Rahul Gaitonde

Long time readers of this blog know that I a proponent of sustainable computing: thinking about how your hardware, software and data lasts.

Yesterday I took one more step towards extending the life of my pre-retina unibody mid-2012 MacBook Pro.

I maxed out the RAM, doubling it from 8GB to 16GB. Unfortunately the machine does not support any more than that. With 8GB RAM, the machine would often use about 2GB on my SSD as ‘swap’, or overflow space. With 16GB swap is zero, because there is always more free RAM.

The results have been immediate. Applications open quicker on the first launch, especially when there are already several other applications open. Web pages seem to load more quickly too.

As I’ve described previously, I have also upgraded the storage on the machine: changing the spinning hard drive that it shipped with a 1TB SSD. And couple of years ago, I also changed the (then) eight year old battery for a new one. Finally, in other minor changes I’ve replaced some missing screws for the bottom case and replaced the broken/missing feet.

In total this has cost me about INR 15,000 on the outside. The laptop itself is a (free) hand-me-down. That is less than one tenth the office of a new M1 MacBook Pro with similar RAM and storage. Of course the new machine would have been faster and would have had a lot more battery life. But it’d also have been less upgradeable and maintainable. And it’d have fewer ports – and types of ports – than this one.

There’s a joy in owning a new, snappy machine, undoubtedly. But there’s a different joy in being able to service your own laptop & update its components. In making deliberate choices about using well crafted, efficient software because you don’t have the luxury of raw processing power.

I’m going to conclude by pasting what I wrote in a previous post:

And using well-constructed hand-me-downs has also forced me to become at least somewhat proficient at repair and maintenance, meaning I get to know these things better, which in turn teaches me what about them makes them great in the first place.

Finally, adopting a mindset of being okay using such tools has over time helped me get better at identifying new items that are likely to last long, perpetuating the cycle.

(ends)

I read this article with interest:

…a girl around 13, who is somehow related to me. Her mother decided to move 400km away from where they lived, closer to us. And she had literally nothing she could bring, all tech was her dads. Luckily I got some spare hardware for emergencies and we equipped her with a MacBook, an iPad and a small TV with an AppleTV. When I handed her the iPad she clicked on Settings and set up wifi. AppleTV? She could identify the icon easily and setup wifi. MacBook? Blank stares and most likely questioning what she is supposed to do with this thing. She knows how to use touch interfaces and how to read app names displayed on her home screen – she was already using a smartphone. But a computer? Not so much.

I’ve written before about the iPad and MacOS, including perhaps running the more capable MacOS software on the very capable iPad Pro hardware. The writer examines a different, related hypothetical: merging MacOS and iPadOS eventually. As we’d expect, he doesn’t like the idea:

… these platforms are not meant to be the same thing. They both go against anything the respective platform is as of today, and undermine the appeal the respective platform has for their users… having the majority of users understand that the iPad is all they need, and having macOS designed for power users seems like a far better idea to me.

Steve Jobs, around the time the iPad was introduced, pointed out that not all people need trucks anymore, since their needs have changed; they just needed a car to get around.

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Jobs said at our D8 conference in 2010. “But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”

The iPhone, then as now, couldn’t fulfil that role. You needed something in between, and that, he said, was the iPad. The iPad fits in that niche very well, and as the writer describes, more and more people are discovering that the iPad is all they end up using every day.

Apple has understood this from day one. They have doubled down on the ‘What’s a computer’ theme on their advertising campaigns the last few years. That campaign, full of people doing everyday things on their iPad, implicitly challenges people to think about whether they really need to buy a laptop or desktop when they decide they need a new computer.

(Previously:August, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, June home screens)

This month marks the first major changes to the Home Screen in months:

Some apps I use several times daily are now easier to get to. Therefore, I use the App Library less. I had no problems locating and launching apps from there, but as I have mentioned before, I used to get the app search bar mixed up with the Spotlight search bar. I do wish Apple would merge both of them.

These new apps meant making room on the Home Screen, which had been nearly full of widgets. I only really use two of the four shortcuts in the giant shortcuts widget. Those two are now icon-sized pins below the other app icons.

Speaking of widgets, the fantastical widget is now half the size it was, while still displaying the same information as previously. Given the day to day uncertainty of Bombay’s monsoon season, I have a widget for the local weather.

Finally, I’ve added a widget that opens a specific Note in Apple Notes, one that I use as a scratchpad. It’s more flexible than Drafts (which is text only), and much faster than Copied.

The dock remains unchanged:

• I continue to use Drafts for quick notes (things I consciously write, as opposed to throwing things into the Scratchpad).
• I have also continued using Apple Notes for day to day information management.
• My long term notes and archives are of course still in plain text files in my library folder in iCloud Drive.

On the Spotlight and widgets screen to the left of the leftmost Home Screen, I now have a few other widgets:

• One for the time in a few cities around the world where friends and family are. This used to be on the Home Screen
• One for the weather in another city aboard. This too used to live on Home
• And one for the battery. I’m frequently connected to my Bluetooth headphones; this is an easy way to look up he much charge is left on it. I wish the battery level on my Fitbit would show up too.

PS: It doesn’t look like I’m going to install the iOS 15 public betas on my main iPhone yet, so I won’t know until later if there are any changes or new features that’ll change my Home Screen.