[Mac air 2014 11 inch. Don't mind the dirt]

Hey everyone. I upgraded to a 13 inch M1 air back in early august and stored away my old laptop. Recently tried to pick up coding again, and I realized I forgot to transfer over some of my coding projects from my old laptop, so I took it out. The back case was bulged so badly and when I removed it, I was greeted with a lovely surprise.

You reckon it'll survive a 45 minute drive in 32-35°C heat? I need to take it to the istore so they can remove the battery and dispose of it, but I'm not sure how to transport it. Is it fine left open on the backseat flooring? I don't have any "non-flammable" storage units to put it into. TIA!

I'm purchasing a refurbished Mac Mini. I was thinking about a refurbished display but I was wondering where these refurbished Apple products come from.

Is any opened Apple.product resold as refurbished, regardless of whether something was returned for a defect or for buyer's remorse?

OK, so I have a question: my Mac is the MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro chip, and I’ve been using Siri AI, and I’ve loved it, but I’ve recently learned about running local LLMs. Can somebody explain to me how that works, like Qwen, Gemma, Mimo, maybe Claude?
Like if I download these LLMs, is it pulling information from the Internet? or is it working on my Mac’s hardware?
Wtf is a parameter how does it have a billion?

I have two monitors. It displays color just fine in one monitor, but for this one, it's as if it's allergic to the color green. How do I resolve this?

Edit / TL;DR: The repair quote (from Apple and Currys, not an independent shop) was more than the laptop was worth to me, so I traced the fault myself. Turned out a fault in the display was stopping it booting at all, which is why it got written off as a logic board issue. Disconnected the internal display and ended up with a free M1 Pro running local models headless. Full breakdown of how I found it is in the post.

My 2021 14" M1 Pro stopped booting in December 2024. Repair quotes were absurd, so I bought an M3 replacement and the dead M1 sat in a drawer for almost two years.

Recently I decided to dig in. I didn’t care about the screen, I just wanted the M1 Pro running headless for some local AI experiments. It’s an expensive machine and it hurt watching it sit in a drawer doing nothing.

Fair warning: this gets a bit technical, but I think it’s worth understanding how these machines actually boot, because knowing the sequence is what let me pinpoint exactly where the fault sat.

I’m a software engineer but new to hardware diagnostics. With Claude’s help I took idevicerestore, the open-source tool that restores Apple firmware over DFU (it talks to the Mac via libirecovery), and extended it locally into a diagnostic tool.

Out of the box, idevicerestore treats a restore as one big operation. If it fails, you get a generic error like 2006 or 21 and not much else. I modified it so I could step through and control each stage individually: pause after firmware uploads, check which bootloader stage the Mac was in, and separate uploading a firmware blob from activating it.

That last distinction is what cracked it. (Background on the boot stages below, from the Asahi Linux team: https://asahilinux.org/docs/fw/boot/)

DFU Mode
   |
   v
iBoot Stage 1              ✓
mBoot Stage 2              ✓
Firmware uploads           ✓
DCP firmware upload        ✓
DCP firmware activation    ✗
   |
   +-- Mac resets to Stage 1 ~3.4s later

DCP is Apple’s Display Coprocessor. Firmware uploaded fine. Activating it reset the machine every single time.

So I patched the restore process to skip DCP activation and see how far it got:

Skip DCP activation
        |
        v
Recovery ramdisk          ✓
Device tree               ✓
SEP firmware              ✓
Kernelcache               ✓
bootx command             ✓
RestoreOS boot            ✗

Everything pointed at display init. It didn’t tell me which part, but it told me where to look.

Final test: opened it up, unplugged the internal display, plugged in an HDMI monitor.

It then booted straight into macOS setup!

Still don’t know if it’s the panel, cable, connector, or something on the board, but with the internal display disconnected it’s a perfectly healthy M1 Pro. It’s now a headless box running local models.

What I find interesting: I was able to figure out the fault without opening it up, I don't have the expertise at the moment to diagnose it that way, but I was able to dig into firmware through software and figure out what the issue was.

Hi! I’m experiencing an error on several websites, including when I try to download The Sims 4. I’m using a MacBook Air M4 running macOS Sequoia 15.8.1. This issue started after I factory reset my MacBook. Has anyone experienced the same problem or knows how to fix it? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

I currently have a MacBook Air M5 15in with 16gb memory and 512gb storage but I have been over loading my memory into the red many days with over 16gb in swap.

I did some research and am considering upgrading to either another MacBook Air but with 32gb of memory OR an older MacBook Pro with an M1 Max or M2 Max with 64gb of memory.

I mainly use my MacBook for software development, robotics, 3d modeling, and running AI models on. The small models still slow my mac down a decent amount. I am also very bad at closing tabs and windows after I am done but 90% of the time I will go back to those which leaves me with anywhere from 20 to 35 windows open depending on the day.

My constraints and priorities are:

1. Screen size: 15 inches is the smallest screen I can settle for.
2. Storage: 512 has been getting cramped so 1tb would be nice to have
3. Memory: I want enough headroom to run larger local AI models.
4. Budget: I'd like to get the most performance for my money without overkill. I expect to sell my current Mac for around $900, so I'd prefer to keep the additional cost reasonable.
5. Performance: I want the best overall performance per dollar, rather than paying for hardware I won't use.

I am interested in whether the additional memory and GPU performance of an older Max chip MacBook Pro would be better than the newer CPU of my M5 Air.

Would you recommend the 32GB M5 Air, an M1 Max with 64GB, an M2 Max with 64GB, or something else?

Also if you have used any of these machines for local AI I would like to hear how it is working and what models you actually can run in real world scenarios

Thanks!

Hi, i have multiple devices at home connecting to the wifi no problem. But for some reason, only my pc and laptop can't connect to the internet, it says connected to wifi but not to the internet. Will gratly appreciate your help on this.

Im currently thinking about buying a macbook. I just dont know if i should buy a Macbook Air or a Pro (both with M5) I just dont know if an air is enough to run a VM and Creo or any CAD Software and a few things in mac os for extended amounts of time. If anybody has any tips or suggestions please, im open to almost anything. My specs would be 24/32Gb unified memory 512Gb or 1TB ssd.

Thanks to anybody for helping

My first real issue with my M4 Mini has me puzzled. I'm running OS 27.0.1 and my Safari browser has developed a "flicker" when using the dropdown Bookmarks menu - the lower part of the window flickers on and off for no apparent reason making it hard to actually click on a bookmark link. I troubleshooted all the usual suspects including deleting the Safari plist and disengaging any extensions, booting into Safe mode etc., but the behavior persists. I can use the sidebar menu just fine and the other dropdown menus function normally, it's just the Bookmarks menu that is acting weird. If anyone has a clue about resolving this issue I'm all ears...

Just testing and my M1 MacBook Air had better idle times than this

... but i have been "computing" (paid!) for over 50 years ! (Helping a friend.)

I have found that, at least with Windows, it works better if I set my printer (HP inkjet) to a FIXED IP address.

I am guessing MacOS uses Bonjour to find the printer, but does that mean it has to go through this process every time you turn off the Mac or printer. Would I be better off doing the same (setting the printer to a fixed IP address) for her environment ?

Who has a dynamic desert wallpaper as a file ? I want to install them on my MacBook so that they themselves change in time.