TFY unwisely agree to Do Something about 70-year-old in-law's laptop, which is 9 years old and running Word 2008 atop a version of macOS unsupported since 2018 …
You have a spare M1 Probook to upgrade him to. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, he's forgotten his login password, never had an AppleID, and his old machine doesn't recognize APFS filesystems for that old-time floppy-style SSD shuffle.
And the cable to the only SSD they have is flaky.
(Now back home, screaming quietly in Mac.)
UPDATE: job done.
For all that the Migration Ass. didn't want to work across a 4 OS version mismatch and I had to do everything by hand, I've got the machine sorted. Took hours, but significantly less painful than doing the equivalent job on Windows (don't ask, I speak from experience).
@cstross I've found it... tolerable on more recent versions of windows so long as everything you're running [and care about] is written for the NT branches. Still have to reinstall software from scratch though, the worst of which in my case is the softsynth-and-effect plugin collection much of which wants to be remotely authed the first time it's used as well (these wouldn't be any easier on Mac, ofc).
But there's at least a decent equivalent of /home/ that's actually respected by most software these days, even if you need to know about some of its hidden contents. The 9x branch and software written for it, not so easy.
@cstross OCLP will fix that, if you can be bothered.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/09/opencore_legacy_patcher/
The Now Official Mrs Proven's old MacBook is a 2009 model and it's supported by OCLP. In principle I could get it onto macOS >10 easily. Big Sur is the last one to support pre-Metal GPUs. It's doable.
But it's in the basement in Prague and we can't find it. So I hackintoshed macOS 11 onto my old ex-SUSE Dell, restored the Time Machine backup onto that, then copied the files onto a USB HDD and switched the SSD for one with ChromeOS Flex on it. That does all she needs and it's simpler and quicker than macOS.
(This latter made some folks on Reddit very angry with me.)
Yeah, 8GB or RAM and 250GB SSD is actually kinda nice, but Celeron M performance is just too sluggish.
Heck, it was too sluggish when it was new. I think Celeron M laptops weren't able to handle Netflix or YouTube even back in the day.
Even so, I'd personally have uses for it (don't need much CPU or GPU to remote into my work computer, or act as an extra display).
I wouldn't bet on that.
Passmark for a Celeron M 1.6Ghz is only 190
Passmark for a Core2 Duo E4300 @ 1.80GHz is 593
The E4300 is an older slower Core 2 Duo, and it's still 3x the performance of the best Celeron M.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+M+1.60GHz&id=710
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E4300+%40+1.80GHz&id=1678
@cstross I didn't think Apple ever shipped Celerons?
And as ever, a reminder: these things are relative. Mrs P's MacBook is a Core 2 Duo with 6GB of RAM (I have more but it's *too fast* for the nVidia GPU) and a 120GB SSD.
It flew along in 10.13 and its ~12-year-old battery was good for ~2 hours of disconnected use.
It was a freebie (dropped; dinged case, dead HDD) so I did it up as an experiment. A very successful experiment. It became a daily driver for another couple of years.
@cstross Aha!
I think I tried one in a shop. Not my cuppa: ultra-low travel keyboard, just 1 port, tacky gold option, etc.
But, saying that, for some people it would be a lifesaver.
Apparently it runs Ventura and Sonoma well with OCLP! https://www.reddit.com/r/macbook/comments/178zg1f/updated_my_12_mb_via_opencore/
@cstross Well. I just made myself a fool by biking to the PC shop and complaining the harddrive I bought doesn't have a jack fitting the cable.
Turns out that jack is ~so small~ it's nearly invisible amongst the ventilator grate holes.
And yet people continue to pay the ridiculous prices that (cr)Apple fleece people with for sub-par systems.
@cstross my default answer to all these sad problems is to lay hands on a large enough external disk, and SuperDuper!
"Mavericks (10.9) users can download v3.1.1, Mountain Lion (10.8) users can download v2.9.2, Lion (10.7) users can download v2.8, Tiger (10.4), Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6) users can download v2.7.1, Jaguar (macOS 10.2) users can download v1.5.5, and Panther (macOS 10.3) users can download v2.1.4, the last releases available for those older versions..."
@cstross I'm staring at a 10-year-old Mac aptop in similar shape (Office 2011, macOS Sierra...) and doing actual work on a current one, fortunately. But the old one sits there chuckling at me...
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