What's old is old again — but still kinda fun to play with

Since forever I've been charmed by Apple's 11" MacBook Air (above), which made its debut in 2011 and was retired — to use Deckard's choice of words in "Blade Runner" — in 2015.

Note the lighted Apple logo on the back of the screen, a feature from back in the day that Apple retired in 2015.*

Such a small device compared to all the increasingly large screen laptops appearing every year.

When the Neo came out recently I noted comparisons to the 11" MacBook Air in terms of dimensions: in length and width they're very similar.

Sure, the Neo's a zillion times more capable and has a better screen etc. and costs $599 compared to the $999 11" MacBook Air's debut cost (BTW that's $1,440 in 2026 dollars).

Anyhoo, I noodled around on eBay and found a 2012 11" MacBook Air said to be in good condition and working for $40 so I took a flutter.

It just arrived and it looks brand new; I plugged it in to power and waited overnight to see if it actually turned on: YES! 

It made the classic Apple sound and started right up.

I played around with it for a while adjusting the settings etc. to my preferences. 

Turns out it's just as fast as my MacBook Pro M4 from November 2024 — but it can only access a few websites; most say they're not compatible with my 2011 11" Air running Lion OS 10.7.5 from 2012.

For example, my MacMail doesn't work at all.

Here's a video — "Using Mac OS X Lion in 2025" — that echoes my experience: no YouTube, no Wikipedia, no X, etc.

I tried and failed to update the OS to 10.13.6 El Capitan, which appeared in 2018 and was the final version of OS X before Apple switched to MacOS.

But that's kind of irrelevant since it turns out that my 2011 MacBook Air 13" running El Capitan 10.13.6 (I bought the machine new and updated its OS faithfully over the years), when I tried to create a boj post with it, appeared to do it correctly albeit slowly but to my dismay it turned out that the post as displayed on my 2024 MacBook Air was different from how it looked on the 2011 machine: the spacing of the text was all wrong.

It's hard enough using Blogger to create posts: as I remarked earlier, it now takes me 2-5 times as long to create a new boj post with this setup than it did with Typepad.

Like tears in rain... but I digress.

So, good-bye to using either of these 2011 legacy machines for boj.

Still, good fun for $40.

*Back story here.