16 years ago today: Apple quietly updated the Mid-09 MacBook

Quietly made available on May 27th 2009, the 13″ Mid-2009 MacBook was a silent upgrade to the lineup of portables, released without much fanfare or any press release, for that matter. This was the second “older-style” A1181 MacBook model sold after the debut of the Aluminum Unibody MacBook, and the final “older-style” MacBook before Apple […]

CustoMac: 3.1 Ghz i7-5557u-upgraded 11″ 2015 MacBook Air

The 11″ Early 2015 MacBook Air ships with a 2.2 Ghz i7-5650u as a BTO/CTO option, making it the absolute fastest 11″ ‘Book ever. This hasn’t at all stopped users online from shoehorning an even better CPU in there, which inadvertently or intentionally upgrades the GPU also. Out with the old Intel HD 6000, in […]

Firmware Update Supports 8 GB in Aluminum MacBook and Late 2008 15″ MacBook Pro

When the Aluminum Unibody MacBook was unveiled in October 2008, its memory support ceiling specified by Apple was 4 GB. That was enough for most users at the time, and it was later discovered that these machines could happily support up to 6 GB of RAM – but while 8 GB could be installed, independent testing found that if an application […]

Mac ‘Book Power Management Adventures

2009 – My First Mac’s Chris Kerins says he’s been trying to get every last month out of his 6-year-old 17″ PowerBook G4, but it’s been not starting lately. He’s had power issues in the past, after he cracked the big PowerBook open to do a repair and broke a connector. Since then the power […]

My Apple Laptops: Past, Present, and Future

2009 – I had an email Monday from my daughter, who is the current custom users of our old WallStreet PowerBook, telling me that she had succeeded in getting OS X 10.4 .11 Tiger installed on the venerable ‘Book. This was particularly interesting, because I had myself failed in several attempts over the years that I […]

Making the Switch from My PowerBook to a Unibody MacBook

2009 – I finally switched to using my new Unibody Aluminum MacBook for production – just over five weeks after it touched down here. That isn’t how I had expected things to unfold, but I ran into some unanticipated snags in the transition from my long-established and highly evolved workflow on my previous Macs to […]

First Impressions of My Unibody MacBook

2009 – My Apple Certified Refurbished (ACR) 13″ 2.0 GHz Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook arrived last Thursday afternoon, just a couple of hours short of a week after I ordered it, having been air-shuttled by FedEx back and forth across the continent twice, from Rancho Cordova, CA, to Memphis, TN, to Calgary, Alberta, to Halifax, […]