i have the 2010 model and did a clean install on it like 3 years ago and deemed it still uselessly slow to do anything with it … Guess I will get it out of the box, dust it off, charge and see if I can replicate that Mojave magic
Since everyone is talking so good about old Macbooks under Mojave: Don’t you have problems with plain text rendering?
On my 13" Macbook Air 2013, the rendering of text on Mojave (and High Sierra before) is horrible! I read up on it, and it seems Apple removed subpixel rendering since more current hi-res displays don’t need it anymore (pixels are so small that they are not visible, thus subpixel stuff doesn’t matter at all).
In contrast: Running the same device under e.g. Ubuntu gives perfectly fine crisp text…
My Macbook Air is becoming too sluggish to be useful. I love the size, weight and battery life enough that i was willing to go out and buy a new replacement. Unfortunately the latest basic versions come in at a reasonable cost but have no upgrade capability and the memory and SSD prices are over the top expensive. I ended up getting an Asus Zenbook 13. It has a similar form factor, has a similarly rugged aluminum case and while the memory is also soldered in and non upgradeable, 16GB wasn’t a huge price add on and it uses an industry standard SSD. Apple may eventually put themselves out of relevance with their proprietary and non upgradeable hardware.
My daily driver is a ‘14 13” Air and I am despondent over the reality that every day I creep closer to having to switch it up. I recently got a brand-new MacBook 13” from work. Typing on that thing is like eating a slug. I dug around and got the last-model wireless keyboard and trackpad out of storage so I can use it in clamshell mode and never touch that awful keyboard. The Air still runs like a champ and only once or twice a day does it slow down for a few minutes. It’s a good reminder to take a break from sitting at the desk. I have never loved a piece of hardware as much as my Air. Hopefully by the time I’m forced to upgrade the current keyboard design will be dead and gone.
Wow! Interesting that you had a positive experience. I had the mother board fry on not 1 but 2 of my past Mac Book Airs (2011 & 2016) after upgrading the Operating System after 2.5 years. Now I NEVER upgrade after owning my Macs for more that 2 years. At the moment i’m running a 2016 MBP w Touch bar w High Sierra. No intention of upgrading.
I would rather be safe than sorry.
I believe you could hack an upgrade using dosdude1’s patch tool: How to install macOS Sonoma on an unsupported Mac | Macworld
I used it on a 2009 unibody MacBook, and it’s working well.
I have a 2013 macbook pro. I installed a 1TB solid state hard drive and it was like supercharging it. No Ram upgrade ever made as much difference as that. Still using it to this day with Mojave and its still working great. I cannot recommend that particular upgrade enough. solid state vs the old disc hard drive was like getting a new computer.
(not sure if this is possible on an air model, but i love my old macbook pro machine with it’s disc drive and multiple inputs. even has a separate mic in jack! great for digitizing analog music)
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Thanks! But I had seen and tried this before. Maybe it’s slightly better, but still not comparable to any text rendered in the Ubuntu I tested… I should probably take screenshots and do a side by side comparison.
There are also other posts that change the variable AppleFontSmoothing (instead of CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled, as in the article you linked to). This also didn’t do much good.
Btw., PDFs in Preview also look particularly bad at specific zoom values. When strongly zoomed in, things look nice. But at regular zoom settings that one would read on, it’s a fuzzy mess.
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