Mac developer Quentin Carnicelli writes about the sad state of Mac hardware:
It’s very difficult to recommend much from the current crop of Macs to customers, and that’s deeply worrisome to us, as a Mac-based software company. For our own internal needs, we’ve wound up purchasing used hardware for testing, rather than opting to compromise heavily on a new machine. That isn’t good for Apple, nor is it what we want. . . .My late-2011 MacBook Pro won’t be able to use the upcoming macOS 10.14. I’d like to buy a new, faster machine, but one try at the MBP’s redesigned keyboard put me off. And that was before I knew about keyboard failures. So for now, I’ll be holding out with Roy Earle.
Apple needs to publicly show their commitment to the full Macintosh hardware line, and they need to do it now. As a long (long) time Mac OS developer, one hesitates to bite the hand that feeds. At a certain point, however, it seems there won’t even be anything left worth biting.
One quick way to make an older machine faster online: use Cloudflare’s DNS. Bam!
comments: 5
I have a year-old MacBook Pro and I'm generally happy with it, although it is a pain that you can't plug USB devices into it directly. (I like to use an external keyboard and mouse most of the time and pretend it's a real computer.) Naturally there's no optical drive either, but I know that ship has sailed. My biggest beef with Apple of late is that they decided to kill off scroll arrows.
There should be settings for scroll bars in System Preferences, under General, no? To my mind, they should be turned on by default, so it’s clear that they’re there. I have 10.13.4, and I have scroll bars, for sure.
As a human who still believes in CDs and DVDs, I’m resigned to buying an external optical drive at some point. The lack of USB ports in newer Macs is, to my mind, ridiculous. Everything taken away and then awkwardly added back on.
Hey, Michael--You've always given me good tech tips (ever since Tweezerman tweezers!)--can you tell me a little more about what this DNS is?
I clicked on the link but was mystified...
The MacBook Air I inherited from my dad last summer is 4 or 5 years old---love it, though there's no DVD slot (or whatever that's called).
Thanks! Fresca
Not the scroll bars, the scroll arrows.
Chris, I have to admit I never even noticed. I read arrows and thought bars.
Fresca, DNS is what turns something like nytimes.com into 151.101.193.164. It turns a domain name or name of a webpage into an address to be found on the Internets. Beyond that, I can’t really give a proper explanation. If you scroll to the bottom of the Cloudflare page, you’ll see a link to a page of directions for using Cloudflare DNS with various devices. Don’t worry about the Install button — it just drops you down to the directions. It takes just a couple of minutes to change the DNS numbers on a device.
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