I had the 11” dual core i7 and I wouldn’t even call it slow (for its time). Loved that little machine and I keep longing for that form factor but with modern specs.

What have you tried?

Mostly getting stuff done on the Windows machine in the next room or playing music off a different stereo or playing music on cassette tape or minidisc on the same stereo, etc. It's easier to fall back to a world of 20th century electronics where latency is imperceptible than it is to dive into a world of third-party apps that were all designed around somebody's inscrutable KPIs but didn't consider at all my convenience or inconvenience. Probably it is Creative Cloud updating or some software for the mouse or some kind of crap and if I sat in front of the machine for 30 minutes it might settle down but it's rare that I sit in front of it for 30 minutes. It used to be that kind of thing wrecked the Windows experience but over a long period of time Microsoft did a lot of work to balance to load of startup processes and mostly you don't feel it.

My wife browses the web a lot on that Mac, she hasn't complained since I installed Firefox + uBlock Origin but maybe she expects it to be slow.

In what way are the keyboards and ports non-functional?

MacBook batteries have not been permanently glued in for quite some time. Replacement requires some disassembly but is perfectly doable for most techies.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Late+2020+B...

You have remove screws and be careful not to damage anything. Easy for you and me but not for the layman.

Sorry but why do we have to accept mediocre as acceptable these days? My old laptop had hot-swapable batteries.

Personally I prefer the current solution to adding weight and size.

I can’t remember my battery draining below 50% since I bought my M5 a while back. 10+ years ago I agree that the needs were different but these days needing swappable batteries seems like a very minor niche IMHO.

You can just use a third party shop.

Pre-Regulation you couldn't even buy a genuine spare part, and they even did part pairing with batteries. Bothering you with stupid Nags when you went with the 3rd party shop

So gender is a strict binary but dragons kinda-sorta exist, got it (＠_＠)

Yeah, my 2005 beater has both CarPlay and a backup camera. Cost me $40 and an hour of labor.

At least it’s not a reaction video. That those are such a widespread phenomenon both frightens and fascinates me.

Sometimes I think they are a mash-up of three things from older media

1. A laugh track

2. An inset with a sign language interpreter

3. An imaginary friendship with a low budget meta commentator, like Mystery Science Theater 3000

Doom scrolling. For people who get hooked it can be very very addictive.

I switch between Tahoe, fedora and pop_os on a daily basis. Tahoe in its complete design madness is still in a league of its own when it comes to basic UX IMHO. Just the fact that the keymappings for undo/redo are consistent between apps puts it’s way ahead of Linux when considering the whole ecosystem. Linux is a clear winner in tech and tooling thought, which is why I use both.