I HATE APPLE

The fixit tutorial seems to be several steps above and beyond, possibly in the name of caution/overkill. The OWC (video) tutorial still seems like a pain, but doesn't contain nearly as many steps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lue6lVWhh4o

The biggest concern seems to be care/handling of the battery. There is no way to know how stuck on there it is after so many years, so yeah, may take some time/work/caution. Second after that are the number of connections, but I've changed out my hard drive before and that part doesn't seem nearly as concerning. Last are the screws, which are tiny but which are just screws. I have a compatible screwdriver set already, but if I got a kit it would come with new ones, I guess.

I'm leaning toward going through the authorized rep. $200 vs. $90 is not a terrible difference for such an important component (and potentially problematic and def. PIA DIY project).

I think 5-6 years life on any laptop is decent enough nowadays

Again, not talking about the laptop. Laptop is fine! It's the battery. Seems silly to replace a laptop for the battery, it's a bit like replacing a car for new tires.

A few points: lithium polymer batteries can catch fire if they are pierced. The Apple repair job is more or less guaranteed not to wreck your machine. Exposure to major solvents is not a healthy thing to do. And you’ve no way of knowing if the third party battery has the same actual capacity as the original part.
I repair the shit out of MacBooks all the time but I would hesitate before tackling a glued in battery. Check it out on ifixit and YouTube first hey.

I think 5-6 years life on any laptop is decent enough nowadays

What’s a major solvent?

caek, you're making me feel bad for not replacing the keyboard myself (and the battery along with it), but when I revisit this dude's guide, my stance is still 'fuck it, I'm glad I dished out an extra 150 (Canuck) bucks':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXJBAlM32NY

Some years ago I looked into upgrading the CPU of our MacAir. Everyone said it was impossible except this one dude I found online with an epic instructional video involving solvents, soldering, the whole deal. The video itself was I want to say 90 minutes at least, and super intricate. I immediately thought, who the fuck would do this? So I read the comments and people were indeed asking, hold up, how in the world did you get these skills? Turns out the dude was a former Apple factory employee from China. I figured if it was a PIA for him (however achievable) then no way would I even consider it.

my new air seems good

i've shared this guy's videos before. great lad

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl2mFZoRqjw_ELax4Yisf6w

What’s a major solvent?
Anything other than water or ethanol - acetone, xylene, naphtha, DMSO. They're all carcinogens to varying extents. It's not a technical term tho, just an adjective I chose.

I mean don’t huff it but acetone is a household chemical. I don’t think there’s much additional personal risk from using it in these amounts one time in a world where people drive cars and use bleach.

I stand corrected on acetone - years of working in labs have given me a dread of all the solvents we used to work with happily on the bench, and later found out to be major health risks (formalin, xylene etc), so I over-generalised.

ach, formalin's not a solvent but you know what I mean. Just remembered all the tissue clearing I did with chloroform too, sitting next to the wax embedding gear on a sunny afternoon.

Sent my old iPhone 7 back to apple fo get a battery replacement and I’d say the new battery has about 75 pct of the capacity of one that comes with a new phone (though batttery health shows 100 pct unsurprisingly)

maybe let it run down to zero a couple times to dial it in - battery estimation is an inexact science, especially with a new one.

i'm using my iphone 6s as a webcam, it's very nice!

What software are you using to do that? I tried to get my old 6s running with CamTwist on my MacBook, but nothing shows up.

Camo

https://www.benkuhn.net/vc/

40 € a year?

It's recurring? Didn't see that. There are other apps, too, but I feel like our phone already gets abused enough daily without turning it into a constant video conferencing driver.

yeah it's $$ but i have sympathy for the view that subscription is really the only way to make indie development work these days, and $0.99 is not going to cut it for a team. also my work pays for mine hahaha.

fwiw I ended up going the official route for a battery replacement. $199 all in, including tax and shipping to my home and includes for the sake of simplicity a new keyboard, trackpad etc is better than the DIY route which would have cost $90 plus tax and shipping, plus might have blown up. They are already a day past the work estimate though.

I will say the repair process is starting to make me a little irrationally angry. I dropped the computer off on Sunday, they gave me a completion estimate for September 30th. The last automated update I got was first thing in the morning on the 29th which said the repair was in progress. Having looked into this I know for a fact the repair as they do it, just replacing that whole part of the computer, does not take days, so I'm getting a little impatient, even though getting it back by now would still have been pretty fast.

Ok, all I wanted from these ding dongs was a new battery. Now I get a vague email claiming that they want authorization to do a new repair, this one costing not $199, but $999 (!), plus tax. It's unclear what the problem is, at least until I speak to them, but it might involve changes I made to the computer, which include putting in a new hard drive and adding RAM. Yet that should have absolutely nothing to do with a $1,000 repair, since there was nothing wrong with those parts of the computer, I just wanted a new battery! Either way, as if I would pay $1,000 to repair a 5-year-old MacBook. But now I'm forced to wait for the stupid store to open just for the satisfaction of yelling at a human.

Easy tiger

Pfft, if you can't get mad after bringing in a computer for a new battery then hearing back that not only did they not put in a new battery, now they want to charge you several hundred dollars more for an unspecified repair, essentially totaling the cost of a new computer, then I guess you can't get mad at anything. I feel bad for the suckers that get messages like this and okay the repair.

that is fucking insane and I am sorry for suggesting the official repair was a better idea

okay, I just got off the phone with Apple, and in some ways it makes perfect sense and is also crazier than it seems. a while back I installed a hard drive and some RAM myself with generic, non-Apple components. Apple, however, whenever they so much as do anything beyond opening up a computer, automatically adds a 90-day work guarantee to whatever repairs or changes they make. But because there were non-Apple components I installed in the machine, Apple would not/could not invoke its 90-day work warranty. So that $1,000 quote was in essence a fee for replacing my perfectly good hard drive and perfectly good RAM with Apple versions of that hard drive and RAM so that Apple could add that 90-day warranty to its work, in this case simply replacing my battery. Long story short, they will not replace my battery - or essentially do anything to my computer, ever, even though it is out of warranty and I want to give them my money - unless I have Apple replace my hard drive and RAM with Apple products.

wow, that is super obnoxious

okay, so I now have some cash, and want to buy a new laptop. should i continue to wait until Apple unveils these ARM machines or just plunge in...

tbh i'm working on a 2013 13" MBP and it served my needs well until a year or so ago— i've started needing to utilize InDesign and Acrobat a lot more for work and other purposes, and the machine simply cannot keep up with my commands at this point.

other than this, I'm mostly using it to write, download/listen to/manage my digital music files, as well as teach seminars and such.

i know i asked about this over the summer, but thought it wise to ask again, since things might have changed? anyway, i'm sorry i'm such a clueless idiot about this stuff, i just don't have time to parse through all these reviews that litter the internet.

and thanks in advance for any help!

I would wait if you can, they've said they will introduce the first ARM laptop before the year's out and it will probably be a 13 incher.

i'd wait as well, unless you have specific needs for Intel

Go for used, every time. The depreciation is insane on these things. At least with recent generations the RAM is on the motherboard and the chance of a non Apple SSD is very low, so you won’t run into the scenario you’re in now. That said, the SSDs can be third party upgraded up until a few years ago.

Thanks y'all. Going to put some dough aside for the purpose. I appreciate it!

Thread title does not deliver

In waiting for arm but it i depended on a specific non apple big application like indesign I would wait to hear there plans and err on the side of getting an intel. And yeah used is a pretty good deal on macs these days (better than it used to be, and I can only imagine that gets even better as the impending arm transition drives used intel Mac prices down).

Thanks again for the advice, all. I ended up plunking down for one of the newer, faster Airs, refurbished (of course). With my education discount and AppleCare plus tax, turned out to be $1400. Arrives on Wednesday. Will report back!

I've started using Spaces and just switched to a new MacBook. Why is the dock now showing only on my main workspace and not the others? I can't find this setting anywhere in preferences for mission control or dock. Googling finds no answer. What's going on??

Oh, I figured it out. I was creating new workspaces (or are they called desktops?) by dragging the apps up there in Mission Control. That creates them in full screen mode, in which you can't see the dock unless you do some weird double-swipe manoeuvre that I'm completely unable to replicate except by chance. More zoom window, less full screen window is the answer for me.

This shit shouldn't be this hard, even for an ageing doofus like me.

They are called Spaces but named Desktop 1, Desktop 2, Desktop 3, etc. (Thanks Apple.)

At home I prefer a deskspace over something like a worktop. But on the road I’m all about purpose-driven stacked control views, separated by spaces

I’ve been a Mac guy forever and still have never used Spaces.

I use a lot of spaces, one for each writing project that I'm actively working on, plus one for mail, calendar, bibliography manager, another for browser. I would not want to do without it, even though the old 3x3 grid version was better.

Long time user of Spaces - especially so now that I work from home and only have one monitor. ILX gets its own space.

Maybe I should try it out.

alright maybe someone here knows the answer to this: is there a way to see the files that you have uploaded to the iCloud music library and ONLY those files? Apparently I hit 100,000 uploaded files (this doesn't count things I just added via Apple Music, but actual files I've uploaded that weren't in Apple Music, or didn't match); this seems basically impossible to me. But I can't find a way to see these files by themselves. Anyone know if this is possible?

update: I think I found it, more or less. look at 'songs' in music, make sure you have 'cloud status' as a sorting option. had hundreds of things in there that for whatever reason aren't matched even though they are available in Apple Music. Also was able to see all the things that failed in their uploads for whatever reason, cleared all that out. Could also see the depressing list of things that were still in my library that were 'no longer available' presumably due to licensing changes.