The first Mac I ever owned was a 2006 MacBook. It was a great machine. I still own it, in fact. It doesn’t get too much attention these days, but occasionally I’ll get it out for nostalgic reasons — usually just to make some funny faces in Photo Booth with the kids.
Apple made some great hardware at the time. And that legacy continues to this day. But that wasn’t enough to convince me to make the switch from Windows to the Mac.
I was a big PC guy in my teen years. Mostly because of my interest in video games and computer hardware. I had built a handful of PCs and obsessed about the latest offerings from AMD and Nvidia. I would frequently tweak Windows settings and occasionally make hardware upgrades to optimize for performance.
I didn’t want to switch to the Mac because I didn’t want to lose out on my familiarity with Windows or the joy of hardware tinkering.
But Apple switched to Intel in the mid-2000s, which meant I could always just install Windows if I found that Mac OS X wouldn’t do the trick for me. And the 2006 MacBook actually offered some decent upgradability. After removing the battery from the bottom, you were just a few screws away from the hard drive and RAM.
That was enough for me.
I bought a base 2006 MacBook from Apple and upgraded the hard drive and memory myself. I loved it.
But that experience is almost entirely gone now. Unless you’re willing to buy older Macs or spend way too much on a Mac Pro, the internals you get when first buying the machine is what they will be for the remainder of its existence. And although the Linux community has made great strides at getting Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, it’s nothing compared to what we used to have.
Today, if you want to run an operating system other than macOS on a Mac, you’re much better off running it in a virtual machine. But that’s pretty limiting. When Apple stops offering support for the machine, the host operating system will no longer receive software updates. And you’ll never be able to get the same kind of performance in a virtual machine as you would booting it natively.
All of these changes took place slowly over the past fifteen years or so. Apple continually reduced the number of components that could realistically be upgraded by the end user. For example, I was able to upgrade both the hard drive and memory in the 2011 Mac Mini that I used as my home server for about a decade.
The 2018 Mac Mini that I’m using now is only able to have its memory upgraded. And latest Apple Silicon Mac Minis? They don’t offer any upgradeable components.
The versatility of booting into alternative operating systems is basically non-existent, too. Naturally, with the move to Apple Silicon, Boot Camp is no longer available. And while you can install Linux on these machines, hardware support just isn’t what it used to be. I wouldn’t expect that to meaningfully change in the future either.
All of this, along with Apple’s continual march toward locking down macOS, has me starting to look elsewhere. I still enjoy using a lot of the software on my Macs. But it’s hard for me to get excited about another machine that can never be upgraded and will eventually be left a paperweight when Apple drops support and third-party developers cease development for the older operating system.
For now, I have my eyes on a Framework 13. A machine that represents the polar opposite of Apple’s hardware philosophy, but one that’s much closer to my ideal.
