Tag: apple

I Found Something Neat At the Dump

So I went to the dump a couple weeks ago and came back with something pretty cool. I was dropping off a box of old electronics (which they take for free), and I spotted an Apple product in the pile. Despite being gold in color, I pulled it out and brought it home. After charging it up, I learned that the screen was damaged, probably because the previous owner closed something in the hinge. Otherwise, it functioned perfectly. I wiped out the previous owner’s data and got macOS installed so I could get to About This Mac. I picked up a 2015 12″ MacBook; the base model with a 1.1 GHz Core m processor, 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. Definitely not amazing specs, but it runs Firefox and ssh sessions just as well as anything else. Plus it was free.

I bought a used display assembly on eBay for $120 and used OpenCore Legacy Patcher to get Monterey installed. I’m pretty pleased with my find. I was originally planning on selling it, but it’s only worth about $250, so I think I’m going to use it until the keyboard stops working (this was the first device with Apple’s infamous butterfly keyboard) and then sell it for parts. If finances allow I’ll probably pick up the then-current MacBook Air when that happens.

I have a perfectly good HP laptop with a Ryzen 4500U, but I hate the form factor. It’s a 15″ laptop with a 16:9 display, which is just too damn wide, and the 1080p resolution is barely adequate for a display that size. The trackpad is awful, especially coming from the Surface Book I had previously. Two things Apple laptops do better than anyone else are displays and trackpads. All their displays are 16:10, which strikes a nice balance between width and height, although I think I might prefer 3:2 or 4:3. Apple trackpads are second to none in my opinion. Large, but not too large, and the force touch thing is fantastic. The whole trackpad clicks, so you never have to move your fingers off their target to make a click.

I’ve been making trips to the dump here and there since I got a truck (which is another post I should write), so hopefully the next dump trip has another diamond in the rough waiting for me.

Here’s How Much I Hate Epic Games

Up until the last month or so, you may not have heard of the controversy surrounding Epic Games unless you were a PC gamer. The PC gaming community has been sharply divided over Epic Games and their practice of buying up games and their publishers to secure their exclusivity to the Epic store. I personally hate this. Pretty much any PC game worth playing is available on a few storefronts, usually Steam, GOG and/or Microsoft. Probably 95% of my games are on Steam, and I try to buy there when I can. It’s a good system for game purchasing and management. Epic isn’t. They don’t even have a shopping cart feature. They bought Psyonix, developer of Rocket League, and pulled the game off Steam, and canceled the Mac and Linux versions of the game. As of a day or so ago, you can’t play Rocket League without an Epic account regardless of where you bought the game originally. I hate it.

Epic recently started a practical nuclear war with Apple over an issue with Apple terms and conditions for developers on the store. Ars Technica has some good coverage of it. Honestly, Apple doesn’t look amazing either, but Epic is just getting damn scummy.

Anyways, my first anniversary and my wife’s birthday are coming in the next week-ish. My wife wanted Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 (developed by a studio nearby in Albany, to my surprise) for her birthday, which did come out on PC. But only on Epic, with no word on when or if a Steam release would be available. The game is only $40, a price that is more than worth it according to every review I’ve seen. I just couldn’t bring myself to pay Epic that $40 though.

My wife suggested we get a PS4 as a kind of anniversary present. If coronavirus wasn’t happening, we’d be taking a small trip like a long weekend for our anniversary, but that just isn’t a good idea today. I took a look, and found out we could get a used PS4 Pro with games for less than we’d spend on a long weekend. She’d get Tony Hawk (and hopefully some more stuff eventually), and I’d get to play the PS4 exclusives I missed by being a PC gamer. So I got one. It was about $350 for a PS4 Pro, controller and several games, all of which except Horizon: Zero Dawn will likely be going on eBay this weekend.

I got Tony Hawk for my wife, which she loved. I also got Ratchet and Clank, thinking that we could both play a fun 3D platformer. She loves Tony Hawk, and I’m extremely happy with Ratchet and Clank. For me, Ratchet and Clank alone was worth the price of admission. It has a really beautiful, Pixaresque style with a humorous, unreliable narrator presenting a kind of unoriginal but interesting enough story with some self references sprinkled in. The PS4 offers remote play, so I can play on my PC in the office or bedroom if I want. My plan is to buy the handful of Playstation exclusives I want either used on eBay or from the Playstation store on sale, plus any games that are Epic exclusives on PC, like SnowRunner.

So that’s how much I hate Epic games. I’d rather pay $350 for a used Playstation than give them $40 for a fabulous game.