Getting a Refurbished Macbook Pro M4 and Feeling Sad about It
	2025 December 09
	Current Mood:	excited to decorate our new year tree soon
	Now Playing:	"Mekong Ballad" by COLA REN

I finally got myself a new laptop. I tried to keep using my Mojave-running early 2014 Macbook Air for as long as I could: I replaced its battery twice in the last 3 years, I replaced its SSD (twice) and made it run Linux Fedora as a dual-boot [1] [2]. I kept old versions of the software I used, lost access to some of the software I couldn't get an old version of, had to cope with some web services not running at all in my outdated browsers. But in the end, I knew I had to finally spend money and get myself something new to (hopefully?) last me another 10 years.

Earlier this year I was dreaming of getting myself a new Framework 13 and installing Linux on it and being cool and happy with it. Then I went through my dual-boot Linux migration saga and hesitated. Luckily for me, Apple finally released a Macbook Pro laptop with one of their fancy Apple Silicon chips and 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD as a default model, so I figured this would be so much simpler to switch to from my Macbook Air that I've been using with macOS for the last 11 years. I decided against a similar Macbook Air model because there were not enough usb ports (maybe silly of me) and, what's more important, I don't trust their automatic cooling system with no fans inside. As someone whose old Macbook Air has been constantly showing CPU temperatures at more than 90ªC I just don't trust Apple to sustain that new model for the same amount of time I did with my old fan-cooling model (again, probably silly of me). So, my only real problem with getting this fancy new Macbook Pro laptop was that even a refurbished model was going to be the biggest one-time purchase I've ever made in my life so far. And I had to make this purchase mostly because Apple said so.

When me and my parents found out that I was accepted to study software engineering at a Moscow university we realised that I needed a laptop, since I was moving away to another city. At that time they could only afford buying me a Samsung netbook running Windows XP with a maximum screen resolution of 1024x600. I survived the first two years of uni with that netbook, even though some teachers were on the brink of kicking me out of their class whenever they saw me taking it out of my backpack. For example, it could barely run any Java development environment, which was problematic but didn't stop me from finishing and successfully defending my second year coursework written in Java. And not long after that the netbook's screen matrix broke.

Before starting my third year of uni my grandfather decided to invest into a more serious laptop for my studies. It was a beautiful Sony VAIO (with Windows 7 pre-installed) that I chose myself. I started making electronic music on that laptop, I started making games on that laptop, I played soo much Skyrim on it, got my first job thanks to having it, and overall loved it very much (until I fucked it up by updating to Windows 8, and then later installing half-assedly a dual-boot Ubuntu on it, and then completely bricking it after full-assedly trying to remove that dual-boot Ubuntu).

In 2014 my sister offered to buy me a refurbished Macbook Air and get it to me from USA via my father visiting her. I was curious because I never used a macOS computer before. It took me some time to get used to it but after a couple of months of laptop transitioning I fully switched to using macOS and abandonded my Sony VAIO. This was the same Macbook Air I've been using for 11 years until this December, literally until a couple days ago when I transferred everything to the new Macbook Pro.

I feel sad. It absolutely sucks that I can't continue using my Intel processor Macbook Air forever because of all the neverending OS limitations Apple is pushing over and over. On top of that, I can't even find a new charger for my old Macbook Air model anymore, and I've been in dire need of one because their wiring melts so quickly all the time.

Things don't seem to work as reliably on Apple Silicon as they did on my old Intel chip. It really feels like my dual-boot Fedora experience all over again, when I had to do a lot of trial and error to restore my current workflow. It's much much faster doing macOS to macOS workflow restore operations compared to macOS to Linux, but, still, I can't avoid small disappointments here and there. Some websites have broken layouts for no reason, wine stuff gives different results (so far a lot of these results have been just not being able to run most of the games I tried to), I can only run my already existing VirtualBox environments via experimental libraries (who would have thought I would like to continue using my 32-bit Windows XP setup after switching to arm64? not enough people at Oracle, apparently), some of the old x64 installers don't work anymore because they had x32 bits in them. Beyond the CPU stuff, the silly bass-boosted speakers are not suitable for listening to people on YouTube talk, the crisp of the retina screen actually makes text difficult to read often (which still surprises me, I should finally check my sight maybe).

I am mostly just tired of this artificial consumer technology acceleration. I'm not even sure yet if my financial liquidity will survive this expense hit next year. I shouldn't have this much power, that Macbook Pro M4 has, to perform the line of work I intend to be doing for the foreseeable future. I can work much faster now, but it still feels wrong that every software in my work pipeline performs faster now. Some of the software clearly felt bloated and problematic to me on lower specs, and getting a cool powerful computer shouldn't be the answer to that. I also need to figure out how not to fall into the common gamedev trap of not making video games optimized enough because your gamedev computer is so strong.

Sigh.