Way back when, I bought a black MacBook and an iPod Touch. I was – har, har – going to learn how to write Objective-C and earn millions selling apps. You know the kind of thing:
Except Objective-C is a right royal pain in the neck – and this is coming from someone who loves JavaScript. Anyway, after a year or so, I had a better plan: use a Mac as my main laptop and get used to the Mac way. I bought a unibody 13-inch MacBook Pro, mid-2010 version, speediest CPU at the time, upgraded it to 8GB and a hybrid 500GB drive from Seagate, and used it as my main machine for about 8 months, trying to love the Mac ecosystem. I sold the BlackBook a little later.
Via some time using VMWare Fusion, I ended up with a Bootcamp partition and used mainly Windows 7. But I found the Mac keyboard to be not ideal (plus some other niggles) and so in mid-2011 I bought a Dell XPS 15z instead. The MacBook Pro was sidelined, with me booting it every now and then to update it and back it up. Still in the back of my mind was the thought of writing iOS apps and so I didn’t get rid of it completely.
Fast forward to now.
I have a Xamarin license from work. It’s time to play around writing iOS apps but with C# instead. Much better. However, carting around a 4.5 lb MacBook Pro as well as my Dell XPS 12 when I travel doesn’t tempt me. Since the Mac side of things is only for compiling and uploading to an iOS device (aka, my phone or my iPad), it makes sense to get the smallest lightest Mac I can find, viz the MacBook Air 11. And that’s what I did: I bought a second-hand machine off of eBay (it hasn’t changed substantially since the mid-2013 release and that’s what I bought) and to offset the cost it’s time to sell the MacBook Pro.
Of course:
Hmm. It behooves me to optimize here, perhaps.
After backing up my MacBook Pro, I rebooted into the Disk Utility (press ⌘ and R while the machine boots). Here I erased the whole drive – select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” for the disk format and give the disk a name – and then selected the option to Install OS X. (Note: you will have to be connected to a network since the install process has to download the OS installer – WiFi is fine.) It then installed Mavericks. Nooooo! That’s not what I want!
It turns out that in order to install Yosemite (that is, OS X 10.10) at the moment as a fresh install (and not as an upgrade), you have to do something different: you have to create a bootable drive with the Yosemite installer on it. Generally this is a USB drive; 8GB will do just fine. So, go find one of those freebie USB drives you have stashed away in a drawer.
I went through the new install process on Mavericks (basically which country, which language, etc) and then downloaded the install for Yosemite. And now the easy fun part: there is a way to type in a bunch of commands into a terminal to create a bootable USB drive and then copy the Yosemite install on it, but fooey to that. I downloaded DiskMaker X and it did everything for me. At the end of 10 minutes or so, it had reformatted my USB drive and had copied the relevant parts of the Yosemite install onto it. And the best bit? It went and found the install program itself, I didn’t have to browse and point to a particular folder. So now I had a bootable USB drive with the Yosemite installer on it.
Now it was even easier: reboot the Pro with the USB drive plugged in. This time, just press the Option/Alt key when you reboot. It’ll show the bootable drives, so select the USB drive and boot from that. Select Disk Utility, erase the main drive again (same parameters), and then install Yosemite. Bingo. After about 15 minutes I had a MacBook Pro with a Yosemite clean install and waiting at the registration details prompt. All ready for the lucky person who will be buying this machine from me on eBay.
Now to do the same on my new MacBook Air. The USB drive I’ve just created will work just fine there as well: no need for all the shenanigans above again. After that, it’s time to install Xamarin and go play.
Now playing:
Stansfield, Lisa - My Apple Heart
(from Affection)
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4 Responses
#1 Phillip H. Blanton said...
07-Nov-14 2:50 PMDid you know that you can virtualize Mac osx server and run it on your dell for just this purpose?
#2 julian m bucknall said...
07-Nov-14 6:01 PMPhillip: well, apart from the fact you'd be violating the Apple EULA by doing so. It can only be installed (or virtualized) on an Apple-badged machine.
Cheers, Julian
#3 Paul said...
07-Nov-14 11:36 PMWelcome to the dark side. I love running my Mac full time with Windows running on parallels. Office time is mbp running two thunderbolt displays, weekend is just the beautiful mbp retina.
#4 julian m bucknall said...
08-Nov-14 4:58 PMPaul: Well, apart for the need for a touch screen, perhaps so.
Cheers, Julian
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