Welcome to the last part of the series dedicated to #MARCHintosh 2025! Adter I dabbled with the 1984 Macintosh Plus, then switched to the 2001 iBook G3/500 and then the 2006 White Macbook, I decided for the last week to go somewhere in between.

So meet the 2011 MacBook Air. Yes, it’s an 11" and it’s so small and cute, you’d think it’s a tablet. You know this one, I’ve recently written about it. But on the other hand, it’s strong, powerful, with good specs, a decent 1366x768 screen and a couple of speakers that sound a bit better than a tin can. I chose this particular laptop because it’s old enough to be considered “retro”, as it’s fourteen years old, but it’s powerful enough to still be useful on a day to day basis. And although it’s pretty old and low-powered in comparison with today’s MacBooks, it does its duty very well.

Unfortunately, this laptop stopped receiving updates and it’s stuck with Mac OS High Sierra (10.13.6), which was released in 2017. While not optimal, this should be fairly fine. I know that some applications will stop working, and I’m looking at you, Steam! With the RAM being a soldered 4GB, and the processor an i5 at 1.6GHz, this laptop is snappy and responsive, even while multi-tasking (I’m writing these while listening to music in iTunes and having some Chrome browser tabs open in the background). I’m planning to do some light gaming (ZUMA REVENGE, AMIRITE?), and also maybe try some productivity tools. Using Coda 2 is actually a breeze and it works very fine, so I can use this machine for work fairly easy. I am using it to write this article remotely, directly on the computer that builds my website.

Hardware-wise, the MacBook Air is a beast of a computer. Not only it’s fast and has good battery life, but also the keyboard is nice, the trackpad is flawless, the screen is fine and the speakers give a good listening experience, actually impressed me with how loud they are, even though they don’t distort too much.

I could upgrade the SSD inside it, but it would be pretty complicated, because it has a proprietary connector, and I need to buy either a new M.2 and adapter or an Apple SSD, which both cost more money than I want to spend on this machine. So I’ll just let it use the currently 120GB SSD, which is more than enough for the light usage and gaming I’m planning to do on this.

Speaking of the battery, I’ve used this for more than an hour with the brightness at full blast, with Coda and Chrome opened, iTunes playing in the background and I still have 56% battery left, which is great. Speaking of Chrome, 1080p playback in Youtube works great, only losing a couple of frames when switching to full screen. Awesome!

Bluetooth works just fine, and I was able to pair the Mighty Mouse finally to a computer to use during #MARCHintosh, which made me really happy. But the trackpad is so good, I rarely use the mouse, which I now find heavy and clunky. And since we’re talking connectivity, the laptop can properly connect to my 5GHz wireless network and reaches 150Mbps, which is more than enough to stream 4K movies, although the screen can’t display that. More than enough for daily usage. Speaking of daily driving this, it has two USB-A ports (although they’re on separate sides), one audio jack, MagSafe (yay!) and Thunderbolt 2 / Mini-DisplayPort, which makes this little computer a good candidate for usage with an external monitor.

Since I paired the previous laptops with a period-specific iPods, this time I’m featuring the iPod nano in his 7th incarnation, also known as iPod Nano 7th Gen/Multitouch. It’s got 16GB, so there’s more than enough space to fit in some nice bangers.

As I’ve taken care a bit on the previous computers of the creative side, I’m going to try and focus this week on relaxing and having fun and this means a couple of things:

Watching something

Of course I will use VLC, and what else to watch that the best episode of the Lost TV series, The Constant, the fifth episode of the fourth season. It’s probably one of the best TV episodes of all time and definitely one of my favourite.

Listening to something

iTunes works out of the box and I added some nice older music, but I was happy that Spotify, which state-of-the-art-website-in-a-browser-shoveled-in-an-app throws a popup window saying that the operating system is out of date, but still works.

Playing some games

Steam is a retarded company, and if you didn’t know about this, the games that you buy with your hard earned (or stolen) money are never actually yours. So now Steam won’t open, because it considers High Sierra to be too old, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Your entire Steam library is now gone. Better spend some $$$ on a SteamDeck maybe? (Don’t get me wrong, I love the SteamDeck, but I think that Steam pulling the plug on older Operating Systems is just a proof that Steam is not tailored at gamers, but at shareholders). At least Transmission loads just fine. Yar!

Discord is another fine example of state-of-the-art-website-in-a-browser-shoveled-in-an-app that won’t work because fuck you. It’s crap anyway, so nothing of value really lost.

Now turning into some serious games, although most of them cannot be found easily online, unless you sail the aforementioned high seas, or maybe take a walk in the macintosh garden. Yar! However, these I actually paid with my own money, so they should better be working!

Starcraft refused to open, the moment I finished installing it, saying there was some corrupt data. I tried the repair option, but I guess there’ll might be no zerg slapping for me this week. I could try to search online for some old version of this, but I don’t have the patience to do this. The Starcraft started properly after a repair and update, and it works just fine, even on the small screen of the MacBook Air.

Although Starcraft II loads and starts fine, it’s definitely way over this little machine’s power. While it opens and runs and is “playable”, the graphics settings are set to minimum and the framerate is low, all this while making the laptop heat up a lot and spin its fans like hell.

I already had Diablo 3 installed on this computer, but looking at how the Starcraft II experience went, I don’t think there’s any chance that it will work. And after another 30 minutes of downloading, installing, updating, of course the app opens and closes. I was lucky enough to have on my storage hard drive a dmg file of Diablo 2 that I used to play when I was maining my 2006 MacBook from my previous episode, but that didn’t work, because of some X11 error. So there goes that as well. Back to Starcraft, I guess.

Zuma Revenge! The spiritual and literal sequel to the great Zuma Deluxe, there is not much that you can say about this addictive click-em shoot-em game, except for “Ribbit!”. I am set on finishing this again on this computer, so that’s something nice to do over a Friday afternoon. And you’d be amazed how much progress you can do in an hour or so, or how much fun you’ll have playing this. However, the fans are not very happy, so I’m letting this rest for a bit, as the CPU is at 68ºC and the CPU fan is spinning at 6500RPM.

I tried to play one of my favourite games, Dawn of Man, but unfortunately, this laptop was already 8 years old when the game was released in 2019, so while it opens and works, it runs at about 2 frames per second, making it unplayable. Sadge.

While sailing the high seas, I was able to find and install a 32-bit Mac OSX variant of Stardew Valley, a game that I’ve heard about very often, but I never got into playing, and I’m happy to report that it works pretty fine!

All in all, this is a fun gadget to have around if going to a party or somewhere where you need a trusty computer, as it’s light, works well at the mundane tasks, and is even powerful enough to play some games.