Hi Nathan, At least on genuine apple hardware with a real serial: The iMessage thing is probably because certain root certificates expired in high sierra and others by now and they can be updated manually. [0] https://osxchateau.com/articles/updating-ssl-certificates-on... A bunch expired in 2019 and Apple pushed new installer versions for several OS releases going back to Yosemite. High Sierra made the cut but you don’t have to reinstall [1] https://tidbits.com/2019/10/28/redownload-archived-macos-ins... You’d see this if you booted off the CD or recovery partition. an Internet restore should be okay. You can also get a newer macOS on that laptop altogether using something called OpenCore. I think I stopped somewhere around Monterey but my 2013 clunker would run Tahoe if you wanted it to. I had a newer m1 I just gave away but I had updated the Intel because it was still in mint condition and ran perfectly. I still preferred it to the new one. I just needed a functional browser. /rant
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To provide my anecdata, my work MBP is 48GB and with nothing more than our dev environment, VSCode, Slack and Chrome it's at 34GB memory used. Modern NVMe drives make swapping to disk bearable (and it's the same on MacOS and Linux), but it is still swap and there will always be a performance penalty. Sure I could survive with a 32GB machine but over the many years of life a laptop has, the extra cost seems negligible, and I would prefer to have slightly more RAM than I need rather than slightly less. With how bloated the web is becoming I wouldn't recommend an 8GB machine in 2026 to someone who intends to use it for the next decade. (I know people still using 2013 Macbooks with 16GB that are still fine for the kind of usage the Neo is aimed at.)
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Several ideas from this blog post are factually wrong. Additionally, I cannot confirm the more subjective ideas - and I've been running Macbooks for almost 20 years, and specifically working with Python both for hobby, for research, professionally, for cybersecurity, etc. I have an old 2013 laptop that is the "couch machine". It still works adequately. No issues with sleep/wake. Time machine outlasted the external HDD it was running on. I am writing this on an M1 Max, which will be 5 years old this year, and I hope I get 5 more years, it's just that good.
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It’s really a shame. May last “favorite” MacBook was from 2013 where everything was upgradable. I bought the fastest Core processor with the lowest everything else and upgraded to 16GB of RAM, SSD (granted at SATA speeds) and a second data drive in the optical drive bay. What luxury!
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My 2013 Macbook also had a display mux that switched the laptop display itself between the integrated and discrete GPU. In some cases it would fail to properly switch the display over causing it to remain permanently off until the next reboot. I was not the only Macbook user with the problem. Apple is just as guilty for shipping laptops with hardware issues that you just have to work around. And unlike this Asus issue the Macbook mux was on by default. You had to turn it off in the settings if you wanted to entirely avoid the issue and then you would have no way of using the discrete GPU.
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I use a 2013 MacBook running Ubuntu to code in. It works totally fine UNLESS you load something like a crazy landing page with animations. I always end up having to kill Firefox and prevent that site from opening. One unexpected benefit of LLMs is they’re more performance friendly, I can query the docs of what I’m working on without loading the docs themselves.