Macintosh

My Mac is hot

Literally. For some reason, it runs pretty warm (much warmer than you’d expect for a well-ventilated M1 Mac). I’ve tried a bunch of things, ranging from shutting down every extraneous service or app, rebooted, updated, and worn a black mock turtleneck sweater1In my head, and it looks fabulous.. And still, it gets warm.

Activity Monitor shows no obvious culprits. I am baffled. Maybe the 40,000 vent holes in the back have sucked in a kilogram of dust over the last two years. I’d open the case to check, but…

The end result is, troubleshooting this is now the same sort of whack-a-mole as it is over on the Windows side, so I am now often shutting down the Mac when not using it so it doesn’t melt down on itself.

Sometimes technology is cool and sometimes it’s hot. And sometimes it’s too hot.

Here is a Macintosh LC. It is not my Mac. It may have never gotten hot. But I still love the industrial design some 30+ years later.

EDIT: I looked up the trade-in value on my Mac after writing this post, and that seems to have at least temporarily scared it back down to being not-so-hot. We'll see if it holds. I'm sure the Mac is totally sentient and reads this blog, probably using Apple Intelligence® to provide succinct summaries.

The Macintosh was released 40 years ago today. I am mandated to tell a story about it.

macintosh classic
Kids, ask your parents about floppy drives. Photo by Sidde on Pexels.com

Because everyone else on the internet is doing it.

I did not use a Macintosh in 1984, My home computer at the time was a Commodore 64, which, at $200 U.S., was somewhat more affordable than the $2495 Macintosh.

But I did use a Macintosh in 1985, when, as part of a job entry program, I was placed into a small advertising firm that was outfitted with Macs and a LaserWriter. The LaserWriter fascinated me as a child of dot matrix printers that were slow, loud and mangled paper as soon as you turned your back to them. The LaserWriter was silent1OK, silent-ish and sexy.

I remember three things from my time in that early Macintosh office:

  • I didn’t have a lot to actually do, so I spent time writing a parody screenplay for a Friday the 13th movie I called “Friday the 13th, Part VII: Orville Finds a Meat Cleaver.” I printed out a copy on that sleek LaserWriter and still have it today.
  • I am left-handed but learned to use a mouse right-handed because the mouse cord was not long enough to place the mouse on the left side of the Macintosh. I still use mice right-handed today.
  • The owner of the company, a serious young man named Arnold Brown, got mad at me for adding helpful directions into a database of local businesses. I remain as adept with databases today. I could have easily fixed the entries, but he insisted on doing it himself, perhaps as penance for having agreed to bring me on.

My own Mac journey is thus:

  • 2013: I got my first Mac, a MacBook Air. This was just after they got bumped to 8 GB of ram. They still come with 8 GB of ram, more than 10 years later. I didn’t really like macOS back then and traded the Air for a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. There are people out there who are probably wondering what kind of madman I was, but the SP3 had a better display, pen support (I used it for doodling at times) and I was able to crank out an entire novel on it.
  • 2018: I got a Mac mini. It had the flakiest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth I have ever encountered in a computer. I got rid of this, too.
  • 2020: MacBook Air M1. Finally, a Mac I genuinely liked! The one-monitor limitation was stupid, but I used a USB adapter to work around it. I used it exclusively at home, so eventually sold it, as it seemed silly to have a laptop that sat on the desk 100% of the time.
  • 2022: We arrive at my fourth Mac. We’ll see how long this one lasts. It’s a Mac Studio with the M1 Max SoC. It generally runs everything very well. It is silent. The design is surprisingly ugly (a stretched up mini is not much to look at). Bluetooth is better, but also still flaky. It’s like Apple keeps the secret sauce to how it works for their own peripherals. The worst thing, though, is the way software will randomly crash out with no warning. This happens across all apps, including Apple’s own. I reboot the Mac every once in a while and just hope for the best. It’s a fine machine, otherwise, and while macOS has regressed in some ways recently, it’s better than it was in 2013.

Bonus story with me and a Mac in it: Four days before Christmas 1998, someone broke into my apartment while I was at work and stole my PC (a Celeron something or other, whose processor I had upgraded just a few weeks earlier) and my roommate’s strawberry G3 iMac. I think my roommie eventually got another Mac, though I have no recollection of what it was. The strawberry iMac was much prettier than my PC.