It eventually released its death grip on the processors, to a degree.

I also realised that the reason why the laptop was so sluggish was because Dropbox was being Dropbox when it started up. I liked it, but I still preferred the overall aesthetic of Pop!_OS. For one thing, MATE is better suited to older hardware, and it has a bunch of indicators and widgets that you can customise. I then switched the desktop environment to the MATE desktop, and it seemed to help. I also couldn’t work out how to make the dock appear in a more convenient way, and how to add other bits and pieces to my desktop to improve my experience. The laptop still seemed a bit sluggish initially, and it looked like all the processors were maxing out. Of course I also installed the app for Linux testing too. I also switched my shell over to ZSH (with Oh My ZSH), installed Conda as my main Python distro/option, and even figured out how to run Jupyter Lab on the laptop. I installed a couple of my preferred apps such as Sublime Text, Sublime Merge, Dropbox, and so on. I’ve also wanted a Linux laptop to geek out on, so I took a leap, and wiped the drive completely (I was actually planning to configure dual boot, but couldn’t work this out), and installed Pop!_OS by System76 on it.

The laptop is past the support cut-off for the current macOS version, so it was running High Sierra (I think). I first reset the device, and poked around a bit in macOS. I decided to see if my wife’s laptop would suffice, instead. I’d wanted a personal laptop for my non-Automattic projects, and was building up the courage to buy a new machine that I’d install Linux on. This left her MacBook Air gathering dust in a corner of the apartment. My wife recently left her job, and we bought her (formerly) work Lenovo laptop for her to use as a personal machine. It had also become pretty sluggish between macOS updates, and general cruft accumulation so it took forever for the device to boot up, and perform simple tasks. That left my wife with her MacBook Air that she had to use when connected to main power. We eventually removed it early last year, before it burst. Over time the battery became less effective, and started to swell. It’s a Intel® Core™ i7-2677M CPU 1.80GHz (four core) laptop with 4GB of RAM. I bought my wife a 11″ MacBook Air in 2011.

Latest os for macbook air 2011