Stripped and Simple Studio Setup – Tuesday VO Tech Tip

In addition to appreciating specificity when it comes to studio hardware, I also like getting a maximum amount of use out of any given tool.

The laptop which I just retired was an aught-nine MacBook Pro. While a few of you may be wondering what “aught-nine” means, more of you are probably wondering how I could have had that machine chugging along for as long as I did.

That’s a fair question. The first thing to get limited was the operating system (OS). One of the shifts which Apple has made since I started using their products was making the newest operating system free each year. On one hand, that’s a very good thing, as you can keep your computer OS current, up to date against nefarious schemes and security vectors, while continuing to gain functionality with each improvement.

On the other hand, each iteration of the MacOS requires a bit more robust hardware. At a certain point, that fancy chipset with processor speed that was so amazingly, blazingly fast back in 2009 struggles to keep up with current demands placed upon it. In my case, that meant when MacOS moved on from “High Sierra” (version 10.13.x, for those of you playing along at home), it dropped hardware compatibility for that laptop model.

After the moment of “Drat!” there wasn’t too much immediate negative impact. Everything continued to work, and it simply lacked a few features that came with updated system software. As I updated the studio computer to Catalina, it held its own for a bit.

Then the old Macbook Pro started losing a few steps here and there. That’s really the point where I should have started paying attention. However, as it was my laptop, and we were mid-COVID, there wasn’t much need for a mobile computer. Everything I was working on sat rooted on my studio’s Mac Mini as I moved about the world via Zoom and Source-Connect sessions. When some plug-ins lost functionality, or the newest version of RX wouldn’t run on the laptop, it didn’t really cause an insurmountable issue.

Things went south when the browser became unsupported. The newer versions of Chrome no longer worked with High Sierra. Cloud documents kept going weirdly jittery and not saving changes. It made me realize how much I relied upon that functionality to remain seamless. Though workarounds existed, it was not a sustainable method. Spinning “beach balls of death” announced themselves more frequently. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, it became time to move on.

There’s an interesting positive aspect of that slow slide to non-functionality: I don’t have to migrate anything onto the new machine. One of the weird quirks of Apple’s amazing Migration Assistant is that when we get a new Mac computer, iPad or iPhone, it ends up looking exactly like the old device. The migration process brings all that old cruft and baggage over. While the new device is faster, it somehow always feels a bit like we’ve simply put a bit of paint on the same old place.

Because I’d been stripping off those things which didn’t work on the old computer, it enables a much more selective approach about what gets added to the new one. Legacy data that had come forward from other machines, applications which at first seemed cool but never got used, and a myriad of little audio tools that didn’t quite make the cut all got left behind. At least for the time being, I’m not installing any apps that aren’t being regularly accessed. It feels good having a dock currently free of forgotten icons. A fine new start to things.

The one final feature I won’t miss about that old MacBook? The “radiant” effect of using it… That M2 chip runs pretty darn cool.

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