My MacBook Pro is pretty old. A mid-2014 13″ i7. It’s been showing its age for a while. I’ve wanted a new computer, but I haven’t really needed one. I spend my working day on a 2020 M1 MacBook Pro which behaves really well. A handful of things have increasingly pushed me further away from Apple. And I’m truly considering the first time in my life that my next personal computer will not be a Mac.
At the end of October I went down to Hackaday Supercon. It was a blast, and among the sponsors was Framework, a hardware startup that makes easily-repairable laptops. I’ve had my eye on them for a while but didn’t really ever think of them as a genuine option because I was a Mac user. They had a workshop at the con. They brought in boxes of laptop parts and said “try and build a computer”. These were all parts that were not refurbish-able from customer returns. We were challenged with testing and trading and seeing if we could get something together most of the stuff didn’t work. I had a motherboard that POSTed, but didn’t get any further than that. It was good fun.
It left me thinking quite a bit though – why am I attached to Apple as a manufacturer? Apple stopped providing updates for this computer in 2021. And the current version of the Brave Browser is the last provided (Chromium dropped support for this version of macOS). And things were going to continue like that. I tried to install and play Portal a month ago, only to find that I couldn’t because Apple had dropped support for 32-bit binaries (Get that? Portal was out when 32-bit was still going strong)
I came back from the framework workshop with a 1TB SSD they provided to try stuff out with. I thought “Oh, I’ll get an adapter and put it in my MacBook”.
But when I was putting it in, I thought “What if I tried to make Linux work?” Like – what if I really gave it a shot, not just play with it for a day, but boot into it every day. Try to really use it as a daily driver.
I tried Ubuntu for a bit, and am now running Mint. And I’m confronted with this other thought: If I give up Apple stuff that’s a part of my personality. I have claimed to be a Mac user for decades. It used to be a badge of honor. Lately it’s not been that. Apple has done a number of things that I find deplorable. And I don’t know that I want to go back and give them more money.
Sort of the weird thing that occurred to me this evening was that I do a lot of hobby stuff in the Mac space. 4 of the regular podcasts I listen to are Apple-focused. I made a Mac badge-add-on for computer shows.
So I’m going to try this for a while. And there’s a real possibility that my next computer will be a Framework 12. Just to be clear though, I definitely will not be a Windows guy