Midwest Macs

I decided I would not necessarily generate a post every day. After I have spend as much time here as I have in past years, we do not necessarily something new each day. However, I did have some photos and some comments for today. We attended a Chinese New Year’s celebration complete with dancing dragons, fire crackers, drummers, etc. and I was all ready to go.

Then, my Mac crashed. Last night it was working and this morning I struggled even to get it to turn on. I started to have flashbacks to our last trip here in 2018 when I had a similar problem with this same machine. It would not start and then it would start on its own in the middle of the night. Very strange. That problem ended up costing us about a thousand for a new motherboard. I finally figured out how to start the machine consistently this morning, but the startup routine could not find a drive. It seemed to know some things about the drive, but the drive and its contents were not visible. I eventually gave up and we took it to the Mac Made Easy. This is not an actual Apple store, but at least there were Apple certified repair folks who told me what I had self-diagnosed was indeed the case. Either the SSD (the drive) is shot or some connection was not working AND because my Mac was old they did not have or could not get parts. Evidently, to be certified you are not allowed to fix old Macs. Others can do this if they can find the parts. I will have to wait until I get back to the Midwest and go back to our Apple store to see if there is any saving this machine.

Yes, that is me in the reflection on my screen taking the photo of the screen. The folder with the question mark is not a good

Anyway, unless there is a way to fix this machine for a low price, it is not worth the money to invest more in a machine I cannot cover on a warranty. We ended up purchasing a new Mac through Costco for $1200 that will arrive Thursday. It will not be the equal of my existing machine which cost more than twice that when new, but I mostly just write now and the high end machines with large storage, fast CPU, etc. make little sense. I do at least like to be able to move content back and forth between my iPad, iPhone and computers, so a less expensive machine seems a reasonable investment.

This thing about my computer and Kauai is strange. The machine was fine all last year on the Big Island. Perhaps it is just a Midwest Mac.Cindy does almost everything she does on her phone. I can’t stand to work within a small window without a real keyboard. I will get by for about a week seeing what I can do with my iPad. The one challenging problem is to get photos off my camera. My camera will work as a WiFi hotspot, but working with a large number of images is not ideal. We expect kids to do real work with Chromebooks so this should be good experience for me.

Photos should be coming up tomorrow.