More than two months ago, my buddy Tod asked me to do a couple weeks of work with him at his warehouse. A full eight weeks later, I am about to start another month’s work on an InDesign project for the same employer, which should be fun. I developed pre-release samples as a contractor for a launch release of InDesign, probably around 2002.

In prepping my production environment for this I decided it made sense to finally spring for a 1tb SSD to pop into my main axe, a late-2008 unibody MBP (the last model with the HD and battery access door, ordered refurb from Apple in April 2009).

Long story short, I ordered and installed not one but two 1TB SSDs and neither were compatible. The first one is actually definitively described as incompatible with the specific model Mac by the manufacturer. The second was confirmed as compatible by the manufacturer before I purchased it, but after a successful clean install and data migration, the machine crashed out and rebooted into the recovery partition. I performed a recovery and went to reboot – but the device was (and remains) unresponsive. Presumably it is the motherboard.  I guess seven years is reasonable use, but I’m still a little cheesed off about it – I certainly was not planning on replacing or upgrading for another five years or so.

So I ended up using the Crucial SSD on my other machine, an old Mac Pro 4,1 tower, and it’s a huge improvement. I had actually pre-ordered an OWC Mercury SSD for the dead laptop and had to RMA it. Immediately after learning the ’08 machine was dead I sourced a third-party refurb MPB from ’12 on eBay for about $500 and that’s what I’m writing on now. It could clearly benefit from an SSD swap too, and I see that OWC has just introduced a raft of new SSD options including a 2TB SSD for about $500, so that’s not out of the question. The CPU on the ’12 MPB is definitely beefier than that on the tower, but the difference between HD and SSD makes the tower far faster in use.

Simultaneously, I had decided to update our set of five-year-old iPhone 4 units and the replacement 5 units arrived this week. So between this and that, it’s been two weeks of intensive hardware and software chaos, hopefully resolved now for another five or six years.

Not sure how I feel about iOS 9 – Notifications in particular are a hideous annoyance that is apparently impossible to turn off globally and re-enable; predictably most apps install with Notifications turned on, in order to maximize ad impression opportunities. Annoyingly, apps that get *updated* ALSO have their on-install Notifications prefs reset. Which truly blows.

Anyway, off to remaster an InDesign workflow. Looking forward to it.