this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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10
Advice on upgrade (europe.pub)
submitted 2 days ago by MrLLM@ani.social to c/apple_enthusiast@lemmy.world
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I’ve been rocking my hackintosh for almost 4 years now. It’s still holding together, but battery life and performance (with battery) are not great, also intel support will be gone soon.

I have to say that I’m not big fan of Liquid Glass redesign, so if I’m getting a new Mac, it’ll be an M4 15” MBA with 512GB and will keep it on Sequoia.

My other option is to move over to Linux (probably Debian), but I’m not confident I’ll be able to find something compelling for a reasonable price with great performance and battery life (mostly because RAM and storage shortage)

Any thoughts on that? On one hand, it’s probably a bad idea to buy a new Mac just to keep it forever on sequoia but I also feel like my laptop will hold me back any time soon.

For a little bit more context: I’m a computer engineering college student, I do programming in different languages, I make heavy use of virtual machines and I like Apple iWork for office related workloads. I have an M1 Mac mini, but I still need a mobile computer.

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[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)

My other option is to move over to Linux (probably Debian), but I’m not confident I’ll be able to find something compelling for a reasonable price with great performance and battery life (mostly because RAM and storage shortage)

Nothing comes close to the battery life, performance, and formfactor of the MBA. A ThinkPad X1 Carbon might get close, but Linux always struggles with brand new devices. It looks like a base model starts at $1700 (USD) and it's going to perform worse and get worse battery life. It does have twice the RAM and storage at least.

That said liquid glass on Mac is much less obnoxious than on a phone. UI elements take up far less of the screen and it's mostly just actual content. Also it's a lot less glassy than than on iOS, even without it being set to tinted glass. Also future versions of Mac OS could fix it.

[–] MrLLM@ani.social 1 points 1 day ago

Nothing comes close to the battery life, performance, and formfactor of the MBA. A ThinkPad X1 Carbon might get close, but Linux always struggles with brand new devices. It looks like a base model starts at $1700 (USD) and it's going to perform worse and get worse battery life

I made up my mind and I went to the Apple Store just to check if they still had 15” MBA.

It turned out that they did and were giving them away with a wholesale discount (sorry I’m not sure if that’s the term) plus the student discount I got it from 1519€ to 1219€. I think it was a great deal.

[–] hodgepodgin@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

I have a 15ILL9 and it’s fine on Linux. There’s issues with Microsoft modern standby but the Arch wiki has a fix to resume fan control. I’m using the EAS scheduler with schedutil. I have it tuned to comfortably sit within 5-6 watts while performing acceptably. Its battery is 70wh.

[–] clubb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah, but my 13" Air felt much harder to use after the update (I was running the dev beta back in June, but they didn't change the spacing since) because I felt I was getting far less usable space for almost no benefit. They did finally make those damned window buttons bigger though.

[–] modcolocko@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

wait for new macbooks releasing this week whatever you do

[–] MrLLM@ani.social 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I don’t know about that. I’d like to avoid Tahoe at the moment, so, if apple pulls out an M5 MBA, I won’t be able to get my hands on a brand new M4 MBA with student discount

[–] blitzen@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I know the M4 Air was released with Sequoia, but I’m sure any M4 you bought new would now come with Tahoe. My M4 MacBook Pro bought at the end of the year shipped with Tahoe.

If Tahoe is a dealbreaker, buying used (not Apple refurbished) is probably your only option, and even that is predicated on finding one not yet upgraded. But honestly I don’t think it should be a dealbreaker; while visually it’s a mess and I’m not thrilled with the overall direction of Apple software, it is the present and the future, and does have some niceties over Sequoia. With Alan Dye gone and Tim Cook on his way out, I have some optimism for the future of the OS.

The way I see it you’ve got three options: buy the now released M5 new, find a used one running sequoia (unlikely), or find a used model capable of running Linux.

[–] MrLLM@ani.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I’m sure any M4 you bought new would now come with Tahoe

Yeah, that’s true, but unlike iOS, in macOS you can downgrade a Mac with another as long as the target Mac supports the OS.

https://ipsw.me/Mac16,13

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108900

[–] blitzen@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That’s fair. But IMO the negatives of Tahoe don’t merit buying old hardware just to temporarily avoiding using it.

[–] MrLLM@ani.social 1 points 23 hours ago

That’s what I was thinking, so that’s why I made the post in first place. But I got a great deal as I stated here, and I don’t think there will be a huge difference between the M4 and M5, specially in a MBA.

[–] Substance_P@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm in the exact same boat looking for a replacement for my macbook pro M1 that had a screen failure. Was looking at the MB air with a 15" screen and the best performance possible for photo/illustrative design purposes. Not happy with the screen on the MBA but portability is also a thing I miss.

I may be wrong but didn't Apple introduced a specific Liquid Glass section under System Settings > Appearance, allowing users to switch from the default "Clear" mode to a "Tinted" mode.

Another way is within the Accessibility pane. By navigating to System Settings > Accessibility > Display and enabling Reduce Transparency.

Also I hear that the app OnyX, the version designed for macOS Tahoe, includes a dedicated toggle to disable Liquid Glass elements that may persist even after reducing transparency.

Personally I don't expect that apple will stoically force this on us without toggles to tweak it in the future, due to user pushback on liquid glass, I'd expect there to be workarounds in Tahoe and future os rollouts.

[–] MrLLM@ani.social 2 points 1 day ago

I'd expect there to be workarounds in Tahoe and future os rollouts.

Yeah, that’ll probably be the case, I’m quite used to having third-party software to add things I need that apple hasn’t added.

Although, I’ll probably miss some features like the old System Preferences or the LaunchPad.

[–] Arcane2077@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 day ago

In my experience, if you don’t use the atrocities that are Finder and Safari 26, Liquid Glass doesn’t really change anything