Re: Rinse and repeat
Have to agree, from what I've been reading.
I'm writing this on a late 2008 MacBook. I upgraded the RAM from 2GB to 4GB using a COTS SODIMM as soon as I got it. I've had to replace the battery with an after-market one and the HDD with an SSD. Maybe £200 for the two items which isn't bad over ten years. It's been updated to El Capitan which is as far as it'll go but so far nothing I install has had a problem with that.
Other than the slot-load optical drive getting a bit temperamental and a little bit of cosmetic cracking of the plastic on the display hinge it's still running fine - reasonably fast boot, quick wake up, perfect display & keyboard and fast application launch & operation.
I am not looking forward to the day when something irreplaceable goes. Given what I've read about the reliability of modern Apple laptops and also how they are now even more overpriced than they were back in 2008 I don't think I want to risk buying one but I also really dislike the retrograde changes in Windows 10's ghastly Metro UI and its intrusive/uncontrollable maintenance/snooping policy. And while Cygwin is great it's not as good as having a real POSIX OS under the hood.
I use Linux all the time server-side and for things like Jupyter on VMs on my lappy but with the best will in the world even Ubuntu is not as slickly integrated onto laptop hardware as OS X or Windows. In particular, graphics performance always seems to be poorer than the hardware should be able to achieve. (The fault of the GPU manufacturers not publishing the hardware info or writing decent binary dirvers I know, not of Linux itself.)
Living on borrowed time. Oh well. I'll have to burn that bridge when I get to it, I suppose.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
