Mastodawn

is my stuff #retrocomputing? this one https://defcon.social/@yuman/116601226418831983 is 13 years old, what's the cutoff? is it years or something tangible, like a tape player or floppy drive?

Show thread

Imran Nazar ~ عمران نزر

@yuman I feel like the cutoff is whether you can still buy them new or lightly used. To take your retina MBP: you can't get that same model at the Apple Store, but you can walk in and buy a unibody MBP and it won't even look _that_ different to yours.

Whereas you can't buy the plastic-body MBP's any more, so they'd be the bleeding edge of retro, as it were.

Show thread

fraggLe!2d ago

@Two9A @yuman My personal line is the somewhat nebulous "meaningfully different".

Like a Core2 is old as heck, but it's not really meaningfully different to a modern machine, just slower, so it's not really interesting.

My 2011 MBP isn't really meaningfully different to the last x86 ones (other than its 17" form factor ruling ass in a way they can only dream of). It *is* different to the m1 though, so when x86 macs fall completely out of support that'll be enough for me, but for now, no.

Show thread

yuman 1d ago

@fwaggle @Two9A

how's that 2011 keeping up, is the AMD graphics still alive?

btw, here's my 2006 17: https://defcon.social/@yuman/116527734997036311

Show thread

fraggLe!1d ago

@yuman @Two9A Nah, that's how I ended up with it. There's a boot rom setting you can type in which blocks loading it, and then there's an article about removing a zero ohm resistor to cut power to it which significantly slashed heat and battery usage.

Works great on High Sierra with the iGPU though, lovely machine. Was a fine Linux box until the wifi started dropping out on it, almost certainly a driver issue.

Show thread

yuman 1d ago

@fwaggle @Two9A

it's way easier nowadays, had a buncha those. no need for soldering and tweaks, nvram GfxMode=4 kills the discrete graphics. not present in sysreport, wastes no power, no heat, etc.

had no issues with wifi on mine, they do need the proprietary broadcom drivers (broadcom-wl on fedora, wl on debian/ubuntu)

Show thread

fraggLe!1d ago

@yuman @Two9A I forget what package I was running on Arch, I *think* it was the proprietary one. It was fine, until it wasn't - I think around the kernel 6.6 point?