My thanks to @MacSparky for playing along, and to @ismh for being appropriately horrified. I’ve saved the clip via Overcast sharing and then saved it to my hard drive, so I can have it forever.
I especially loved how David called it a “sweet solution” which most MPU folks may recall is that same phrasing that Steve Jobs used when talking about web apps instead of native apps on the original iPhone. I’m not 100% sure that David meant it the same way, but I’m about 98.75% sure.
I’ll admit that I did this as a joke because of all of the grief that Stephen gives David about his drive “taped to the back of his iMac” but I also have to admit that I haven’t taken it off since I did it. I had to use my laptop literally on my lap in a waiting room with no table, and it was really nice to be able to use my external SSD knowing that it wasn’t going to slip off my lap and fall to the floor while getting disconnected uncleanly.
Allow me to point out a couple especially terrible things about this picture:
- The “Samsung” label is visible, which is terrible, but also upside down, which is much worse.
- The two pieces of tape are not parallel.
- Neither are they the same length.
- The USB-C cable that connects the drive to the MacBook Air is actually very short, but because it’s not fully visible in the picture, you can’t really tell that, so you might imagine a long cable too, which would also be terrible
(Aside: I love that Stephen resized the image 512px.)
I think that I will eventually remove this, and if I put it back on, I’ll definitely fix issues 1-3. Ideally I would like to find a way that doesn’t include scotch tape, but it’s actually worked much better than I would have expected. And hey, who wouldn’t like a MacBook Air with 2.5 TB of storage?!
(I’m running virtual machines via VMWare via this T5 and it works great, btw, but the last thing I want is that drive disconnecting and potentially corrupt my VM image.)
Update
@ismh - having heard you reference the distraction factor of the Touch Bar reminded me that I had just heard someone talk about that recently. Turns out it was Rob Griffiths:
https://robservatory.com/de-distractionate-the-touch-bar/
He wrote:
…just because I now have a Touch Bar-equipped Mac doesn’t mean I suddenly like the Touch Bar. In fact, my feelings about it haven’t changed since I wrote about it two years ago:
The Touch Bar, despite its name, is actually an Eye Bar: It forces your eyes off the screen, down to the Touch Bar, back up to the screen, repeat ad infinitum.
Rob’s solution was to change the settings shown here:
as he explained (emphasis mine):
For me, the simple fix was to set the first pop-up to “F1, F2, etc. Keys,” and the second to “Show Control Strip.” Now, when using my machine, the Touch Bar never changes—and I have my function keys back (though I do have to look at them to use them):
This is the first time that I had heard this is possible, and I expect it is what I would do too.
Maybe that will help you too.
ps - if @ismh built a computer capable of running macOS out of generic PC parts, would that make it a Hackettosh?
I’ll see myself out.