My current laptop is dying of age after 7 years. Thus I'm getting a new one to replace it.
As part of the research, I looked for my last laptop purchase.
I not only found my last one, but also all the previous ones.
So I established my personal Mac history:

Reflecting on it, it seems I get quite a good milage out of my laptops.
Current replacement due to age related failures after 7 years is the top one.

The previous 2017 replacement was similar due to age related failures after 5 years.

For the 2012 replacement it is a bit of a different story, as my laptop at the time was stolen from me.
But I still got five years out of it before that.

The 2007 replacement was the switch to Intel after 4 years on PowerPC.
I was very happy with my PowerBook at the time, even helped to reverse-engineer the wireless chipset to write the Linux driver for it :-)

I wanted to see the output of a program repeatedly with the watch command.
To my surprise this failed on my macOS laptop with the following error:

% watch ipaddr
zsh: command not found: watch

Turns out that macOS does not have the watch command installed by default.

% which watch
watch not found

Thankfully this can be fixed easily by using homebrew to install the watch binary:

% brew install watch

Daring Fireball describes how to restore the old trick of slow motion MacOS Dock effects:

In the midst of recording last week’s episode of The Talk Show with Nilay Patel, I offhandedly mentioned the age-old trick of holding down the Shift key while minimizing a window (clicking the yellow button) to see the genie effect in slow motion. Nilay was like “Wait, what? That’s not working for me...” and we moved on.

What I’d forgotten is that Apple had removed this as default behavior a few years ago (I think in MacOS 10.14 Mojave), but you can restore the feature with this hidden preference, typed in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock slow-motion-allowed -bool YES

Then restart the Dock:

killall Dock

Or, in a single command:

defaults write com.apple.dock slow-motion-allowed -bool YES; killall Dock

I had forgotten that this had become a hidden preference, and that I’d long ago enabled it.

Here's how to upgrade the disk of a MacBook Pro in 45 minutes while keeping all your data/settings/applications:

1. Uninstall rEFIt and make sure your MBP restarts with the Apple 'default' bootloader
2. Follow the iFixit Guide to replace your disk
3. Put the old disk in a SATA-to-USB case (they are available for $7.89 from Newegg.com)
4. Connect the old disk to your MBP and turn the MBP on. (The MBP automagically recognizes the old system and runs it)
5. Open the Disk Manager and partition your new disk.
6. Select your new 'system' Volume and open the "Restore" tab.
7. Drag your old 'system' Volume to the "Source" field and your new 'system' Volume to the "Target" field. Click on "Restore", the contents of your old disk are now copied to the new disk.
8. After the restore process finishes, shutdown your MBP.
9. Disconnect your old disk and turn on your MBP.
10. Voilà. You are booting from the new disk and all your data/settings/applications are there too!

1. Install Mac OS X 10.4
2. Install rEFIt
3. Install Linux
4. After some time decide to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 and at the same time make the partition bigger (e.g. by merging with a FAT32 partition which was originally intended to contain some Windows)
5. Use the GNU Parted utility to delete the Mac OS X and FAT 32 partitions and create a new bigger partition for Mac OS X 10.5.
6. Restart your Mac.
7. Cheer that now you can no longer boot from the harddisk or a CD/DVD nor from anything else!

And now, how to un-brick it again:

1. Call Apple support
2. Find out that you are lucky and have some warranty left (6 days in my case!!!).
3. Bring your Mac to an Authorized Service Provider.
4. Get it back with a new harddisk :-)

Nachdem ich diese Artikel gelesen hatte, kam ich plötzlich auf die Idee die bisher nicht funktionerenden Spezialbuttons meines PowerBooks zum laufen zu kriegen.

Dies stellte sich unerwarteterweise als gar nicht so schwer heraus, und nun gibts hier einen Patch für den 2.6.3 Kernel :-)

*kernelhacking*