Tag: apple

Why The mid-2012 Is Still The Best MacBook

That maybe a nigh-on ten-year-old design, but the mid-2012 MacBook Pro (A1278) is still the best laptop Apple have made. There are people who say that the model which superseded it (the A1502 Retina MacBook Pro) is the best one. I won’t fight them on that – those 2015 MacBook Pros are still excellent machines, with many of the same attractive qualities as the A1278 – but they are wrong.

The A1278 is more serviceable and more upgradeable. You can easily change the battery when its performance inevitably starts to wear out (as happens to all batteries). You can change and upgrade the storage (in my own mid-2012 MacBook Pro, I have fitted a 1TB SSD as a system drive, plus a 2TB SATA disk in place of where the original optical drive used to be). And you can change the RAM up to an actual maximum of 16GB in a matter of moments.

With the A1502 model, on the other hand, changing the battery is difficult as the original battery is glued in place – and a replacement battery can cost up to five times what a new battery for a mid-2012 MacBook Pro costs. You can still change or upgrade the storage – but the NVMe SSD this model requires also costs a lot more. RAM is soldered onto the Logicboard and cannot be replaced or upgraded. And although you gain onboard HDMI and more Thunderbolt 2 ports (compared to the A1278), you lose Ethernet and FireWire 800 ports.

However, if you are content with your specs (or happy to spend more time and money on maintenance) the 2015 Retina MacBook Pro is still a very good machine, and very nice to use. It’s after 2015 that things really start to go downhill…

For the last five years, Apple have insisted on producing worse laptops than they did in the past. Gradually removing all the features people actually liked and used, whilst at the same time making the machines all but impossible to repair or maintain.

Consider some of the features of the older MacBooks I have mentioned which no longer appear on the newer models… Apple’s MagSafe charger design is a work of true genius. It’s subtle pieces of brilliance in design like MagSafe which in the past have set Apple’s products apart from the herd, and made it worth paying the premium for their brand. So in 2016, Apple discontinued this universally-acclaimed design in favour of charging over USB-C on their new A1707 MacBooks (which iFixIt scores a lousy 1/10 for repairability).

Likewise, the mid-2012 MacBook Pro and the earlier Retina models produced alongside it feature a scissor-style keyboard using a mechanism Apple calls a ‘Magic Keyboard’, which in my opinion is an absolute joy to type on. In 2015, Apple started using their ‘Butterfly Keyboard’ mechanism instead – a keyboard mechanism which is painful to use, received consistently negative reviews, and was actually the subject of a lawsuit – purely for the sake of slightly thinner MacBooks.

This single-minded pursuit of thin and lightweight has resulted in laptops which are less repairable, less upgradeable, have keyboards which hurt your hands, and feature next to no connectivity (a MacBook Pro which has four USB ports – one of which has to be used for the charger – and nothing else is not, in my opinion, Pro at all).

So although they may seem chunky by today’s standards, the mid-2012 MacBook Pro is still a vastly more Pro device than almost all the MacBook models released after it. The specs are still comparable to much more recent machines – and if you happen to buy one with lower specs, you can upgrade it to the maximum for around £100, with less than an hour’s work. You can plug in almost everything you might need to plug in, without having to take out a mid-sized bank loan to purchase Apple’s own cable adaptors. And you get all the advantages of some of Apple’s best design work – especially the MagSafe charger.

The only serious downside of the older A1278 is that the onboard graphics chip seriously limits performance if you are running a very graphics-intense workflow (video editing or rendering, for example). It is possible to get around this, although the workaround is a clunky and not-especially-portable solution.

A couple of years ago, Apple finally opened up the use of external graphics cards with MacBooks, recognising that thermal throttling on graphics issues is one of the biggest causes of loss of performance for MacBook users. Officially, eGPUs are only supported on Thunderbolt 3 enabled Macs running macOS 10.13.4 (‘High Sierra’) or later. However, it is possible to force eGPU support on Thunderbolt 2 Macs (including the A1278 MacBook Pro) using the PurgeWrangler script, which is something I have done successfully prior to my Cheesegrater Mac Pro build.

(I should note that since I did that, Mayank Kumar who designed the PurgeWrangler script has released a new version called Kryptonite, which supersedes PurgeWrangler as it does not need root level kernel modifications requiring System Integrity Protection to be disabled on your Mac. I have not personally tried Kryptonite, as I have not used my eGPU much recently.)

I would not recommend taking this route unless you know that you are going to be running lots of heavy-duty graphics on your Mac. But it is always worth being aware that these types of modifications are available for certain specific use cases.

In conclusion, the only thing you gain by opting for a MacBook built in 2015 or later is a marginal saving in terms of size and weight. Personally, I would always rather have a computer which is slightly bulkier, but is actually fit for purpose and which can be repaired when it goes wrong.

Thoughts On Apple’s Self Service Repair Announcement

As a longtime and loyal Apple user – but one who abhors the company’s proprietary instincts and lack of transparency around parts and repairs – the announcement earlier today that Apple would soon launch their Self Service Repair programme, making specialist parts, tools and diagrams available to the public should have had me jumping for joy.

And it did! I was genuinely cheered by the news when I read it. It’s a remarkable change of tune from a company who have previously been so wildly hysterical on the topic of repair – as the iFixIt blog on the matter was quick to point out…

This move invalidates many of the arguments Apple and other manufacturers have used against the right to repair. Liability? You understand the risks, and won’t sue Apple if you damage your device, or stab yourself in the palm with a screwdriver. Warranties? Although it’s illegal to void a warranty for a DIY repair, people worry. Apple’s program should tell motivated fixers that their warranty is intact.

But there are some serious caveats, too. As the European Right To Repair campaign’s response says, the devil is very much in the details. Their website wonders whether the announcement might end up being too good to be true.

For my part, I don’t think ‘too good to be true’ is quite fair. I think this is genuine, and I think that is legitimately good news – but I think it does not go anywhere near far enough, and I think Apple’s motivations still owe more to safeguarding their market share than helping their consumers. That is their right – but it is also our right to keep campaigning for binding right to repair legislation which serves the public, not just vested interests.

Apple are releasing only the schematics and spare parts for the newest iPhone and MacBook models (at least to begin with). The message is clear: Buy our new stuff, and you’re much better off! You’ll even get to fix it, too!

But those of us who care about repair and sustainability don’t want to be forced into upgrading to new devices so we can get the cool new toys. In fact, that is exactly the type of attitude we are trying to get away from! If Apple’s damascene conversion were serious, they would want to help us keep older devices running better for longer.

What cheers me most about the whole thing is that it shows we are winning. Apple is a smart. Smart, with a carefully-honed image of slick, polished competence. In my view, what’s happening here is that Apple have spotted which way the wind is blowing; they want to get out in front of any legislation which maybe coming down the line to do things on their own terms; they want to jump before they are pushed. Well, good. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still push.

mid-2009 MacBook On Mojave

My ‘secondary’ laptop – an A1181 white MacBook from 2009 – only officially supports up to OS X 10.11 (‘El Capitan’).

Using the super-easy, user-friendly patcher tools from dosdude1, I was able to force this machine onto macOS 10.14.6 (‘Mojave’) in line with all the other Macs I am using.

All good on Mojave

Some trackpad functionality has altered a little (I was warned this could happen on these models when I downloaded the patchers) but that’s still very useable. With an SSD now installed as well, the Mac runs impressively smoothly for its age.

Ideally I would like to boost the RAM up from 4GB to 6GB (which is the actual maximum RAM for this model, according to Everymac), but that will require finding a 4GB DDR2 SO-DIMM at a reasonable price, which seems to be almost impossible! Do please let me know if you spot any for sale, if you have any which you are no longer using!

Cheesegrater Mac Pro Modification

Having run my recording studio entirely off a laptop (a mid-2012 MacBook Pro A1278 to be precise) for many years, I decided to take advantage of all the time at home over the summer of 2020 – and the increase in remote studio work which accompanied that – and invest in a dedicated studio machine designed to handle pro creative environments. Highly customisable and still comparable to many of the latest top-spec computers, I found a ‘cheesegrater’ Mac Pro 5,1 on eBay.

Cheesegrater and MacBook Pro together in the studio

I installed an SSD system drive (plus three more large 3.5″ SATA volumes in the other hard disk slots, to accommodate large project files, audio samples, etc.) and 64GB of 1333MHz DDR3 RAM in the dual CPU tray. The trickiest part of the build was getting the Mac Pro to communicate with some much newer Apple peripherals I already had.

With the laptop, I was running a triple screen setup via Thunderbolt – the MacBook Pro’s built-in screen was the first display, and I had two Apple 27″ Thunderbolt Displays mounted on the wall above my desk in the studio for running audio software which requires a lot of screen space. The Thunderbolt displays were daisychained together via Thunderbolt, and running from the MacBook Pro. An eGPU allowed this setup to function without the laptop exploding due to thermal throttling.

The ‘cheesegrater’ Mac Pros do not have any native Thunderbolt support. But they do have PCIe slots, and people on the MacRumors forum had started to install third-party Thunderbolt PCIe cards into these machines with varying degrees of success. The key thing is to ‘flash’ the Thunderbolt card, and then modify the firmware of the Mac Pro to recognise it as such. Although I watched some excellent video tutorials on doing this whole process yourself, I ended up buying a pre-flashed GC-TITAN RIDGE Thunderbolt PCIe card from a company called dqupgrade – which came with instructions on how to use OpenCore to modify the Mac’s EFI to ‘see’ the card – purely out of convenience.

Because I needed to send video over Thunderbolt, I needed to get my GPU to communicate with a Thunderbolt PCIe card too. I already knew I’d need to upgrade the graphics card in the Mac Pro, as I wanted to run this Mac on macOS 10.14.6 (‘Mojave’), and that requires a ‘Metal’-compatible graphics unit. I opted for a Sapphire Radeon RX580 with two DisplayPort outputs, which I could then feed into the Mini DisplayPort inputs of the flashed GC-TITAN RIDGE card, to carry video over Thunderbolt.

So far, I was following a path trodden by a number of Mac Pro (or Hackintosh) modifiers. But my setup involved two Thunderbolt displays, and I couldn’t find any literature online from anyone who had experience of driving more than one Thunderbolt video peripheral at a time from a flashed PCIe card in a Mac Pro 5,1 – so I had to do a bit of trial-and-error in my studio.

I had assumed that the Thunderbolt ports built into the backs of the Thunderbolt Displays would no longer be active, and that each display would have to be connected individually to the GC-TITAN RIDGE card (which thankfully has two Thunderbolt 3 outputs on it; obviously I am using Apple’s vastly overpriced Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 converters in order to connect the Displays’ own data cables).

In fact, the opposite ended up being true – connecting each display to its own Thunderbolt output on the back of the Mac Pro meant that only one display would be active (whichever was plugged in first; which at least told me that both ports were outputting video over Thunderbolt, and that both displays were communicating with the GPU – just not at the same time!). However, if I connected one Thunderbolt Display to one of the GC-TITAN RIDGE’s ports, and then daisychained the second from the first screen’s onboard Thunderbolt port (as I had done in my old setup, running off my laptop), I could actually drive both displays at once via Thunderbolt – providing I was sending two separate video signals from the Radeon RX580 to the Mini DisplayPort inputs on the GC-TITAN RIDGE.

Here is a short video of the moment I first got that configuration working:

That proves (as I mention in the video) that I am sending both video and data over Thunderbolt. The Mac’s own System Information window also bears this out.

There are some anomalies in this setup, still. The Apple Thunderbolt Displays were designed to act as an all-in-one hub for all kinds of connections (which were popular at the time of release), almost like an iMac without a processor – the back of each unit has three USB 2.0 sockets, a FireWire 800 port and an ethernet port, as well as the onboard Thunderbolt 2 connection I already mentioned. All of these connections work perfectly and communicate with the Mac – except, for some reason, the FireWire 800 ports. Luckily the Mac Pro itself has four FireWire 800 ports built-in, so being unable to use the ones on the backs of the screens is not a huge issue for me.