1 hour ago, HiWire said:

Need a mortgage for that Mac Studio... on the other hand, you might cure cancer.

Not by vibe-coding, you won't.

Also: fuck cancer.

As I have said previously: Time Machine, once a jewel in the Apple ecosystem, has become a neglected, buggy shell of its former glory. Currently I have Schrodinger's backup. I have "successfully completed" the first backup of my M1 MBP to my M4 Mac Mini. Apple have been making increasingly insistent noises about discontinuing support for Time Machine backups on drives attached to a router. With this in mind, I bought a second 8 slot Thunderbay enclosure from OWC (see Jacob's Jacobless Jacobing.) I reformatted my 8TB backup drive for the M1 to APFS. This cost me all of my old backup images, but I have learned that in practice I only care about the most recent one.

The backup process was nontrivial. I had to update both machines to Tahoe (something I had been dragging my heels about for quite some time) and make sure both had every other software patch applied. Prior to upgrading to Tahoe, I could not get the MBP to play nice with drives attached to the Mini. I also had to dig out my CalDigit TS3+ TB dock (and, ahem, the damn Thunderbolt cable) because wireless is too slow and too unreliable for a ~1TB backup. With the CalDigit and TB3/ethernet, the backup process only took a couple hours. As a bonus, the Time Machine image is now on a drive that is backed up to the cloud Backblaze. This is an arrangement I've wanted to do for five or six years.

Of course, none of this actually fucking works. The backup was successful (it completed 100%) but it also wasn't (the Time Machine app doesn't think the backup completed properly.) I spent considerable time pestering some of my geekier friends and even when as far as employing Clod Claude AI for help. Apparently this is a "known issue" with Tahoe. There are some fussy workarounds, but I am currently a bit low on energy and very low on patience. I'm going to pursue the problem further at later date.

On the other end of the spectrum, the 2012 (ya rly) Mini my (sainted, octogenarian) mother uses now has an external HDD enclosure attached to it via USB3 and it's cheerfully backing itself up every hour. Also the Mac Thunderbolt Display she uses with it has built in speakers of sufficient quality that she can watch some of her British TV shows on it and understand the dialogue. We really have lost ground, haven't we?

I have like six AAPL posts in the works, but right now I'm going to focus on this:

Someone on island is selling The. Worst. Mac. ever made. A good friend of mine bought one of these when it was new. His was over $3K (jn 2013 dollars) and it was an utter piece of shit. Nevermind the lack of upgrade path an other limitations due to the form factor. He knew all about that going into it. The damn machine hard locked at least once a day. Not when he was working, but if he left it on and came back later, it'd be completely unresponsive. No amount of OS reinstalls, calls to AppleCare, and even having the unit sent in to be serviced ever fixed it. The techs "could not replicate the issue." Conversely, the "cheese grater" G5 tower and Mac Pro he owned on either side of it continue to work to this day. He maintained that the little trash can was the worst Apple product he ever owned.

TBH, if the seller was asking ...$150 and not $350, I might buy it just for the lulz. At the price he's asking, I could pick up a used low end Apple Silicon Mini and get far more performance at much less power consumption.