I'm not even sure where to start. I stopped blogging for a while out of pure ennui.
This story either begins when the laptop died in August or when I bought it, a refurb macbook air from woot before amazon's acquisition of woot basically nullified them into a mere walmart-clone with a fresh coat of social-media-glittering paint.
Why bother to post my histrionic brain-drippings? I don't know you well enough to bore you with that. Just to wring it out a bit and smear it across this page.
I had a macbook air, 2010 or 2011. Fairly nice hardware, an obvious drop-damaged bent corner that never bothered me, but a piss-poor 720p display that made me want to shove an elbow into it and stretch it out to a bare-minimum 1920x1080 resolution.
I stuck with it though for the small size and light weight. If I was careful I could get it into my messenger bag whenever I found myself out stomping around a major city's streets. I wrote several nanowrimos on it.
Sometime in March it began getting unreasonably hot when being used from time to time, so I'd drop everything and fold it shut and let it cool down. I guess this is a known issue with these machines. Eventually it took its toll. I carried it through airports visiting my people this summer, and within a week after returning from the trip, it died.
I was using youtube or reddit and felt the bottom case get hot. Then the mouse stopped responding. I was all ?wtf? and then saw yellow lines every half centimeter across the screen. I only saw that for a few seconds before it immediately shut down. I let it cool for a half hour and then tried to boot. It gives the 4 tones of death.
I can't even get it to Target Disk Mode to recover my journalling and notetaking from the last few months. It won't let me access the onboard storage. I'll need to resort to some other methods to recover any lost data.
I began to search for a laptop to replace it. I cast a wide net. I wanted something that would run my favorite linux distro, Mint. I knew I'd likely end up with something running windoze. But that's not the dead-end it used to be.
System 76, Think Penguin, Purism, Libiquity, Star Labs, and maybe a Lenovo something or other.
In the end I burned out on the research. I gave up and walked into the local Costco and looked at what they had on the sales floor just to get an idea how the hardware felt at various price points.
I walked out just after Labor Day with a Lenovo Ideapad S340. Within a week I'd hackintoshed it by installing a spare sata ssd I had on hand. I had everything but the trackpad working, including sound and wifi - idgaf about imessage or any of those pointless bells and whistles. It's another OS environment which allows me to get tasks done that are NOT best done elsewhere, and by Cthulu it's not a social media hub or influencer-creation platform ffs.
In less than 10 days Costco dropped the Ideapad price to $449 and I caught $50 refund and used it for the hackintosh-compatible m.2 wifi/bluetooth card I've been using.
Another week later Costco's website had the noticeably superior Lenovo Ideapad Flex 6 in the 14 inch configuration. Usually a minimum of $699 but suddenly $499. I pounced and have been attempting to justify which one will stay ever since. I won't keep both.
I wish I could combine the two experiences. I'd rather have a sata port for a different physical drive to put the hackintosh on. The Flex doesn't have that. It has a better battery and keyboard than the larger model. It also has a metal keyboard deck, not a plastic one like the S340.
I would like the larger battery and the sata port on the mobo. But I can't. So I'm willing to work with just Mint and keep the Flex, reinstall the original wifi card, yank the sata ssd hackintoshed, and return the S340 because it's far more awkward for a writer and blogger than I would have expected to have a 10-key shoving the home-row off the center of the monitor.
Also worth noting is that the Ideapad S340 appears to be a newish model of Lenovo. I can't find much details about hackintoshing it. Otoh there are like 12-15 pages of people who've hackintoshed various Flex models on github alone. That means you don't need proprietary apps to install macos, you can at least BEGIN purely vanilla.
Remains to be seen if I can get winderz, Mint and Mac to share the SAME nvme ssd...
