A few weeks ago my buddy Mark (I know far too many Marks) in California was telling me he was ready to throw his MacBook Pro (mid 2012) through a wall. It had gotten slow and unresponsive to the point of being unusable.
He couldn't afford to upgrade to a new one—something I strongly dissuaded him from doing anyway based on my own experience over the past year—and instead suggested he increase the RAM and swap out the spinning hard drive with an SSD since his was the last year of "upgradeable" MBPs and it would be a relatively easy process.
He didn't feel comfortable doing it himself, and since I have always been his hardware go-to guy but now lived 700 miles away, he asked, "Can they do that at the Apple Store?"
"Probably, but you're better off just buying the parts and sending it all to me. It will be cheaper in the long run and you'll know all your data will be transferred properly."
"Tell me what I need to buy."
So last Thursday the machine arrived, along with 8GB RAM and a new 512 GB Intel SSD.
And for once—a rare instance for my experience with Apple these days—everything just worked. It took only about two hours to swap in the new parts, load a fresh copy of the O/S (I had it on a USB thumb drive that I'd created for work a few days earlier), and restore his data from the old drive.
Working on this "old" Mac reminded me just how much we've lost in Jony Ive's unrelenting quest to build a Mac no thicker than a sheet of paper. Never mind the loss of ports or the stupid fucking keyboard on the latest models. It's the little things like MagSafe and that slowly glowing (but otherwise invisible) indicator on the right side of the bottom case that showed the machine was sleeping when the cover was closed) that initially made me such a fan of Apple. And of course this:
Having the two machines side by side, however, did highlight how much better the display has gotten over the past five years, even leaving out the fact that Mark's wasn't a retina display and mine was. The brightness and color saturation were so much better on my 2016 it was ridiculous.
But c'mon Jony…how about bringing back a little of that "surprise and delight" factor Apple used to be known for?