An upgrade to my mom’s 2007 iMac

If you thought my MacBook Pro was old, then you’re going to be surprised to hear that my mom has a 2007 iMac 24″ (model A1225) that’s still fully functional. Nothing has ever gone wrong with it, in spite of sending it to Romania via a shipping container (on one of those big ships) when she moved here, in spite of wild electricity fluctuations both in the US and in Romania, and in spite of being buried in paperwork all these years on her desk. It’s been working just fine and now that I’ve upgraded it, it’s working even better.

I saw an even greater difference in performance after the upgrade, as compared to my 2008 MBP. Not only was it slower than my MBP before the upgrade, but it’s now faster than it. I couldn’t understand why until I realized that the MBP’s hardware caps off at SATA I (150 MB/s) speeds while the iMac’s hardware is SATA II (300 MB/s). Yup, it was made a year before my laptop and yet it’s faster than it. It was also less expensive. There’s a lesson in there somewhere…

I’d upgraded this iMac’s RAM to the max it could handle (6 GB) a couple of years after she bought it, so the only upgrade I could make now was to swap out the HDD with an SSD. I opted for a 1 TB SSD that would replace her aging 320 GB HDD. Yup, this was the original HDD that shipped with the computer, and it worked just fine for 11 years!

Here is a set of photos taken during the upgrade. Since I’d never opened this iMac, I figured it was due for a thorough cleaning and a replacement of the thermal paste. I used this guide from iFixit to help me out. I’m glad I cleaned all of it; even though it didn’t have as much dust and lint inside as I’d expected, it needed to be cleaned.

A word of warning: there aren’t a lot of guides for this iMac on the internet, which means I wandered into unknown territory when I took all of it apart. I had to take photos of the screws and their positions, and of the wires and the sensors and oh boy… just be careful and keep track of everything if you decide to take it all apart… The back is plastic and uncharacteristically for Apple, the screw mounts are plastic, and that means you have to be gentle when you’re screwing components into the frame or else you’ll strip the plastic threads. This was the most complicated take-apart job I’ve undertaken so far, even more complicated than my iMac G5. I’ve never seen so many sensors and power cables running everywhere. And once I got it open, it was aluminum foil city… you’ll see what I mean.

As you’ll see from the photos, I ended up not using graphite pads. I went ahead and cut up pads for its chips, but when screwing back the heat sink assembly I noticed that one of the pads had fallen out, which meant that it just wasn’t making proper contact between the chip and the heat sink. I couldn’t risk having the other pads fall out as well and ruining my mom’s computer in the process, so I ended up using thermal paste for all of the contact points except for the GPU, where the pad seemed to stay in place securely. You’ll see a piece of cork under the graphics card below. It’s actually helpful when you screw the heat sink on top of the card, because the screw heads will dig into the cork and not turn, up to a point.

Be careful with this heat sink assembly you see below, the pins that secure it over the chip have to be de-cored (I don’t know if that’s the right word for it) so you can pull them out safely. Then you’ll have to push the cores back in place to secure the pins; if you break one… good luck hunting one down.

When you put the whole thing back together, leave these two screw mounts unused.

The two screws that you think go there, actually go here.

I know now why Apple has decided to make their display assemblies one-piece. While it might be easier to take apart a magnetic glass top that sits over the display instead of prying apart an assembly stuck to the case with adhesive strips, you only get to appreciate that design change when you polish the display for half an hour at the end of the upgrade, trying to remove the smudge marks that you left on it when you took it apart, and when you blow away every single particle of lint with a lens blower before you put the glass back on top, only to discover that you needed to clean some more spots, but you’re too tired to do it over. You might be tempted to cuss at that point… On the other hand, when your one-piece display assembly somehow sucks in fine dust that decides to settle into a spot in the middle of the display and in a corner and is quite visible but you can’t do a thing about it, as is the case with my 2013 iMac, you are also tempted to cuss.

I still say the newer iMacs are easier to service than this older iMac and also than my old MacBook Pro. They’re also more beautiful inside. I can clearly see the attention to detail and design that went into something few people will ever see, simply for the sake of doing good work. That’s something I appreciate more and more and I get older.

Here are some screenshots that show the specs of the upgraded computer. You’ll see that the disk write speeds went up from about 40 MB/s to 240 MB/s. It’s not exactly 300 MB/s, which is the theoretical max of SATA II, but it’s still a huge jump in speed and the computer shows it in real world use.

The highest version of macOS I could install was El Capitan. The App Store still bugged me to install Mojave but when I tried, it told me I couldn’t do it. I know Apple wants everyone who can upgrade, to upgrade to Mojave, but they might want to check their notification code to exclude those with older hardware that can’t upgrade. I get the same notifications on my 2008 MBP, which I also can’t upgrade to Mojave.

I’d like to encourage you to explore upgrade options for your older computers. An SSD will probably make the biggest difference in performance and their prices have really come down during the last couple of years. From an environmental standpoint, upgrading an older machine to keep it working well is always going to consume less resources than making a new one. And there’s something to be said for keeping a good machine well maintained: if it’s served you well, it deserves a bit of TLC from you, a bit of regular maintenance to keep it working, as was its purpose from the start.

How To

An upgrade to my 2008 MacBook Pro

I have a fully functional MacBook Pro made in early 2008 (model A1260). While it’s fairly slow when editing photos and I wouldn’t try to edit 1080p video on it, it’s just fine for word processing, web and email. It has become slow over time, as is the case with older hardware, so I thought I’d give it an upgrade. Since I maxed it out when I bought it, the only upgrade I could give it now was to switch the HDD with an SSD.

This MBP was my main computer for a number of years. I really put it through its paces during its heyday, and by that I mean the sound of its little fans going into overdrive to cool its chips isn’t a rare memory for me. When I bought an iMac, the MacBook Pro became my wife’s laptop, and she used it to write quite a few of her published books on it. Fortunately, I did something few people do with their laptops: I bought an aluminum stand for it right after I bought it, and we’ve used it (mostly) with that stand through all these years. I believe that’s what’s made the difference in its longevity.

When you use a laptop on your lap, you are shortening its life considerably, in spite of what its name (lap-top) implies. A laptop needs to stay cool, and making it work very hard to achieve that while it’s pulling lint and crumbs from your lap through its air intake, just isn’t going to do it long-term. Its chips will overheat and in the end give out, as I’m sure has been the experience of many people.

Here is a set of photos taken during the upgrade process. Although I’ve opened my laptop multiple times in the past, once to replace a faulty fan and another to replace a bad wireless card, I referred to this guide from iFixit to refresh my memory. I didn’t just replace the HDD, I also took the laptop completely apart in order to clean out the dust and replace the thermal paste on its chips. I’m really glad I did it, because there was a lot of dust and lint inside (as you can see from the photos) and the thermal paste had become dry and brittle, which isn’t a good thing.

I should caution you first: if your computer is still under warranty, such work will likely void the warranty. Take it to a trustworthy and authorized shop to have it done. Also, don’t expect the job to be as easy or look as clean as it does in the guides posted online. Here’s what my desk really looked like while doing the work. Know what you’re getting into before you open up your computer.

If you’ve looked through the photos and are wondering about the new thermal paste… I ended up not using any. I’d heard good things about a replacement for thermal paste: graphite pads, so I used those instead.

While I’m fairly sure they do what they say they do, which is to enable much better heat transfer than paste without degrading over time, I wouldn’t recommend them for this application, because unlike paste, they don’t stick to the chip at all, and they’re so light even a wisp of breath can blow them away. I was stubborn and did it anyway, but the way you have to fit the heat sink over the chips and turn the whole assembly over in order to tighten the screws means the pads will likely fall out or shift position, and that’s not good in either scenario. If they fall out, you’ll have nothing in place, leading to chip failure, and if they shift and touch other stuff on the board, like the little transistors next to the chip, they can cause a short-circuit, because unlike paste, they conduct electricity. I’m sure they’re great on regular motherboards where you simply sit them over the chip and close the heat sink on top, but not here, where the chips are tiny and you have to fiddle with and turn over the heat sink assembly to get it in place.

Our daughter had broken off one of the keys a few years ago, so I took this opportunity to replace it. Did you know there are websites that sell individual keys for reasonable prices? I didn’t; that was new to me.

I’d like you to see that there are six lights under each key on this keyboard. This is worth noticing because many laptops nowadays brag about having lighted keyboards and “individual lights under each key” when they mean a single LED, while back in 2008, this MBP had six LEDs for each key!

Last but not least, a set of screenshots for the specs. The two specs that are different now are the disk size and speed. The new disk size is 1 TB, which is going to be plenty for this old timer. The speed is capped off at SATA I (1.5 Gb/s or 150 MB/s) by the laptop’s hardware. With the new SSD, I’m getting somewhere between 125-130 MB/s, which is less than the theoretical max but about right in real world speed. Before the upgrade, I was getting somewhere between 40-60 MB/s.

The highest version of macOS that I can install on it is El Capitan, which means it still (sort of) works with iCloud: the photos sync up with my other devices, but the documents and desktop don’t. I know there are hacks out there to enable an upgrade to Mojave, but I’d rather use what’s officially available.

The question that needs a final answer is this: can I see a difference? The answer is yes. The laptop’s gotten a little snappier and for what I need it to do, it works great now. Most of all, I’m amazed that after 10 years, it still works, and it works well.

Thoughts

Sort the apps in Launchpad by most used

I’d love to see Apple introduce a simple option (a checkbox somewhere in System Preferences) to sort the apps in Launchpad by those most used. I find myself using the Launchpad a lot these days, but there is no way to sort the apps other than manually dragging and dropping them, and that’s no fun.

It would be nice to see this same sort on the iPhone and iPad, where the Screen Time algorithms built right into iOS could be used to measure app use and continually sort the apps accordingly, listing them by most used to least used across all of the iOS home screens.

Thoughts

The answer to a great many questions of today

This post will seem to fall right out of nowhere for you, mainly because you haven’t been privy to my thoughts in recent years — how could you be, after all? It may also strike you as highly inconsiderate and you may even become angry with me. Let it be so. You will inevitably calm down and you may also agree with me in a few months or years.

The pompous title may lead you to think I’m going to philosophize. Nope, it’s just a little bait meant to entice you to read on. I’m going to speak plainly, because this must be said plainly and repeated loudly, for all to hear and understand: the answer to a great many questions of today is “too many people”.

Go ahead, ask a question about the state of the world or the state of the planet. Any question at all. The answer, if you dig right down to the core, is inevitably overpopulation.

Shall we have a go right now? Here are a few examples; keep in mind you already know the answer:

Scarcity of clean drinking water?
Disappearing forests?
Disappearing fish?
Disappearing animals?
Garbage piling up everywhere?
Pollution?
Overconsumption?
Poor quality of manufactured goods?
Poor quality of foods?
Traffic jams?
Growing numbers of lonely and depressed people in large cities?
Filled up cemeteries that are now contaminating water tables and surrounding land?
Crowded schools?
Crowded hospitals?
Crowded nursing homes?
Crowded mass transport?
Crowded buildings/smaller apartments/taller buildings/feeling like a sardine in a tin can?
Natural beauty ruined by poorly planned and poorly made modern development?

I could go on and on, I suppose, but I would also get sadder and sadder as this list grew bigger. It’s daunting to face up to the problems we’ve created for ourselves, simply because we collectively thought there should be more of us. “Sure,” we thought, “let’s go on f*****g, it feels good and we’re making babies. The world needs babies…”

It turns out, the world doesn’t need that many babies. Babies of all species are absolutely adorable and they melt your heart with their cuteness, but the overpopulation of any species is a real threat to the species itself and to the planet as a whole.

In the past, people thought the answer to many questions were more people. How do you solve a labor shortage? How do you fund social security? How do you gather enough revenues as a government in order to build and maintain a modern infrastructure and have enough employees to take care of it all? How do you grow the economy? We thought “more people” was the answer. Well, it turned out not to be so.

Paradoxically, at over 7.2 billion people, we still have massive labor shortages, social security and other social safety nets are in the dumps, it turns out that governments can never have enough revenues, and most puzzling of all, that economies and companies do and must stop growing. As a matter of fact, the very economic model that drives every economy in the world is based on constant growth. We can talk about “boom/bust cycles” and “contagion” and “recovery” all we want, but in the end, it’s about growth. And you can’t have growth forever. At some point it stops. It has to stop. You either run out of people or you run out of resources. To pick an example out of recent memory, there are only so many smartphones that people will buy. Given the limited resources available on Earth, there are only so many TVs/cars/houses/pieces of furniture you can make before you turn the whole Earth into a dug-up wasteland.

This is a huge topic: an immense “minefield” that we’ve built and that we’ve got to wade through and “disarm” if we want to have a sustainable future. It’s filled with “hot potatoes” that no one wants to touch or step on, because there’s a real price to pay in the real world if you are a person of any clout and you dare talk about these things publicly. But these things must be said and someone must make the hard decisions, or else…

Shall I tell you what you’re thinking? If you’re a parent, the basic question swirling through your mind right now is: “How dare YOU tell ME whether or not I should have MY children?” How dare I even bring up the question of procreation, which most people, at some level or another, conscious or subconscious, believe is their God-given right and even more so, God-given blessing?

I wonder though, should God ever truly speak to us — if He or She or It would even deign to speak to an arrogant, dirty, criminal and avaricious species like ours — would would be said? We don’t know. God isn’t speaking to us, in spite of what some deranged “religious leaders” seem to think on the topic. We are left to figure this out on our own.

I think it boils down to egotism. We are all so caught up in ourselves, most of us much more so than we realize, that we believe the world would be deprived of something if we didn’t have children, as if our exact chromosomes will combine to create a super-child that will solve the problems of the world. Let me assure you, right here and now, that collectively, the world won’t miss a beat if any one of us stops having children. It might even breathe a sigh of relief, as in “Thank God, I’ve been spared another mouth to feed!” And no, your “super-child” won’t solve the problems of the world. YOU need to work on solving them RIGHT NOW, so STOP procrastinating and passing the buck to future generations!

What about the other egotistical question, “But who will take care of me when I’m old?” Does it always have to be about you? Must you be a burden to your children in old age? How about you figure out some other way, such as taking care of yourself and your money, so that you reach old age in relatively good shape? That way you can be independent and function well, living from your own resources. Why, you might even be able to give back to society, through volunteering and donations, instead of being a feeble shell of your old self, depending on social security and being carted around by a nurse.

Is it any wonder that the rate of birth among well-read, well-educated folks all around the world is declining rapidly? As people better themselves and start to think beyond their bellies and their willies, they begin to see that all is not well with the world, and they choose to have less or no children.

When I think of the people who are having more children, it is unfortunately those who shouldn’t be having them. Let me make it CLEAR here that I am NOT talking about RACE. What I am talking about is: livelihood, education, household resources, strength of the couple’s relationship, geographical location, available opportunities and so on. Let me make it plainer: a child born to a couple who abuse each other physically and verbally, living on government aid or in poverty, or in a country roiling in upheaval and conflict, will have limited or no opportunities and will have a poor quality of life. That child will likely be abused by its parents, perhaps even sexually — certainly and at the very least emotionally — and will grow up just like them, stunted, tortured, a stump of a human being that will likely continue to hurt others, just as it was hurt, knowing no better way in life, unable to do better in life even when shown and helped. That mother and father should give serious thought as to whether they should be having children at all, because they cannot provide for them, but unfortunately they give no thought to this at all and typically have them in droves. Is that the right thing to do?

The solution is simple in theory but near-impossible to implement: we must each of us choose to have but one child or no child. It must not be forced upon us, or else it’ll feel horrible. We must make that choice. If all the families in the world would choose to make this decision, for the sake of our world as a whole, the world population would enter a steady and unforced decline, a very welcome decline that would allow us to slowly plan and become accustomed to an ever-decreasing population and re-work our economic and government models in order to account for it.

I cannot state how dire the situation truly is. In developed countries, it’s easy to get lost in the abundance of it all, even if you’re poor. You can still dream about “having it all” and you think it’s going to be like this all the time. But we are on the precipice. We have been for some time, our end postponed for a little longer and a little longer. Mind you, I’m not talking about Biblical stuff here. I’m talking about the planet shaking and scratching us off like a bad case of fleas, but it’ll certainly feel Biblical to us. I’m talking about us doing it to ourselves, because as a species, we are all of the stuff I said we are in the paragraphs above. And it’s so easy to solve this peacefully, slowly, without the use of force and fear and horror, if we act now and we act collectively.

I am sorry to dump this on you so near to Christmas. I’ve been mulling over this stuff for years and I’ve alluded to it here and there, but I haven’t come out and said it outright so far. Since most of us will have some downtime and our bellies full this year-end, it might be a very good time to think on these things.

I remain hopeful. Who knows, in the near future, instead of bugging newlyweds for grandchildren, parents might ask them instead, “Have you thought about not having kids?” or “Isn’t one child enough, honey?” Wishful thinking, I know…

Some mornings I wake up early. It’s not often that it happens. I’m a late sleeper, always have been. But when I do wake up at the crack of dawn and it’s snowing outside, I will get out of bed, put on some warm winter clothes, grab my camera and head out for a walk. Today was one of those days.

As I write this, about three hours after taking the photos, it’s still snowing lightly. This was a good snowfall. We’ve had some other ones this year, of which one in particular sticks in my mind. It happened earlier this week, with snowflakes almost as big as my palm. That was magical — but it didn’t last. With -1 degrees Celsius outside right now, this snowfall looks like it might last longer than a few hours, so that makes it the first good snowfall of this winter.

As always, I hope you enjoy the photos. These were taken in the historic town center of Medias — known as Mediasch in German and Medgyes in Hungarian — and known to me as my hometown.