The untimely death of the mid-2015 MacBook Pro that had been my primary machine the past few years meant I forking over for another laptop. Given the hassles that resulted from buying that machine from somewhere other than Apple or MicroCenter, I didn’t take any chances with its replacement.
A refurbished version of this laptop (where I wrote this post) cost a little over $400 less than retail. I’m still in the process of setting things up the way I like them, but one new thing I learned was that Apple is still shipping their laptops with an ancient version of bash.
Having used bash since my freshman year of college (way back in 1992), I have no interest in learning zsh (the new default shell for macOS). So right after I installed Homebrew, I followed the instructions in this handy article to install the latest version of bash and make it my default shell.
There’s still plenty of other work to do in order to get laptop the way I want it. Data recovery hasn’t been difficult because of using a few different solutions to back up my data:
- Carbon Copy Cloner
- Backblaze
- Time Machine
I’ve partitioned a Seagate 4TB external drive with 1TB for a clone of the internal drive and the rest for Time Machine backups. So far this has meant that recovering documents and re-installing software has pretty much been a drag-and-drop affair (with a bit of hunting around for license information that I’d missed putting into 1Password).
I wasn’t a fan of the Touch Bar initially, even after having access to one since my employer issued me a MacBook Pro with one when I joined them in 2017. But one app that tries to make it useful is Pock. Having access to the Dock from Touch Bar means not having to use screen real estate to display it and means not having to mouse down to launch applications.
Because of Apple’s insistence of USB-C everything, that work includes buying more gear. The next purchase after the laptop itself was a USB-C dock. I could have gone the Thunderbolt dock route instead, but that would be quite a bit more money than I wanted or needed to spend.
Even without the accessories that will make it easier to use on my desk in my home office, it’s a very nice laptop. Marco is right about the keyboard. I’ll get over the USB-C everything eventually.