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Am I nuts for preferring a 13-year old MacBook Pro with a 7-year old OS over a shiny new M4 Mac mini with a modern OS and a large display?
It's been a little over a week with the mini and I'm just not feeling the love for it. It's all little things, but it's keeping me in a continuously bad mood and causing anxiety.
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Change is difficult for some.
JPK
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Dew,
Nopes. you're not nuts at all. For me, Mojave is really a great balance of usability, features and OS maturity. After Mojave, Apple has consistently made changes to the OS which have overall worsened the experience, added features that don't interest me at all and/or broken portions of what was an excellent workflow.
One of the worst changes was to kill the ability to easily clone a boot drive. Seriously. I can still clone a boot drive in newer revisions of the OS but what used to be a simple two drive task is now a three drive task that takes far more time:
See this post for the method:
Unfortunately, the system relies in part on Migration Assistant, which I've found unreliable at best. However, it does have an added safety factor since it involves working off a backup of your data drive instead of the actual data drive.
Apple Intelligence is another example... If you're like me and use an external SSD as a boot drive, you'll forgo the ability to use Apple Intelligence. It doesn't work when you're running your system off an external boot drive. For now, it's a nifty way to disable a feature/software that doesn't interest me at all.
Robert
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Obviously your previous setup was working well for you if you're not noticing significant improvements in the new system.
Personally, I barely notice the differences between various MacOS versions.
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Matt,
I don't notice the vast majority of the differences. I just do what I do and ignore stuff that doesn't get in my way. There are definitely times when the differences are incredibly noticeable and, in some cases, unwelcome. That's when I wish Apple would focus on perfecting the OS, restoring useful features (it took away) and stop adding nonsense that Mac users don't care about or want at all and/or gets in the way of the overall usability of the machine.
Robert
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I am not sure.
I could be a combination of buyer's remorse, or changes that you don't like or aren't yet used to, or something else.
To be honest, if you are not ready for Silicon Macs, send it back now and wait another 1-2 years until you re-evaluate the situation. Maybe you same some more and score a deal on an M4 MacBook Air in 1-2 years, or maybe get a something else, like iPad, Chromebook, or (gasp) Windows.
If you are not happy with M4, send it back.
Whatever you do, we are here to support you. Happy Holidays!!!
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I'm curious: Did you migrate your user account and settings to the new Mac or did you make a new user account?
I wonder how much of your difficulty is simply not starting out with all of the little tweaks you've made to settings over the years.
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7 years of changes to an OS is a big thing and moving from a laptop to a stationary desktop is also a big thing.
You did both, making the transition quite a bit more jarring than it already was gonna be.
Give it time. Or don't! Either is good. I really dunno what to say other than you will get used to it and those of us who've had it forced gradually on us (I work in IT on Macs so it's always the most recent OS by decree) have adapted to the changes more easily because each one was a smaller step.
You can do this but you don't have to if you don't want to.
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These were your stated reasons for wanting to upgrade. Seems like the purchase met your goals.
In general, it's old, it's a 13" early 2011 Macbook Pro, 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5, and since it's old, I imagine it's days are probably numbered. Newer software won't run on it. Firefox 115.18.0esr is the only browser that runs on it and still receives updates. I don't really have any issues with it other than it's gotten old and consequently slower and I know that eventually it's going to give up the ghost.
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DewGuy wrote:
Am I nuts for preferring a 13-year old MacBook Pro with a 7-year old OS over a shiny new M4 Mac mini with a modern OS and a large display?
It's been a little over a week with the mini and I'm just not feeling the love for it. It's all little things, but it's keeping me in a continuously bad mood and causing anxiety.
You could look for a used 2018 Mini with decent specs. It can run Mojave and would probably be fairly inexpensive and less of a PITA.
