it's a framework!!! im very excited - and already enjoying using it - which made me want to make a little (ha!) post about the laptop it replaced, and the laptop that laptop replaced. (and i'll probably do a write up later on the (spoiler!) macbook and the tribulations i went through to make that thing work) (fyi this is a Long Post(it got out of hand im sorry))

the only laptop i've used without a keyboard attached! (not true)

ages back, i got a egpu for it, because thunderbolt is Neat™ - and was the thing i had specifically made sure to get thunderbolt for back when i bought it back in 2021 (oh no i really thought it had lasted longer than that). using said egpu with it worked great the first trip i brought it on - but during the second it got real flakey - needing me to hold the cable at a specific angle for it to work. I had assumed it was a cable fault at the time - after all, why else would that be necessary? (and i didnt have multiple thunderbolt cables lying around. those things are pricy.) it stayed like that for a couple trips until it really stopped doing thunderbolt at all - which was really fine. i didnt end up using it that often, but it was still weird. until it stopped charging unless i held the cable at a specific angle,

dont do this. it means things have gone Wrong

at which point i realized it was a laptop fault, not a cable fault. this prompted me to do (horrible) things to it which almost got it charging, until it would not anymore, and i finally realized that the friggen thunderbolt port just... came off of the motherboard. brought it to a shop - they went "lmao we cant soldier a thunderbolt port back onto a board." which meant it was the end for it (unless i bought a new board for it, but that would still just die after a while)

i even drew little circuit traces on it! (it always reeked of sharpie after that)

this was back in may-ish, by which time i had LTX looming on the horizon, and also just a general need for a laptop to like... edit photos on.

this is not a recommended use for the Valve™ Steam™ Deck™

and right then, someone needed me to help them get rid of a bunch of old macs (and y'know... pull the data off of them). Which gave me...

the clapped out macbook!!!

the external hard drive is a bit of an indicator towards how awful getting it working was

Because this was an extremely temporary setup, and an ancient (2015) Macbook, i refused to spend any more than i had to to get it working. Because all that seemed wrong with it was a missing(???) ssd, i grabbed an adapter for an NVME drive, popped it in (w/ my old laptop's drive that i had stolen from it), and promptly had like 3 days of my life sucked away by it. but with some horrid external hard drive nonsense that i hope to document later, got it on mac os big sur, which was the newest version of mac os that would work without ponying up for a fancy apple certified ssd. for a laptop that i would use for less than six months. it uh... wasn't very fast (except in lightroom - it actually held its own (unless i accidentally used full sized previews like i did on a plane lmao)) - but the battery life was genuinely impressive - shame it actually drove me mad from how slow it was! it was just barely not fast enough for me to be annoyed at it, but in fairness, it did serve me well when i brought it to LTX

in the brief moment where i lost the monitor power adapter and thought id be macbook gaming for the weekend

anywho, at somepoint there i installed windows on it w/ bootcamp, and now it only wants to boot into windows unless i hold option while it boots. no idea why it does that (i have an idea - it'll probably go in the awful macbook write-up). don't really know what to do with it now tbh. like if i needed an OSX environment i'd just... spin one up in a vm or something

irony (this was taken like a week before it died)

if anyone has any neat projects with old macs - let me know! (seriously - i have like a closet full of em at this point - and a pile of dead macbooks. help)

anyways framework

ok im done now. have a lovely day!