My trusty early 2015 Mac Air, has begun doing odd things every three or so weeks. A complete screen glitch in the middle of a YT video felt like an advanced warning. So I ordered an M1 Air.
Then my bank sent me a message saying that it had cancelled the payment instruction because fraud.
I called the number I had for these occasions, and the agent told me that this happened a lot with Apple, John Lewis, Curries and a couple of other retailers. If someone gets your card and orders from those guys, they can do a lot of damage in a short time. They choose those guys because they can resell (on eBay presumably) readily. If they bought an X-E4 from Fuji, it's going to be a while before that shifts. Fair enough, if inconvenient. The bank's agent asked me to make another order so he could make sure this payment went through. Not to worry about the first order, Apple would cancel that when they saw the payment was cancelled.
You can guess what happened. I got one Air delivered and the money taken from my account. I noticed that there was still another payment outstanding. I called the bank. Not to worry, they said, it's just a delay because New Year.
Nope. A couple of days later I got another message from DHL saying they would be delivering my Air. I called Apple (in fact, their outsourced customer handling company) explained the situation, and their agent was totally calm and competent, told me to refuse delivery when the courier arrived, and set a return and credit in motion. All of which went through within a couple of days.
So when the bank cancels your next payment to a retailer, cancel the order as well. Do not assume the retailer will notice.
Anyway.
Everything they say about these M1 Airs is true. It's even smaller than the previous one. The keyboard is terrific, and only Apple make trackpads this good. The screen is just pin-point wow!
The stereo sound system is using some psycho-acoustics that puts voices in the middle of the screen, but then ventriloquises background sound as coming from the left and right walls. Music videos have the music in the middle, though it feels like they are using a `spatial' effect that I last heard on a ghetto-blaster in *cough, splutter*.
After making up an old-school what-I-need-to-transfer-and-install list, I found out about the Migration Assistant. See, that's why we all pay Apple prices. It's not for the kit, it's for the eco-system. It's because they put a tonne of work into developing a program that we would only use twice in the life of the machine, once at the start to import everything from the old machine, and once at the end to export it to the even newer one. Everything came over, and everything works, except for a program called LatextIt!, which is probably searching for some files somewhere they aren't any more.
On the hardware side, I got an Anker multi-adapter for USB-A and card readers, plus additional USB-C ports.
Then I tried ripping some CDs.
My Air told me the USB-A CD drive needed power (the Anker supplies power, the USB-A HDD was running) and I should plug my kit into a USB-C port on the laptop. But. But.
OK. Order a USB-A to C adapter so I can plug the USB-A CD drive into the other USB-C port. Arrives via Amazon Prime in less than 24 hours. Plug in. Yea! Works.
This Air turns into a desktop sprawl if you want to do rip CDs, or read an SD card. The rumours are that the next iteration will have extra slots and an SD card reader, and the Magsafe (which I have not felt the need for so far) port.
I am, however, a happy customer.
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