this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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You have a lot of incredible Macs waiting to be grabbed for cheap after Apple discontinued support.
Before converting my girlfriend’s MacBook Pro to Linux, I never thought it would be possible. I don’t know why but I thought they were some special inaccessible computers.
It’s just a shame the latest ones aren’t upgradeable. Apparently the last easily upgradeable one was the 2012 MacBook and the 2019 MacPro..not sure though..
It's their marketing. Marketing, marketing, bullshit and marketing. Macs get viruses, Macs have vulnerabilities, Macs crash. Doesn't matter how much their indoctrinated fans might claim otherwise, Macs are just weird PCs. In that context, their refusal to allow their owners to control them is all the more jarring and makes owning the older models like you mentioned all the more sensible.
even if they cannot be upgraded they are incredibly well built (excluding those with butterfly keyboards, steer away from those) and will likely outlive any PC you might have from the same year
Yeah but since they aren’t upgradeable anymore, you’re often kind of limited by the 8gb of RAM they often come with.
It’s also difficult to know how much life an SSD still has in it even if one day I could be tempted by a second hand M Mac and Fedora Asahi..
i am not expecting any SSD to be worn out unless the previous owner was into heavy workloads, which isn't the case for a lot of mac users. You can technically write over the whole SSD hundreds of thousands of time before losing some capacity. Assuming the OS runs on BTRS you'll be fine as the file system will auto flag bad sectors.
Interesting to know, thanks.
I don’t remember if you can replace the battery though. That would also be big bet getting on of these used M Macs if that’s not the case..
The battery is definitely replaceable but in latest models used to be glued on… I haven’t checked on the Apple silicon models… worse case the Apple Store can do it for you for 70/80€$ You can also remove the glue yourself, there must be an iFixit tutorial on YouTube for it
Well then I guess Apple Silicon Macs might be on my list when I’ll need something to replace my Surface Go 1 if one day it dies or if Fedora becomes more resource hungry in the future.
As a FunFact(TM), you're more likely to have the SSD controller die than the flash wear out at this point.
Even really cheap SSDs will do hundreds and hundreds of TB written these days, and on a normal consumer workload we're talking years and years and years and years of expected lifespan.
Even the cheap SSDs in my home server have been fine: they're pushing 5 years on this specific build, and about 200 TBW on the drives and they're still claiming 90% life left.
At that rate, I'll be dead well before those drives fail, lol.
How can you know how much life an SSD still has? Is it a command in the terminal on Linux? Haven’t found anything in the system information.
sudo smartctl -a /dev/yourssdYou're looking for the Media_Wearout_Indicator which is a percentage starting at 100% and going to 0%, with 0% being no more spare sectors available and thus "failed". A very important note here, though, is that a 0% drive isn't going to always result in data loss.
Unless you have the shittiest SSD I've ever heard of or seen, it'll almost certainly just go read-only and all your data will be there, you just won't be able to write more data to the drive.
Also you'll probably be interested in the Total_LBAs_Written variable, which is (usually) going to be converted to gigabytes and will tell you how much data has been written to the drive.
Thanks for the info. It’s really useful 👍
Your SSD will likely live longer than most of the other hardware. 8gb is surely low but quite enough for running Asahi in daily tasks.
You can put an NVME ssd into a 2013-2017 MacBook Air or ‘13-‘15 Pro with a $15 adapter
RAM can’t be upgraded on any Mac laptop post 2012