In 2024, we took our first return trip to Malaysia since the 1990’s. We thought we might need a laptop for the trip, so I picked up a 2015 MacBook Air. Soldered memory, unfortunately, so the 8GB max was all we were going to get, and a 128GB disk.
Somehow we managed to cram enough working files onto a disk a quarter of the size of Shymala’s daily driver onto that machine and get Sequoia on it.
It ran very, very hot. And very slow. So much so that we ended up not using it much at all.
Fast-forward to 2026, and we’re planning another trip. We actually do need a working machine to manage, or at least monitor, our investments while we’re on travel.
None of our daily drivers was light enough, or riskable enough, to take with us, so I started looking at options.
Option 1: a Mac Neo. For about $700, I could get a Neo with 8GB memory and a 512GB disk. This would jump everything way forward, but a 512GB disk and 8GB memory might be enough, or it might not, and $800 is still expensive for a “this might get stolen” machine.
Option 2: a refurbished M-series Air. Least-expensive option here is still about $1000 (M4, 512GB disk, 16GB memory — honestly a tremendous value for a machine that stays home but felt like a risk for a travel machine).
Option 3: do something with this Air to make it work. This felt like the cheapest and least-stress option, but there are constraints.
The real bottleneck on this machine is storage. We were not going to be able to do anything about the memory: we did get a maxed-out 8GB machine but only a 128GB disk was affordable. (OWC is a great source for older Macs, but if I wanted a big internal disk, the prices were extortionate.)
The internal SSD is user-replaceable, at least; the real problem with the previous trip was trying to run Sequoia on a machine that was extremely strapped for disk space. No swap, no disk space left; it ran hot and slow.
So what can we run that doesn’t stress the machine too much?
I first tried running Elementary OS as the most Mac-like Linux option. Elementary does not like the Air. I tried multiple variations of installs and tweaks, and it just would not run on the machine.
Okay, second option: let’s drop back to a “this absolutely will run” option and see how that works. Linux Mint was the recommended distro, and it did indeed work like a charm. Installed easily, ran great. Had the usual mess with the wifi, but tethering the machine to my phone to have internet until the drivers could be forced to build and install covered that.
It was relatively easy to configure Cinnamon, the Mint window manager, to look pretty much like MacOS, and to install modificatons to properly use command-whatever instead of a Windows like control-whatever for keyboard shortcuts. It ran fast and well.
Two shortcomings, though.
- It still had a lot of “this is not a Mac” feel. I anticipated a lot of pushback from Shymala on this, and rightly so; if you have a work rhythm, having something intrude to say “no, you have to do that this other way” is jarring.
- It could not run Numbers. Our financial planning is all implemented in Numbers, and porting it all to Google Sheets would a) be a ton of work, b) be a ton of repeated work, and c) put our finances on the servers of a company that decided “don’t be evil” was too limiting, In addition, if we suddenly lost access to the associated Google account, we’d have to build the whole thing from scratch again.
So we needed a MacOS solution again.
I had mistakenly gotten the idea that the 2015 Air was stuck at Mojave like the 2012, and had dismissed trying to just run whatever it could run natively, but I discovered that both it could run Monterey, and that upgrading the internal SSD to 1TB would cost me less than $300; this meant that I could get an 8GB, 1TB machine for $600.
This was a no-brainer.
I ordered the disk from MicroCenter (interestingly when it arrived, it had a $499 sticker on it! I checked, and yeah, I only paid $300), and a $20 adapter so it would fit the Air. The most difficult part was finding the pentalobe screwdriver I needed to get the back off the Air! I finally found a “phone repair toolkit” from WalMart for $20.
The disk showed up and it was ridiculous. It was the size of a stick of gum.
Teardown was easy.
- remove the screws, pull on the edge of the back to open it up.
- pull the battery connector loose so the machine couldn’t accidentally power up while I was working
- remove the T3 screw holding the SSD in place.
- pull the old disk out and pivot it up a little to get it to pop out. (The old disk was an OWC upgrade to 128GB! Thing must have had like NO disk space when it shipped.)
- Slip the adapter onto the new disk’s pins, then reverse the removal to install the new one. Took a little push to make sure the disk was seated in the adapter, and the adapter was seated in the machine.
- Put the disk retaining screw back.
- Reconnect the battery connector.
- Put the back on and reinstall all the screws (I hear you saying, “NO NOT YET”, and yes, you’re right.)
Awesome! That was easy.
Power up, hold down the magic key combo to start internet recovery, wait…and it doesn’t see the disk. Okay. Maybe it’s just not formatted. Run Disk Utility…and there ain’t no disk.
Tear it down again, check all the connections, don’t put the back on again yet, just lay it in place. Try again. Still no disk. Check connections again. Looks fine.
Panic. Did I fry this brand-new disk?
Oh, wait. Here’s this card that came with the disk adapter, which says in teeny-tiny print that internet recovery doesn’t work with NVMe disks, and that I need the official Apple installer.
Well, poop. Fine.
Download the installer, follow directions to write the installer to a datastick. Go shopping while the installer app very slowly writes a bootable installer to the datastick.
Come back, insert the datastick, boot up from that, run Disk Utility and there it is. Whew. Format it GUID and Apple format. Exit, install Monterey…and there’s the disk! Woot!
Installer ran fine (if slow); reboot came up, finished the Monterey install, and all is well.
Currently using the Air for browsing, verified Numbers works fine here. All good. So for about $625, I have an excellent alternative for the trip, and no one will be depressed if something happens or it dies.
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