install that one onto my mini desktop PC and run with it. I still daily drove the Macbook during work but the damage had already been done in my mind. I had been radicalized on sites like >reddit to start exploring other operating system options.
Eventually, I just stopped using the Macbook and moved onto other options. I tried using it as a jellyfin server for the home and that works just fine, but I don’t have any other plans for it beyond letting it sit on my shelf.I don’t fault anyone for wanting to use one or shell out large sums of money to have the latest shiny mac hardware, it’s easy to use and you can allegedly do productive things on it. I wouldn’t fall for the meme that having a $2,000 Macbook Pro conveys status and prestige but a lot of people certainly do. I guess the point that I’m trying to convey here is that Mac OS eventually failed me and I’ve moved on to bigger and better things.