Refurbished MacBook Air M1 is Good

 It's been about two years since the original M1 SoC was introduced to make Apple independent of outside CPU makers.  It's been a success and it's certainly upset Intel.

Having had Apple equipment since 1993, I've gone through the Motorola 680x0 to PowerPC transition, the PowerPC to Intel x86 transition, and now, the Intel to Apple Silicon (ARM) transition.

This is the most difficult transition because developers weren't sure what to do.  After almost two years, there isn't as much native software as I had hoped.  Being that Apple cut off 32-bit software with Catalina, I'm not sure why developers aren't more ready.

Game developers aren't really testing the waters.  The biggest current game I've seen is Life is Strange 2, which was ported by Feral Interactive, and published by Square Enix.  It seems to run well enough to believe that it is M1-compatible, not running through Rosetta 2 emulation.  However, Steam, GOG Galaxy, and Epic Games Launcher all appear to be x86 applications.

Creative software is quite different.  Capture One Pro by Phase One is native and so are Affinity Publisher, Designer, and Photo applications.  HitFilm Express from FXHome seems to not have a problem, though I haven't really tested it.

It looks as though Microsoft Visual Studio is compatible, if not 100% native. 

Bottom to Top, Top to Bottom

I've almost always had top of the line machines, but here I am with a MacBook Air.  Why?

It's powerful at a reasonable price.

Remember when US$1499 bought you a 15.4 MacBook Pro with integrated graphics and a dual-core CPU?  It wasn't that long ago.

I bought a MacBook Air 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of storage for US$1399, refurbished.

My previous MacBook Pro had a 3rd generation quad-core i7 with 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage.  My Omen by HP had a 7th generation quad-core i7 with 32 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage and it didn't seem much faster.

While I'm writing this entry, iStatMenus is telling me that the core temperature is 30 degrees C, which is in contrast to 44 degrees C on the Windows machine or 64 degrees C on the old MacBook Pro.  That old MacBook Pro could boil water.  When processing video, it would be at 100 degrees C.

Of course, there are many updates since 2012 besides the CPU and GPU.

The sound is amazing.  The display is so much better than the old 1440x900.  The keyboard is okay.  I liked the PowerBook G4 keyboard and none since have impressed me.

Change is Necessary

I bought a couple of cable adapters and an OmniCase Mini USB-C Storage Docking Station from JSAUX.  The company's products have been as reliable for me as products from Anker have been.

The OmniCase Mini is a unique product.  It has one USB type-C port, two type-A ports, an HDMI port, and slots for microSD and SD cards.  US$34.99 wasn't a lot.  It also comes with a type-C cable, and a few adapters, and a SIM card tool.  Obviously, if you're looking for a full-blown docking station, there are plenty from US$100 to US$500.  If you want an extra type-C port for power pass-through, you'll have to pay more than the US$34.99.

Equally useful and tiny is a Crucial X8 2 TB SSD that I recently bought.  It has a type-C connector, but also has a type-A adapter.

It may help to remember that the original MacBook Air came with one port--for charging, for connecting, for everything that needed a physical port.  The Dongle circus had arrived in town.

With two type-C ports, it's twice as convenient.

 Apple Succeeded

I'm slowly getting everything together, although it's only been about a week.  It took a while with previous machines.  I'm sure I'll be satisfied with this purchase.

Update 2022.05.22: This machine continues to impress.  The operating system is not where it needs to be and neither is vendor support for native applications.

Daily use without the power cable is amazing.  That 3rd generation quad-core i7 with GeForce 650M was constantly sucking power.  It was also a very good heater.

I haven't needed the USB-C hub as much as I expected.  I transferred most of what I needed the first two weeks.

I've tried a few more games, mostly through Itch.io and GOG.  They work well.  Steam itself is full of glitches, but that was also a problem for the i7 running Catalina.  64-bitness is not something Valve wants to do well.

Update 2022.06.06: The M2 MacBook Air was announced today.  It's more powerful and more expensive.  It can be configured with 24 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage.  That would be a plus.  In the past, some would complain that the machine they just bought last year was outdated and practically cry that it didn't work correctly any longer.  I don't do that.  This machine is a 2020 model and it's just fine.

I've had the machine over a month now and it took a while to get things in order but it is a wonderful computer that does most everything I want.  I want some good games for it but that will take some time.  Life is Strange 2 is the biggest title I have right now.

Update 2022.07.09: I'm impressed that they've got a newer processor out and it's better but it's a small improvement over the M1.  I priced what I have with the latest configuration and it was about US$600 extra over what I paid for a refurbished M1.  It's nice to have the latest and greatest, but this will last a while.

Update 2023.06.30: I was checking the prices on computers such as mine because of some pricing on the 15 inch version and I found the exact, same machine as mine for the exact, same price as when I bought it.

It's been a bit over a year that I've had my machine and the stage where I'm impressed regularly is finished.  It's very quick, for sure, but now, it's being filled and used regularly and I've got an interesting Windows 11 machine, also.

Windows still is a pain, here and there, but it gets the job done.  macOS Monterey seems better, but not exactly bug-free.  I'm not comfortable with upgrading to Ventura, but I will probably go to Sonoma, instead.

Update 2026.03.03: Is it time to switch to the just-released M5 MacBook Air?

 I've been looking at the numbers and 24 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage would put it at US$1899, which isn't horrible, especially with the 10 CPU/10 GPU cores configuration.  My current machine has 8 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores with 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage and that was US$1349.

The M1 MacBook Air is fine for everyday work but has become unable to keep up with graphics software and games. 

Digging up my Mac past

I've been on Windows since spring 2018 and it hasn't been all that great.  It smoothed out until update 1809 and 1909 was even more rocky.  The most recent updates managed to eat my drive data.  Even after a visit to a repair service, I ended up with a reset all the way back to factory.  At this moment, I can't really use the machine and it's a shame with all those games.

For two years, I haven't had my music or a recent backup of my music, which has led me to some frustration.  I also left some projects undone and I just wanted to get an inexpensive Mac that would allow me to revive things.  I've been searching a very long time.

On OfferUp, I wasn't sure whether the machines were stolen or not but the prices weren't all that good for the damged look of some of the machines and the distance I'd have to travel.  Apple, of course, has only machines three years old or newer, which would be too much money for minimum wage me.  Newegg has had machines, but they often have third parties with poor ratings, and I'm not very trusting.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a mid-2012 quad core i7 with a GeForce 650M, almost like mine--one step down.  The price was acceptable, but the 4 GB of RAM left me unsure as to whether it would be able to restore my final backup, although the 500 GB 5400 rpm disk drive was sufficient.

I ordered it on a Sunday night.  By Tuesday, they had finished packaging and its status was "Label created".  It stayed that way, even after it arrived several days later.

The machine looked almost new.  The display hinges are a little weak, but since I've got my (dead) machine, I can probably have those switched.  The machine has only 512 MB of VRAM, in contrast to my machine having 1 GB.  It probably doesn't matter a lot because how many games are available for an 8 year old machine?  GOG has some, though.  What's more important is using that GPU to speed up photo and video processing.

Getting the machine up and running was a struggle.  It complained about the backup being from a newer version of the operating system.  Sadly, the Mac App Store pointed me to the current, rather broken, Catalina/10.15.4.  I didn't realize that it was completely 64-bit, so nothing 32-bit would run.  I complained about Apple not doing this in the past, so it's amusing that it was such a kick in the pants.

Loading Catalina wasn't awful.  The 500 GB hard drive had to be converted from HFS+ to APFS.  It didn't take long to be downloaded.  The installation wasn't horrible, either.  Trying to boot it with a hard drive from 2012 and only 4 GB of RAM was difficult, at best.

Once it was running, I was tossing out software and hoping that upgrades would be simple.  Several upgrades were extremely expensive and I'm considering them still.  Those things purchased through the Mac App Store didn't come with upgrade fees.  However, getting things to run was almost impossible.  Firefox would initially run and would fail, apparently because of the 4 GB of RAM restriction.  It displayed some sort of dialog box, but I couldn't manipulate it to see the contents.

There were some system functions that were running constantly, possibly because the hard drive was converted from HFS+.  It disabled the machine for all intents and purposes, especially with a file system that wasn't happy on a hard drive and a system with a shortage of RAM.

Enhancements Matter

I bought a 1 TB Western Digital SSD (2.5 inch) and 16 GB of RAM.  Considering that eight years have passed, the total for the enhancements was negligible.  I remember that the Other World Computing 6G Extreme SSD was something around US$500 for 480 GB and the RAM might have been about the same price in early 2013.

Just inserting the RAM made a huge difference in performance with macOS Catalina.  I wanted to get an external enclosure in order to clone the drive and the enclosure had not arrived at that time.  I ended up finding a compatible enclosure and macOS did all the cloning, once I could get the SSD partitioned and formatted properly.  There was some error at first, which isn't a surprise with 10.15.4.

Making sure the SSD was set to be APFS made a positive difference.  When I booted from the drive, the previous system tasks from when the hard drive was present were not taking over the system any longer.  The system seemed about as fast as my Windows 10 system with the 7th generation quad-core i7 and 32 GB rather than the Mac from 2012 with a 3rd generation quad-core i7 and 16 GB of RAM, just as my other machine had been.  Obviously the GeForce 1050 GTX versus the GT 650M difference is really displayed in applications which use hardware acceleration.

It's taken some time to update applications to current versions, but everything runs quite well.  Most games are not possible because time has left the 650M with 512 MB in the past, and those games that could run need to be converted to work under 64-bit operation.  I tried to get The Witness to work, but it got just past the graphics settings and died.  The Epic Games Launcher seems flaky.  Steam won't run even though it's the 64-bit version and ran once.  GOG Galaxy 2.0 runs occasionally.  MacGameStore can run.  Obduction runs, if a bit glitchy!  Things are running somewhat better and I've found more games.

Thankfully, the Affinity suite by Serif seems fine, along with Capture One Pro 12, Luminar 2018, Swift Publisher 5 and more.  I was concerned with being able to retrieve projects, photos, and music.  My music is up to date on my phone, but it's been tedious getting Finder (not iTunes) to sync things.  My TV and movie downloads are currently not on the phone because Finder had them removed.

I didn't think that a machine from 2012 would be so useful in 2020, but for graphics work, it seems quite capable.

Update 2020.05.01: Is it sad that a mid-2012 MacBook Pro with flaky 10.5.4 is more stable than a late-2017 Omen by HP laptop computer with the latest Windows 10?

1TB M.2 drive, 32GB RAM installation complete

Getting a laptop computer that is working well for me has been a struggle.

For years, people have told me how much cheaper it is to buy a Windows machine than it is to buy a Mac.  For years, I told them to find one with the screen resolution and graphics hardware and it would be practically the same price.  It had been for the longest time.  Displays for laptop computers are not inexpensive but high quality displays are really expensive.

I got this 2017 Omen by HP laptop at about 25% discount.  It has an Intel i7 7700HQ quad core processor, Nvidia 1050 GPU with 2 GB of RAM, and the system came with a 1TB hard drive and 8GB of RAM.  It seemed to crawl most days.  The mid-2012 MacBook Pro had 16GB of RAM and a 480GB SSD with an Nvidia 650M GPU.

I found G.Skill RAM that I trusted that wasn't too expensive at the time and bought 32GB in two sticks.  I also found an HP m.2 SSD that seemed a good fit--an EX920.  Given that I've been working in retail and Thanksgiving Day to New Year's Day has been so brutal, I had few chances to get anything installed.  (I actually thought that, having a decent background with computer hardware installation since around 1981, I might be able to do the work myself but was proven wrong rather quickly.  It was much easier to modify each of my Apple Macintosh machines.)

I went to a phone repair store that was close, where I had some work done in the past, and the technician I knew was gone.  The person who might be able to do the work wasn't there that day, and since time wasn't convenient, I didn't return.  I went to a "computer services" shop (that looked like a pawn shop) and that shop's computer person wasn't there, either.

Last week, I decided to check another phone repair shop and found that they did computer work.  I called and was told that it would be US$30 to install the RAM and m.2 drive.  That was much lower than the $130-$250 I expected.

Wednesday, I went to the store and dropped off the computer.  They didn't give me a receipt--scary--but they sent my phone text messages to inform me on their progress.  US$30 to install the hardware and US$35 to clone the drive was given to me as the quote.  Thanks very reasonable.

Today, Friday, I went to see about the computer.  Things happened in the store and the progress was a bit delayed when "things happened", which was expected.  Thankfully, it wasn't some catastrophe where the hard drive didn't work at all.  He was "optimizing" it, so he told me that it would probably be three more hours.

I ate so-so VietNamese food at a new restaurant for way too much money, walked to a store to shop a bit, and got the text message that my machine had been finished.  I returned as quickly as I could walk.

I paid and I started the machine.  We looked and there was an update that required a restart.  I checked to see if the RAM and drive had actually been installed.  I wasn't accusing.  I just worry a lot.  If you can imagine something going wrong almost every time I do something, you'd be cautious, also.

Having the machine at home now, I'm pleased to say that my usual 51-66% RAM usage is around 19-22% now.  I'll be able to get started on my skate park videos finally.  I still need to select from thousands of clips.  I won't have to worry about my software being unhappy with the environment on which it's running, though.  Hopefully, Magix Movie Edit Pro Plus will be good.

As I've played a few games, the response is generally good but there are still delays.  I wonder if the operating system needs to mold itself to the new drive.  This machine is still labeled by HP as a casual gaming machine, which is all I needed anyway.  It still seems strange that UT2004 was smoother on a 2012 MacBook Pro than it is on a 2017 Windows machine purposed for gaming.

Update 2019.02.16: Windows 10 seems much better, although it does seem to be off in Never-Never land far too often still.  Who knows what it's doing?  As soon as I launch Task Manager, whatever was happening stops.  Defragmentation tends to continue, so I'm sure it's not that.  Feedback Hub is running, but why?  Microsoft does not want to know what I think of their collection of patches that they consider an operating system.  Back when a machine was limited to 64KB (or even 4MB) of RAM, it seemed that everything had to be tight.  Sloppy writers didn't make it.  Atari's implementation of GEM and DR-DOS weren't great but they were quick and efficient.

Firefox and Chrome both seem to handle scrolling more smoothly.

Games still seem just a bit better, which doesn't seem enough for the difference of having 4 times the RAM and a much, much faster drive.

Buying enough RAM to make the i7 7700HQ happy

Okay, I've had this 2017 Omen (by HP) 15t for around six months.  It's decent at most everything, making it a good successor to the mid-2012 MacBook Pro quad core i7 with 16 GB of RAM and 480 GB SSD.

When things get tough, it shows how slow it is.  The 8 GB of RAM shows up as about half in use when doing simple things.  When I go to edit photos, I'm in trouble, with RAM generally full and virtual memory has to resort to the 7200 rpm hard drive.  Intolerably slow would be the key phrase but it's possible to remember with 4 MB of RAM was a full set and my Atari 1040 ST (with modification) would fly at 8 MHz.  That was a monochrome system with a 640x400 display.

The MacBook Pro supported 1440x900 and this Omen has a 1920x1080 display--the not so good display, that is standard.  Hey, if I can edit from lesser displays in the past, can I work with lesser displays in the present?  Of course, I can.

However, using Phase One Capture One Pro has been a bit tedious, especially if I'm using Luminar 2018 at the same time.  If I try to also use Magix Movie Edit Pro and/or Xara Designer Pro, things might grind to a halt.

I just ordered 32 GB, in two RAM sticks, with sales tax, etc. for just a bit less than the two pieces were by themselves just a few weeks ago.  G.Skill RAM works well and is trusted.  My needs may not be as specific or hard core as the gamers who would also buy products from the brand, but high performance, reliable products are necessary.

I considered 16 GB but half of my 8 GB is in use doing almost nothing.  Trying to make video with 16 GB might leave me with almost nothing and virtual memory will ruin the performance and I'd be back to intolerably slow performance, plus I'd spent money to arrive there.  Considering the drop in price, it didn't make sense to go with the lower capacity.

I also ordered a toolkit from iFixit, so I should be able to open the machine and put things right easily.  Previously, I had two Husky drivers (from Home Depot) and two Kobalt drivers (from Lowes), which helped quite a lot.  I made the modifications to the MacBook Pro quickly and easily, while being watched, just in case.  It helped train them, also.  I've watched the video reviews of this machine and they opened it fairly easily.  It's just a matter of remembering which screws go where, just like always.

I will have to wait for drive improvements.  The machine has an M.2 slot, so it's perfect for a Samsung 970 EVO drive.  1 TB is much more affordable than the 6 Gbps 480 GB drive I put into the MacBook Pro in 2013. I'm just wondering if I happen to have a Samsung 2.5 inch 512 GB SSD drive that I bought a few years ago.  If I can transfer everything to a 1 TB M.2 drive and switch the 1 TB hard disk drive for an SSD drive, also, things will improve.  However, saving money takes time.

Wish me luck!

Update 2019.01.08: I've got the RAM, but couldn't install it, due to a plastic plug covering one screw.  I'm still working on solutions, but I'm about to have someone else install it, and the HP EX920 M.2 1TB I bought for very little.  Hopefully, the cost of installation won't break the bank.  I've had some noise lately, and I'm not sure whether it's one of the fans or the hard drive.  In either case, a gaming laptop computer needs everything working at full throttle.

Update 2019.02.15: It's done.  Both have been installed for US$30 and another US$35 covered cloning the drive data.  That's actually less than I spent on tools to do the work myself.

The machine still doesn't feel faster than the mid-2012 MacBook Pro.

Flash memory storage: cards and drives

Last night, I found an 8 GB Lexar Jumpdrive with a USB 3.0 interface for US$6.98 at Target.  That was about US$10.00 cheaper than expected but it was on clearance for some reason.  It claimed 100 MB/sec read speed (almost 20% of my SSD read speed) and 15 MB/sec write speed.  If you keep occasional information that should be transferred elsewhere, that's good.  (I've seen a similar inequality used in cards targeted toward cameras.  What good is the cheaper price, if you can't get the shot because the card is too slow?)  Obviously, you don't want to use it as a disk drive replacement.  It also included a download and activation for System Mechanic, a repair and optimization software.

When I checked the price, it was actually US$2.98.  I looked at the USB drives in their typical location and the 16 GB drives with a USB 3.0 interface were $39.99, somewhat more.  The only reason this one was cheaper was that it was pink and white with Target-style targets on it.  If I used it in public a lot, I guess I might care, but if I'm using it to hand photos to a non-paying customer, it's not bad.

I've been having trouble with an SD Card I got from SanDisk back in March.  I bought two of their Extreme Pro models with 32 GB of storage.

I've been satisfied with SanDisk since 2000 when I started buying SmartMedia cards.  Moving to SD Card concerned me, as it's small, and rather flat, though not as flat as SmartMedia cards although those handled Megabytes of storage, not Gigabytes.  CompactFlash cards, what I use most, are larger, and have the potential to use better, safer techniques for assembly.  It's always easier to test the latest and greatest in a bigger space.  As cameras have changed, so has storage.  In 2000, just a few digital cameras were using Compact Flash, and as far as I know, SD Card have not yet been developed.  Now, below US$3000, it's difficult to find a current camera that uses CompactFlash cards.

I have a couple Sony SD Cards which go into my Olympus E-5, along with my SanDisk CompactFlash cards, but my Panasonic GH3 only takes one SD Card, so I chose a 32 GB SanDisk Extreme Pro card.  The card was giving me various errors after a short time.  Apparently, a bad spot in the storage array was causing the problem.  I requested a new card since they have a lifetime warranty.  The company wanted me to jump through hoops.  I tried various things, documented what I could, and replied after about 1 month.  They sent me a reply with a UPS label and requested that I send the card to them, at no cost to me.

After about three days, they replied that the card was in the queue for shipment.  I'll have the replacement about a week after I sent my original card.

While I never expected to have a problem with a SanDisk product ever, they resolved it nicely.

Update 2014.03.16: The SanDisk card has been great since then.  I've used it quite a bit, including photographing a basketball game, so I'm pleased with the exchange/refurbishment.

SST or SSD: going faster than the speed limit

When I got my first computer, an Atari 800 system with 16 KB of RAM and the operating system in ROM, I was surprised how quickly the system booted.  At 1.79 MHz (not GHz, in this case half a color clock), it was speedy for 1981.  Of course, there were faster clock speeds but the MOS Technologies 6502 as an unofficial RISC-based chip could outperform CISC chips like the 4.77 MHz 8088 in the IBM PC when the 6502 was running at 4 MHz.  Atari also had the amazing Jay Miner design the graphics chipset, and the system could turn off the display to process data more quickly.

As we had to have external storage, we had the options of magnetic cassette tape and magnetic diskettes.  Today, an 88KB diskette couldn't hold much but given a processor that could only address 64 KB of RAM, a diskette could hold many applications.  However, diskette drives were slow and tape drives were incredibly slow.  The only thing worse at the time was paper tape that some kit machines were using, and Hollreith punched cards.  I even built a RAM disk through some code in a magazine and it seemed amazingly fast but back then, dynamic RAM wasn't fast at all.

We travelled through several diskette options increasing capacity quite a bit and even merging magnetic and optical technologies in one type of disk.  The Winchester hard disk became very popular and it's basically what we're still using today.  The interfaces have become much faster, so that an external drive can be accessed much more quickly than some of the internal drives from years past.

I spent a lot of time with SCSI drives since they worked well with Atari machines (my Seagate 74 MB drive is still working) and only dabbled in IDE/ATA drives with an occasional DOS machine, and eventually when I got my Apple PowerBook in 2005.  The ATA/100 specification was great but I don't believe I ever saw 100 MB/second, even on more powerful machines at work.  The number was a measure of peak burst performance.

Where is this all going?

I installed an OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G drive into my MacBook Pro yesterday.  The 6G should be a clue that it uses a SATA (Serial ATA) interface that allows 6 Gbps transfers.  That seems really fast.  However, I'm a skeptic and nothing ever seems fast enough.  At the same time, I transferred my old WD Scorpio Black 7200 rpm drive into a USB 3.0 case from the same company.  Here is an article concerning the announcement of the SATA 6 Gbps update from AMD and Seagate--from 2009.

They had a rather significant difference in the Incompressible Data Rate of the Pro model over the other, for an extra US$70.  I felt the difference in price wasn't prohibitive and got the faster drive.  I did some benchmarks earlier and I was pleased that each one was close to 512 MB/second.  Still, it doesn't seem OMG-it's-so-fast-it-will-fly-apart fast, but rather extremely smooth.  (Other World Computing now has a USB3 connected model.)  It still doesn't feel like the Concorde SST but the delays are minimal, if any.  I have two USB2 connected drives available to offload older files, to clear space since the 480 GB isn't ever expansive or expanding.

I transferred 351 photos to the drive and opened Phase One Capture One 7 Pro which needs a lot of RAM and should get a lot of performance tuning before they finish with version 7 because it's rather slow now.  The performance improvement was quite noticeable.  It loaded the file previews into its grid interface quickly and I could use the arrow keys to move and there was no noticeable lag any longer.  It also didn't seem to heat up the system nearly as much.  Right now, the system is running 44 degrees C instead of about 56 degrees C it was running yesterday.  I'm only using Firefox at the moment, but it seems much better.  After I transferred data last evening and Spotlight was indexing the drive, the palm rest area was warm, including the side with the optical drive.

I'm hoping that the drive's cache will become more familiar with my most used data and applications and it will feel more speedy as I use it more.  I'm pleased to say that replacing the refurbished WD Scorpio Black has resulted in zero kernel panics and other glitches with that drive seem a distant memory.  Note to self: don't buy refurbished rotating things.

It's amazing to come some far and be so close to where I was headed when I started with my first computer.