A friend gifted me their old MacBook Pro, specifically, the 12,1 Early-2015 13-inch model, since they upgraded to an M1 Pro. Kicking the tires on it, it's an 8/256 model with the "2.7GHz Core i5" meaning the 5257U. macOS Monterey is predictably unwieldy on it, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple made it fatter specifically to make these dual-cores look bad compared to the M1. But, I now have a Mac with which to test Intune deployment characteristics for macOS devices and to recover APFS drives with, so... I still ended up dual-booting Debian.
I find it hard to believe that 8/256 is still a base model for them even now. macOS is more memory efficient than Windows, to be sure, but I still saw it as quite the limit -- even on Linux it isn't a fun limit to navigate around. I'm using GNOME for my environment, which isn't my first choice, but it's the only one other than I think KDE to competently handle DPI scaling. I'm of the opinion that the Retina screen is great on macOS if a tad cramped, but it's more of a pain in the ass than it's worth under anything else. I have it set up in a way that I can live with now, I guess, but having a screen that's higher res than my main desktop display at less than a quarter of the size comes with some hurdles. The 16:10 ratio is much appreciated and I'd forgotten how much I loved it -- I'm glad to see it making a comeback, I don't think it should have ever died. That said, I also think I'd have been better served by a 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 screen than this 2560x1600 pain in the rear.
Window management under macOS is frankly rather pitiful without third party applications. Even Windows can quarter-tile now. Then again, GNOME was stuck dual-tiling at first too... but that was a setting, I think, rather than a whole other application.
Broadwell is quite long in the tooth now, and a dual-core in this day and age is, put bluntly, a limit, but it handles itself surprisingly well all-considered. The beefier iGP in the form of the Iris Pro 6100 is appreciated, even if it can still struggle a bit and doesn't have much in the way of modern codecs. h264ify to the rescue! This still does way better than the Chromebook I installed custom firmware on and shoved Linux onto for my personal laptop use. This is in good shape, but it was actually used and I don't feel bad continuing to actually use it, it's taken a couple of dings over the years.
I thought I might replace the battery but it's still at 85% of its design capacity, it just never lasted all that long. That said, my privilege might be showing with me saying that ~4h mixed-load is a bad runtime. In an interesting reversal, I do actually get better runtime on Linux than macOS. And my thermals are managed better too with a little daemon I found. Apple really prioritized a quiet laptop over one that could adequately cool itself -- I guess they figured it would throttle before it killed itself, but it is a bit nerve-wracking to see my temperature spike to 105. I may yet pull this apart and repaste the heatsink, but my friend told me he'd done it himself less than a year ago, and that Apple stuff just kind of runs hot no matter what you do. I think I might be boosting higher under Linux than macOS, too, which is weird -- they say 2.7GHz in the documentation both on Apple and Intel's end, but I've clocked this thing boosting to 3.1 when the thermal situation is right. I remember noticing similar behavior from Haswell-U -- boosting to 2.whatever it was supposed to under Windows, but clocking a bit higher under Linux in the right circumstances.
