In the past I’ve mused about getting a writing-only workstation. This led to explorations into things like the Freewrite, AlphaSmart, or searching for “the best laptop keyboard” and buying some old, used machine from 2010.

Meanwhile, I’ve been selling older and unused electronics (etc) on eBay this winter. As I was preparing an old MacBook Air that I expected to sell for $150 (at best), I realized this was probably a great test machine to see if I enjoyed writing away from my primary workstation (potentially with wifi turned off).

To prepare for sale, I had restored this 2018 MacBook Air to factory settings. In the time it took to install iA Writer I already was asking myself, “Why is this machine so slow? It didn’t feel slow when I bought it!” So I set about minimizing the things running on the machine, which definitely isn’t the first thing I should have tried! Here’s what you should do first if you want to get an old MacBook moving quickly…

Installing an older version of macOS

The reason the MacBook Air felt so quick when I bought it, and so slow when I reset it, is that it had two different versions of macOS installed. When I purchased the computer it had El Capitan (10.11) installed, while the factory reset installs the most-recent macOS one’s computer supports, which in this case was Sonoma (14.8.3).

So I thought things through a bit and decided to click the link at Apple support to install Big Sur (11.7). This took me to the App Store and started downloading that version, which eventually finished and told me I can’t install an older macOS version on a Mac with a newer version. Bah!

I restarted the Mac and held down Command-R to go into recovery mode. Unfortunately, this mode would only allow me to install the latest version, Sonoma. So then I restarted and held down Option-Shift-Command-R, which allows you to install “the version of macOS that came with your Mac or the closest version that’s still available.” For me, that’s El Capitan.

I had some trouble getting El Capitan to install in recovery mode. At one point I read something about El Capitan not working on the latest Apple filesystem, APFS, so I reformatted the hard drive to an older file system. Then I was given a warning that El Capitan must install on APFS, I reformatted back to APFS, and things seemed to work. 🤷‍♂️

At this point I figured I’d just roll with El Capitan. In my ideal world this computer would use iA Writer full screen, an occasional web browser and that’s about it. As of this writing, iA Writer’s documentation says it supports macOS version 10.11, El Capitan, so all good!

In reality, when I went to install iA Writer from the App Store, I was given a warning that iA Writer only works on macOS 10.15+ (Catalina). So back I went to the Apple support link to install Catalina. From there, things have been working well. (Though I’ve found the version of Safari I get with Catalina, version 13.1.3, isn’t rendering the web well, so I’ve installed Firefox for now. Funny that I can get the latest Firefox on an old version of macOS.)

Other things I changed

I was reading an old article about a mnmlist mac setup and I updated some things:

Hid the dock, which I do on my primary machine as well. I also hid the menu bar.

Disabled Spotlight, including running sudo mdutil -i off in Terminal. This should speed up the system by avoiding Spotlight’s indexing. I installed Alfred, which I’ve used for many years.

Disabled Spaces by unchecking System Preferences > Mission Control > Displays have separate Spaces

Installed uBlock Origin on Firefox. Every time I accidentally hit a browser without ad blocker I’m completely aghast. (And a bit surprised that Pika isn’t more popular than it is, honestly.)

Added a nice desktop wallpaper.

I’m sure there are other things I can to make this computer feel even more minimalist and focused. Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Let’s see how it goes

I’m writing this blog post in iA Writer right now. While I love the Pika editor, I want to try writing in a focused mode. (I was also going to say that I want to write offline, but opening Pika, turning off wifi, and writing in the Pika editor be fine, especially because Pika saves one’s writing in browser local storage). Will I really pull this computer out to write? Will it really help to focus my mind? Will I like the copy-paste workflow? We’ll see.

The only real challenge with this experiment going forward is that my old MacBook is one of the last ones with a butterfly keyboard. Even ignoring the double- and missing-key mistakes it makes (thank goodness for auto-correction), I hate the feeling of typing on this thing enough that I’m considering an inexpensive Keychron keyboard to sit on my lap while I write. That doesn’t seem conducive to actually writing, though. And if I’m doing that, maybe an iPad with a keyboard makes more sense.