We are gathered here to mourn the loss of Alan’s trusty 2013 Retina 13″ MacBookPro, a trusty, reliable, though keyboard battered workhouse that was there for every web page, blog post, flickr photo edited and uploaded, and more for over 11 years. The family requests no cards or flowers. Music is not provided by Elton John.
Well, there was only me at the grave side.
I remember in the 1990s when I worked at the Maricopa Community Colleges we had something like a 2 year refresh on computers, with which the churn of capabilities then was almost needed. Maybe. I did get a new machine or two when I went to work in 2008 for the New Media Consortium, it took some negotiation but I took by 2009 MacBookPro when I resigned in 2011. It suffered a bad fall onto a sidewalk, leading to the first outright purchase of my own of the deceased, a 2013 Mid Year 13″ MacBookPro.
It took some email digging, but I found the confirmation of purchase (which actually was April 2014, so it was a year old at the time I adopted it).
I built everything web-wide for the last 11 years on this machine, edited and managed (in Apple Aprerture) all of the photos uploaded to flickr in that span, and spun out countless Ds106 remixes, MOOC mocking grphics, edtech cover songs, 9 gazillion tweets on that machine. I wore out the keyboard (several times the replacement soft cover), the trackpad, and about two years ago the space bar left the party.
I kept it running in an old MacOS (mojave) way loong to keep using Aperture for my photoediting, using a no longer supported flickr uploader, until March 2023 when it was no longer able to reliable use the flickr API (plus it was mis mapping most of my iphone photos into remote parts of Mongolia and China).
In May 2022 the battery went kaput, but luckily the very clever folks at RescueTeach in Regina were able to replace battery and clean a bit of dust out.
Sometime after upgrading to… Monterey? The battery life began tanking, and it could barely function not plugged in. Various battery apps indicated it was dying.
A few weeks ago, I founf out I was unable to get it to boot. After doing all the magic SMC and PRAM resets, even in safe mode, it got to the desktop, hit a beachball, and just shut down. I tried every trick I could, and still was out of lucky. I was not able to connect in target disk mode, and as it turns out.
Eric Likeness via Mastodon gave me the low down on needing to pull data via target dsk mode a special dongle (of course, cough Apple) and a special old thunderbolt cable which I could only find on ebay. The latter is still lost in shipping, but since then, the machine became totally unable to even to try to boot, it just lit up in the red dead battery mode.
I had come to accept the MacBookPro was dead. And (cough) I had not done a TimeMachine backup since March 2023. I was going to accept that, but decided to call RescueTech again (I needed to take Cori’s 2019 MacbookAir in for a battery replacement) and asked them to try and recover the data.
There was a week of back and forth calls as they said the password was not working. This was baffling, as I had only used two passwords on the machine, and had them both stored safely in a locked box off of the coast of Norway (just kidding). In desperation, I sent a screenshot I had saved of recovery key when I encrypted the drive in 2017… and it worked!
I was so lucky to get all my files off of the dead MacBookPro copied to a hard drive.
Why would I blab on and on about a dead computer? Maybe its more than a machine. I typed so much into it, experienced much through it’s screen, and also have all these shreds of memories in photos, posts, old emails.
Now we can send the MacBookPro to its eternal place of rest. And also, be smarter than I was, and back up your stuff on a regular basis!
Featured Image: My own remix, not at all AI Generated (do I really need to say that) based on Its Tough being a Wife graveyard flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license with overlay of My Worn Keys flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
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A little disappointed not to see a closing photo of what had to be an historically worn keyboard. How many keys still legible? Or were there replacements?
I moved on from a long time MacBook workhorse last year when I did not want to… And still mourn from time to time. I’ll say this, the battery improvements in recent models are a real leap and helped me to move on sorta happily.