Continuing part 1 and part 2 I have less  in my life than I have for the last 10 years. The Mid 2015 15” Retina MacBook Pro is the last MacBook I’ll ever own.

Since my first laptop, a Sony Vaio, laptops haven’t really changed much. They have faster hardware, bigger screens, and more battery life. Basically just iterative improvements taking place over 10 years. My MacBook Air was the lightest and most powerful laptop I’d ever had all at once. I had been using that until 2016 when I started a new job and was issued a Mid 2015 15” MacBook Pro. After using it for a few months, I got over the heft of the MacBook Pro vs the Air for daily carrying and got used to the performance improvement. Using the MBA started to be annoying when watching HD video would beachball or outright crash the system over and over. I looked around for some non- alternatives but didn’t really see anything compelling. I saw people at work start to be issued the first MacBook with the touch bar and right away I could tell it wasn’t for me.

The reason I bought a new (new but over a year old) 2015 MacBook Pro was that despite how cynical I had gotten about the direction  had been going in with its hardware, it didn’t fully sink in how bad it could git until I saw people using the new ones. What a piece of shit. The touch bar does nothing useful, the USB port immediately requires a giant dongle that is very inconvenient to plug in external displays and peripherals. The keyboard is shit. All of these tradeoffs are for things I don’t want or need, so I have no interest in ever owning or using one. I realized that if I wanted a more powerful laptop than the MacBook Air, I’d better get one of these last tolerable MacBook Pros.

The software changes have been just about as welcome as the hardware changes. I’m currently running El Capitan on my personal laptop, while my work laptop was force upgraded to Sierra. All that managed to do was break the Hush app I have been running since  introduced spam for the desktop. I looked to see if there was a newer version but it seems like the app was erased from existence on the Internet. I guess it’s bad form to allow users to silence a potential revenue generator on their personal computers in 2018. I especially like the notification that appears anytime I used a browser other than Safari. Way to take a page out of the MICROS~1 playbook you dicks. You can try to hide them by having them only show up for one minute of the day but even that doesn’t work all the time.

Now  plans on removing OpenGL and OpenCL support from their latest release and making “macOS” applications work more like iOS applications. That’s no surprise, they’ve been moving towards that since the Forstall days and good riddance as far as I’m concerned. I do about 80% of my work in a hosted GNU/Linux environment at this point and eventually I’d like to just wipe the disk. Right now I still need it running somewhere so I can access the stuff I’ve bought on iTunes but that’s fine to run in the background while I fullscreen a remote VNC session.

The final chapter of De-Applification is well underway and all that remains is to eventually find some computer that isn’t hot garbage once this one dies.