Apple MacBook Air 2011

It has even regressed, I'm still on my High Sierra 2011 MacBook Air, but on my mom's M3 Air I can't help but observe that they did all that engineering to reduce the black bezel around the lid, only for Tahoe to have overly rounded windows and huge title bars.

I reinstalled MacOS on a 2011 MacBook Air and it was actually shockingly hard. Thankfully, my machine booted and worked fine, so I didn't need to create a bootable USB stick. From memory: - Network recovery boot cannot connect to your wifi because reasons. It'll see the SSID, but won't even prompt for password. It's totally unclear why nothing is working. - Fall back to old IOT SSID with ancient protocols - You cannot directly download or install High Sierra (the latest supported OS) for reasons I don't remember. - I can't remember how, but somehow you can install Lion - Launch beautiful Mac desktop. App store won't work because the certs are too old, or something. Safari won't work, because the supported SSL protocols are too old. - Use a modern Mac to download a DMG installer for a slightly newer OS - Copy it to a USB stick - Find a USB stick big enough to hold it, try again - Plug USB stick into target Mac, copy installer to desktop, run it - Now you have a more modern OS that can actually connect to websites - Also teh app store works, so you can upgrade to High Sierra using the app store. But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.

That’s wild and disheartening. Those machines ran great at the time. I had a 2011 MacBook Air which I adored - it was fast, small and for the day, it had great battery life. There is no reason for computers to get slower over time. Especially on linux.

And unlike, say, Samsung Ultrabooks or even Microsoft Surfaces, Macs last a really long time. My kids are using my 2011 MacBook Air and 2009 iMac and they still work, even the battery still kinda hangs in. They've had a few rough years 2016-2019 with the butterfly keyboards but I don't know many current manufacturers with products as solid long term.

Yes.. so hypothetically if not for Safari/Chrome not being updatable for MacOS High Sierra, she would still be using the same laptop. In fact I have the exact same model as her, a MacBook Air 2011 and I am still using it. I am typing on it right now. It has 4 GB RAM. 8 GB is considered unacceptable on a current Windows machine. The fact that Macs have unified memory or "better managed" (how? in software?) memory hardware/OS, while partly true, nevertheless is on the balance a less plausible an argument than the fact that Apple consistently, knowingly underspecs base model RAM (and overprices the RAM upgrades) for casual consumers. There's an argument for planned obsolescence here, if not at least identifying RAM to be the weakest part of a well-rounded system spec. Besides, if Macs manage memory efficiently then please explain why is Apple online store pricing the M2+16 GB > the M3 base model? That's $70 more just for ram on an otherwise 2022 model. Is there a technological justification for that value? Or just the vagaries of supply and demand?

I really hate usb c ports. They all break. I am a poweruser I know, but still. My mac, my phones, my car charger. All of them are causing connection or charge issues because of dirt, broken connectors or something different. Just give me the old mac magnet charger and apply it on all my devices. My 2011 air is still working fine after all these years.

I'm sure there's a word coined for these 'death of Apple' posts. It is true that my 2020 Macbook Pro 16 is not as much better than the competition as my 2011 Macbook Air was. But it is still definitely the best laptop I've ever owned. I keep my laptops, and I can reach for whichever one I want: 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 in Air, 13", 15" and now 16" form factors, and I choose the 2020. I also daily reject a number of windows and Chromebook pieces of hardware in favor of the MBP16. When I don't choose it, I most often choose my iPad pro at times or my iPhone. A thorough and hard ecosystem-level look at realistic competitors just doesn't turn up anything that even comes close in terms of just "working". Probably the closest would be an XPS developer running Ubuntu, but that is a completely different experience than the 'it just works' world I get to live in with my Macbook. And, by "it just works", I include a decent package manager with homebrew, a very solid neovim or spacemacs development environment, a fully working highdpi environment without 'quirks', ... the list goes on. And, Windows has no Unix underneath it plus it contains ads in the start menu. For me, it's just not a serious option for real work. In all, I'd say that most people agree with me; the market seems to prefer this hardware.

Any info on whether the 2018 keyboard update fares much better [1]? I’m seriously considering buying this MBA, but I’m happy with the travel and durability on my 2011 MBA keyboard and primarily spooked by the butterfly keyboard complaints. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/macbook-pro/#keyboard