Decided to reinstall OSX on the macbook air that I mostly use at home. I bought it in 2012 and, other than upgrading it to Catalina (which is as new as OSX will go without using OCLP) it’s always worked great. Over the years I’ve installed a lot of apps, fiddled with the settings and installed a bigger SSD drive so it was becoming sluggish and needed a refresh. And what a LOT of hassle that turned out to be. Of course, trying to use Apple’s method of “Restoring” the OS just didn’t work. Apple don’t seem to want to support “obsolete” devices like my 12 years-old macbook. Not only was there no way of installing Catalina (OSX 10.15.7) but it repeatedly threw up this screen informing me it would take two-and-a-half millenia to install. It wouldn’t as after a few minutes it just gave up.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Other official Apple methods, like creating a bootable USB installer, also didn’t work. Online the suggestion was that Apple’s servers hadn’t had their security certificates updated and offered a myriad of ways to resolve the issue – usually involving watching YouTube videos punctuated by adverts.<\/p>\n
Naturally, the Internet Archive came to the rescue. I found an ISO of Catalina and used Balena Etcher to create a bootable USB that installed (almost) faultlessly (I needed to install without logging in in order to get past a EULA that was out of date.)<\/p>\n
Even though it’s tremendously out of date, my 2012 macbook is still perfectly useful. It has Windows 11 (maybe 10?) on bootcamp which I rarely use. I try to use Ubuntu on a hand-me-down as my main OS but old habits – that I want to break – are hard to break.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Decided to reinstall OSX on the macbook air that I mostly use at home. I bought it in 2012 and, other than upgrading it to Catalina (which is as new as OSX will go without using OCLP) it’s always worked great. Over the years I’ve installed a lot of apps, fiddled with the settings and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4516,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-microblog","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4516"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4518,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4516\/revisions\/4518"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}