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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

Those generations of MacBook Airs were just unbelievably amazing laptops for the time. They were lighter and more portable than anything else, but still had plenty of ports and functionality (even the old beloved magnet-based power cables). It was the first non-Thinkpad laptop that I enjoyed using. This post is going to make me dust off an old 2013 Air I have kicking around and see if I can fix a broke space bar and get it running Linux.

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I had a 2012 11.6" MacBook Air, maxed out. Loved that computer until it was stolen (I hate DC).

Recently bought a decently spec'd one from 2015 for my nephew/godson to start programming. He just turned 11.

They really are great computers.

I have that same laptop (2012 air). It still works fine and my son uses it daily. It's a great little machine apart from the battery life, which is pretty awful by modern standards (~5 hours of light use, give or take) even after replacing the battery.

A lot of that generation of Airs have failing batts - my MBP from that era was part of the recall for catching fire, and mine caught fire, but apple refused to replace it due to, after having the machine for two MONTHS to investigate - they determined that one of the moisture sensors was set off, and thus they wouldnt honor the recall for the battery literally catching fire.

iFixit.com has a great guide to replacing the battery on those units, and will sell you a new one for $70. Could be a great project for you and your son, too!

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Mid+2012+Ba...

Had the same maxed out i7 11” air. I replaced it with a 2018 13” (the second model of the following generation) which was only faster when it wasn’t thermal throttling… which was its general disposition. Those 2010-2015 era Airs were great laptops for their time.

>Those 2010-2015 era Airs were great laptops for their time.

Can concur. Back then Apple didn't go for thinness for the sake of thinness like the post 2015 machines did. And it's not like the 2010's generations of machines were think and bulky.

It has to be one of the longest-lasting laptop designs ever. The first-gen MBAs were a little different, but from 2010 to 2022 there was almost no change to the basic design (they finally gave it up with the M2 one). Screens got better, ports went Thunderbolt-y, but the look and feel essentially never changed.

I can't think of a laptop design that's been this static for this long. _Maybe_ the more conventional Thinkpad designs?

In 2018 (and continuing in 2019) they switched to the butterfly keyboard (named that because after a while the keys mature and fly away from the keyboard).

Even Thinkpads iterated more often than the basic Air design. And the direct competitor to the original Air got cancelled after two years.

Which one is that? The Thinkpad X1C is up to the 8th generation now.

The X300: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hnOCUkbix0

The X1 came later and with a 14" form factor is a good chunk bigger.

The first gen was also kinda terrible because SSDs were not standard on those. But the 2010s were and it really made it shine. I got a 2012 one and said "Ok I get it now".

The late 2012 unibody retina Macbook Pros were truly unstoppable. I have replaced the battery in mine 6 times and it travelled the world with a photojournalist for the first 4 years of its life. Still running strong w/ Ubuntu.

I had that, it's now used by my brother. It's unfortunate that Apple won't support old hardware.

Extremely unfortunate. These things are built like a rock.

The 2018 line kept the same aesthetic, but it was a completely new design. Thinkpads have been far more slowly evolving than the big break between the second and third Macbook Air chassis.

My MacBook Air 11-inch from 2015 with (1.7 GHz Dual-Core Intel i7; 8 GB of RAM) is still my main computer. And I love it, and it feels new.

It's 8 years old, and it doesn't show them. Not even a bit. Perhaps I'm just lucky, but I made minimal maintenance and I use it everyday for hours. 8 years of daily use. I traveled to super remote places with it.

I want to use it for 2 or 3 more years (10 years in total would be nice!)

Incredible machine to be sure. My problem is that I find just too many websites don’t work efficiently with its resolution. How do you deal with that?

Honestly I never encountered this problem before, or I didn't pay attention

Interesting, thank you.

Yes. I used mine for a decade. Even bought a tweaked 2011 off eBay as late as 2021.

Also I adore those keyboards.

This will be the m1 in 5 years.

I don't understand the attraction of openly hostile hardware.

Does the CPU actively slap you while you use it?

Maybe you'd like to demonstrate the ease of implementing Linux on M2 hardware. Where's that hardware driver source code? Oh, you're having to literally reverse engineer hardware? lol

That's not hostile, that's indifferent. Hostile would be if Apple implemented intentional blocks and safeguards attempting to prevent people from running Linux on M2. From everything I've read about it, it has been the exact opposite.

But they didn't provide any documentation, you are correct, so I wouldn't call it friendly or supportive. But I definitely wouldn't call it hostile either.

And their direction in your opinion is moving towards openness or away from it?

Looks like moving towards openness to me, because as far as I remember, there has not been such a high-functioning Linux distro on a Mac until Asahi. And implemented in such a short period of time, on top of that. Of course I wouldn't attribute it solely to that, the Asahi team seems to be doing a phenomenal job as well.

Also, I haven't seen Linus Torvalds use a Macbook (an M2 Air running Asahi Linux) until recently either.[0]

0. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/linus-torvalds-uses-...

>Also, I haven't seen Linus Torvalds use a Macbook (an M2 Air running Asahi Linux) until recently either.

You're about a decade late: https://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvald...

Huh, Ubuntu works perfectly on my 2010 Macbook pro. Including fringey stuff like keyboard backlight control and the ambient light sensor. Also sleep etc.

I didn't even have to mess with anything, it just worked right after the install. How much more high-functioning can you get?

100% towards openness. Before the move to ARM, Macs' security standing was an all or nothing affair. Either all the OSes that ran on the Mac had a secure boot sequence, or none of them did.

With Apple Silicon, you can keep a complete chain of trust with macOS and install an insecure Linux distro. It's great security compartmentalization, and no x64 chip can offer this granular control.

A fair point though it was downvoted because HN is biased in favor of Apple. It's better to avoid any discussion concerning Apple products here, it just doesn't have the quality that other topics usually have.

At least until their SSDs start failing.

This. People forget that those old macs were so long lasting because the disks were easily swappable with newer and faster SSDs so they could be upgraded and kept along for longer.

With the M* chips this lifehack will no longer be possible. Once the SSD storage fails, the entire motherboard is instant e-waste.

I think the 2015 generation of Macbooks will outlive the M1 generation from a HW pov. I still see people rocking the old Macbooks with the glowing Apple logo. I doubt the M series will see such longevity.

Calling it now, future Ebay listings will include drive cycles listed alongside battery cycles.

I think especially the base 256GB models will be much more impacted by drive wear and failures. It's too early to tell but I'm calling it now for the near future.

I think part of the love for those models is how hobbled the successors to these laptops were. First the line basically stopped improving while the Macbook Pro went Retina, second there was the expensive Macbook no qualifier with a dreadful butterfly keyboard, and then the 2018 Macbook Air came out but still had a dreadful butterfly keyboard. Only in March 2020 did a proper, no compromise, better in every way laptop came out to replace a Macbook Air bought in 2012-2015.

True, I have an i7-8GB-256 MacBook Air. Haswell has been very efficient when it came out, and is holding up well until today. I gave the laptop to the partner of my sister who’s using it daily with the latest macOS Ventura, Using OpenCore Legacy Patcher

My little 11" MacBook Air (2015) was such an amazing computer. I'm a bit sad that I sold it, but at that point, I couldn't afford to buy a new computer without selling my old one, and I did get a decent price for it.

I like my m2 air better than my 2013 Air. I'm assuming you looked up the specs but I actually assumed my m2 is lighter.

Have you tried the newer ASUS Zenbooks?

I've got the Zenbook S13 OLED and it's gorgeous. While the trackpad isn't as good as the one on the MacBook, it's close. And that aside, I prefer everything else about the Zenbook.

I have a Vivobook S 14X. It heats more than I'd like and Intel Iris (GPU) is super weak but otherwise would be a fine laptop. MacBook would probably be better on performance/battery but the proprietary OS is a big no for me.

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