René Rebe

This is one of the few and longer review articles I write on this site, for two reasons. First of all I am pretty dissatisfied with Apple’s laptops (and workstations) for a decade, and second Dell provided me with XPS 15 to try for a few weeks.

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Although I use and develop on Linux for a very, very, very long time it never had the idea to use screen as a terminal emulator on a serial port for an embedded board.

Turs out that is very well support and just works:

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

Meanwhile at Apple HQ:

Tim: Hm, our year over year sales are down, again. How can we innovate to get this up again?

… hm, head-scratch, nose poke, silence in the audience, …

Tim: ok lets also take away the headphone jack so at least every iPhone user also needs to get a new one and third party companies pay us more Lightning port chip royalties.

Not really what we ask for in regards to better battery life or updates Mac line, … not to say the display word, …

Welcome to the brave new Apple, … run by bean counters, … :-/

So this stupidly smart Apple MacBook batteries set a permanent failure bit once they are simply discharged by sitting on a shelf for a month or two. With this permanent failure bit the controller will not charge them again, even when the cells are brand new and otherwise perfectly fine. Another day I need to try sending a reset sequence or otherwise rewriting some flash cells, sigh:

Some notes for now:

Battery Firmware Hacking

MacBook battery (Rom) cycle reset

So Apple does not publish nice Windows driver downloads, you need the BootCamp.app for that, sigh. You need to download hundreds of megabytes even if you only need a driver, or two, sigh.

And where does it store it? /Library/Application\ Support/BootCamp/

The last days I wasted too much time with a Windows to go setup for an EFI MacBook’s. Stange thing that some (or many) combinations of USB drives and setup methods would result in INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE errors, … :-/ ?

To my surprise I finally found the so far best combination (for me): a Seagate Seven USB 3 drive, with the GPT/legacy setup (no VHD/VHDX).

I used it for some T2 Linux booting on various machines on the go. Died in just a year of “light” use. Wonder, if I can find the receipt and try to claim warranty. Though the SD card still reads, just throws away all writes to /dev/null making a warranty send in a bit data leaking :-/

As I found some Sandisk SD card defect remarks on the net, I now got a Samsun MicroSDXC PRO - let’s see how long that one lasts, …

That makes me wonder: are those SD cards doing wear leveling on the flash cells??? !!!

Oh my, grub2 is an overly complex piece of *** and a kitchen sink:

grub-mkimage -O x86_64-efi -d . \
-o /mnt/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI -p “” \
part_gpt part_msdos ntfs ntfscomp hfsplus fat ext2 \
normal chain boot configfile linux multiboot btrfs \
all_video reiserfs xfs jfs lvm crypto cryptodisk luks

:-/

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting#Apple_Mac_EFI_systems
http://askubuntu.com/questions/265644/dual-boot-surface-pro-with-ubuntu

Update: cryptomount (hd0,gpt3)

Update 2:

grub-mkimage -O powerpc-ieee1275 -d /usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275/ -p /mnt/ -o /mnt/grub part_gpt part_msdos ntfs ntfscomp hfsplus fat ext2 normal boot configfile linux btrfs all_video reiserfs xfs jfs lvm crypto cryptodisk luks part_apple suspend sleep reboot search_fs_file search_label search_fs_uuid hfs

boot hd:5,grub.elf

Update 3: OMG, who comes up with such syntax and alien non-Unix way of tools:?

hmount /dev/hdaX
hattrib -b Untitlied:
hattrib -t Untitlied:grub.elf
boot hd:5,\\tbxi

nvsetenv boot-device /pci@f2000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/disk@0:5,\\:tbxi

Update ‘18 Maybe better yet:

grub-mkimage -O x86_64-efi -d /usr/lib64/grub/x86_64-efi/ -o BOOTX64.EFI -p “/efi/boot” part_gpt part_msdos ntfs ntfscomp hfsplus fat ext2 normal chain boot configfile linux multiboot btrfs all_video reiserfs xfs jfs lvm crypto cryptodisk luks

This 2015 MacBook seriously? Yes, the 12″ form factor is exactly my sweet spot since I search for the perfect laptop.

However, it is 2015, and yes I need more than one USB/charging port. As I said on Twitter:

It would not have killed anybody to include a second USB port in the new MacBook and instead probably make twice as many people happy :-/

— René Rebe (@renebln) March 10, 2015

Since the initial, first gen MacBook Air: Are two USB ports too much to ask for a over thousand dollar machine? And now it is even shared with the power supply! ?!?!? :-/

And did I mention it is 2015? I want to connect a HiDPI 4k display at home or in the office. Because, you know, I need to get work done, …

Thanks but no thanks. I stick to the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 then, or grab a Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook. Because you know: they got USB ports, and a pretty HiDPI display, too ;-)

Update: It is also a slap in the face how short the Thunderbolt lifespan was. Thanks god I did not invest into a single proprietary Thunderbolt device. The only thing I got here was one cable for fast Mac backup, restore, and archive test booting, … puh! Oh wait, wrong, I got a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter. As you know, Macs do not come with proper, fast wired Ethernet for some time, requiring all kind of adapter clutter to be added left and right, … :-/

I never quite liked that new Macs do not come with any installation media anymore. In former times you got pretty optical discs. But since the DVD-less Mac’s and the App Store one get’s “nothing” anymore :-/

The trouble comes after some time, when you want to reinstall your OS. Case in point: I wanted to install the latest OS compatible with the black, polycarbonat (awesome, stylish [did I say black?] machines, btw. - except the breaking plastic border, unfortunately). Turns out the App Store does not allow to download my “purchased” 10.7 with errors such as: “Item temporary not available” (or so).

With billions on the bank account: Why does Apple need to be so unsupportive and impolite to good old customers - when they already do not support recent, security updated OS versions on the slightly older machines, ..?

So not only can I not (without hacking and tweaking) install 10.8 or 10.9 on this still nice Macs form just some years ago. I can not even download the last supported Mac OS (10.7) to at least get some latest (and not so greatest) security updates.

This state of this former computer company is really sad.

Thankfully I often burn some backup discs, especially for installation on more than one Mac, and thus found a self-burned Mac OS 10.7 Lion disc in my archive stack and could install it on this Mac in point after all.

And this is not only about the base OS - with the current App Store implementation we will often find ourselves with purchased software, that we can no longer download for older OS and hardware in the future.

Like today being able to install vintage (and often still pretty useful) versions of an OS, and applications. Often even expensive ones: Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat Professional, … and games. How much fun is it to boot up some vintage game from the Amiga, or old PC and play thru it again, with your kids, or friends?

What dim, brave new world, … :-/