My upgrading path to Apple Silicon – Part 1

History of a Mac user

The First Mac

I have been a Mac user since 2009 when, tired of buying a new Windows laptop every year due to mysterious hardware and software failures, I ordered my first Mac. It was also my first experience with buying a computer from the Apple Store and with their phone support. Fourteen years later, I can tell you that it was like nothing I had ever experienced before and, after all the legalised frauds I had gone through, it contributed considerably to my choice.

My first Mac was a 15-inch, Mid-2009, MacBook Pro: for you geeks out there, this was Model Number A1286. It sported a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (P8800), a 45 nm, 2-core, 64-bit processor with 3 MB of L2 shared memory. Read today, these specs are laughable, but let me tell you: I eventually sold this Mac, still functioning, in March 2022, and it felt snappier than my current, 7-years-younger, machine!

It came base with 500 GB of 5400-rpm SATA storage but, during the ordering phase, I upgraded it at no cost to a smaller but more performant 320 GB 7200-rpm drive. It also had a DVD reader/writer (nostalgia, anyone?!). The operative system installed was Mac OS X 10.5.7 (Leopard) and—back when software updates were on DVD and paid—they sent me the upgrade DVD for Snow Leopard for free in the mailbox. It came standard with 4 GB of DDR3 1066 MHz memory, which I later upgraded when AppleCare expired in 2012 to 8 GB.

One of the things I will never forget is the little LED in the bottom-right corner of the chassis that turned on and off slowly, as if snoring, when the Mac was sleeping.

I did incredible things with that machine, from my first professional engravings to writing two theses for the University, to even a good amount of gaming. It never complained once! I believe I had to erase and restore it only once during its lifetime—all the process followed and assisted on the phone by Apple Support.

The main reason I upgraded it was that it was dropped out of software support with El Capitan, OS X 10.11.6, at the end of 2016.

My current machine

During the 2016 October Event, Apple announced their new 15” MacBook Pro with TouchBar, Model Number A1707. It was both a revolutionary and a divisive machine. For the first time, Apple decided to have all its components soldered to the logic board, making any post-purchase upgrade impossible. This made the machine widely unpopular compared to the 2015 one it wanted to replace.

One of the new features was the introduction of the TouchBar, a high-resolution screen strip that took the place of the Function keys row (for context, they reintroduced the Fn keys row in 2021). This strip contextually changed what was shown based on the app in use—assuming the developer supported it—and added a feature I still love today (I’m typing this article on such Mac): three typing suggestions and orthography corrections appeared while you typed, a feature that has also now been removed from iPadOS 17 (why, Apple?). For someone like me who writes in different languages every day (for me Italian, English, and French), having the support of a corrector—especially for French accents!—was crucial.

When deciding whether to upgrade my Mac, I had to devise a method: the new model had to be, at least on paper, double as performant as the outgoing model. The 2016 MacBook Pro had a 6th-gen. Intel Core i7 quad-core processor (with HyperThreading, which means the system believes it has 8 cores available, in very basic terms), double what I had, came with base (and maximum!) 16 GB RAM, quadruple what I started with, and it came standard with an SSD drive. I configured it with 500 GB of internal SSD and with the top of the line GPU, a 4 GB vRAM AMD Radeon Pro 460. It also came standard with four Thunderbolt 3 ports, all with USB-C, which obliged me to buy adapters. I’m possibly one of the few who never complained about this (I still use those adapters today after seven years).

On paper, this was a great machine, but it soon proved to be a non-optimal purchase, due to how bad the 6th generation of Intel CPUs were compared to the 4th gen. used in the outgoing model. The new chassis, very slim—and, objectively, beautiful to see!—caused such overheating issues that any intensive task made the CPU and the GPU throttle—that it, decrease its speed to attempt to cool down. I recall when I got it, in November 2016, and started to configure it. It felt slow as a new machine compared to my outgoing Mac. Much of it was also macOS Sierra vs. El Capitan, probably, but while I have also been able to do incredible things with it, it always felt like a somewhat limited machine. I rushed to order it without waiting for the first reviews to come out. A funny one even demonstrated that the machine could perform at its peak only in a freezer! As hilarious as it was, it didn’t feel good, and here comes the first piece of advice from this article:

Do not buy a new generation machine until a few reviews have been published!

That is, of course, if you do not need a new Mac now. In that case, take any base model available in the Apple Store that corresponds to your needs. If you do not know whether the Mac you are about to buy is good for you, feel free to reach out, I will gladly help.

Reasons for upgrading

One of the advantages of Macs is that they—usually—do not oblige you to upgrade because they break, or because nothing seems to work anymore. Thanks to macOS updates—especially from Big Sur going forward—the snappiness and longevity of this model has greatly increased, and I am, in the end, happy with it. I have not erased it even once, and I have never had any hardware failure so far, which is impressive. To be honest, the top left Thunderbolt port, when connected to a device that is transferring data, such as the Time Machine backup SSD, causes the bottom centimetre of the display to flicker with horizontal lines. Running the macOS Diagnostics returned nothing wrong, but this put me on alert. I had to start looking for a successor.

Another reason for upgrading is that this Mac has been cut out from macOS updates already two years ago (2021), after only five years of life. This was a truly cheap move from Apple, but there are so many times when one doesn’t have to look at what Apple does from an emotional standpoint. They want users to ditch their Intel machines, so they don’t have to support them any longer, and they push as much as they can to force those into retirement. This Mac is stuck with macOS 12 Monterey, which proved to be one of the best macOS versions ever: solid, snappy, reliable, I just love it! Security-wise, though, it is time to move on, since this Mac has already become “Vintage”, meaning that one is not guaranteed to find spare parts should anything break.

Finally, the 500 GB SSD is proving too small for my needs and, while I could use more cloud storage and external SSDs, I prefer as much of what I need locally if possible. Cloud services are excellent for syncing, but if you integrate them into your machine’s Finder (or other File Explorer) they can cause a series of troubles that may make you regret ever thinking about it.

Talking about the economy of all this, my first Mac cost me around €2200 in 2009 (about €3000 today, after inflation). I sold it in 2022, and actively used it until 2016, making its cost per year at about €315. Compared to what I was spending before on PCs, this was a bargain! The 2016 MacBook Pro cost me around €3300 (about €4200 today, after inflation), I’m still using it now, and even when the new Mac arrives, it will still be in operation for a few months. In addition, I plan to use it as a test bench for OCLP (Open Core Legacy Patcher) and see how it behaves with macOS Ventura or Sonoma. Furthermore, it will be an excellent machine to test beta software without affecting the main working bench. So, ultimately, its yearly cost is, so far, €475.

Bottom Line

In the next episode, I will guide you through the configuration choices I am making for my next machine, and why!

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Thank you for reading so far!

Until the next one!