Bricked
Shortly after my daughter graduated college, we bought her a new Macbook Air M4. It was light years ahead of the computer we bought her before college, a Macbook Air from early 2015. That one had the Intel Core i5 with 8gb of ram.
I decided to keep her old Air just to have around to play with. And after a couple of months, I ended up purchasing my own Macbook Air M4 (which I’m currently using to write this up!) and essentially mothballed the old Air.
About a year ago I decided I want to install Linux on it. I dug it out, booted it up, and… firmware lock.
Wait, what?
I never put a firmware lock on the Air. In fact, I’ve never put a firmware lock on any computer I’ve owned in the last 30+ years.
After lots of digging into old forums and reddit posts (where I was accused of stealing the Air), I realized I wasn’t going to be able to fix this on my own. At least not without some serious deep techie know-how. I was pointed to a tutorial on how to reflash EFI ROM, but that included access to a Raspberry PI, a breadboard, low resistance resistors, jumper wires…you get the idea. That solution was way beyond my skills (although part of me is tempted. After all, worse I can do is brick my already bricked Air). Despairing of ever figuring that out, I dug into my Apple purchase history and found the Air listed under my hardware purchases on getsupport.apple.com.
After a year’s worth of half-hearted attempts to fix this, I finally made an appointment at the Apple Genius Bar last night. And the short of it is… they can’t/won’t help me because the computer is “OBS”. Obsolete.
Which is annoying. The specs are still decent for a mid-grade Linux machine. Aside from a few stickers, the aluminum unibody is still in great shape. And it would’ve been fun to tinker with.
But because Apple can’t be bothered to unlock an older machine, it’s gonna be dropped in the recycling bin at Best Buy.
So annoying. And frustrating. Thanks for not helping me keep old tech out of the landfill Apple. (¬_¬)