I don’t really own a “TV”; I do all of my media consumption online and I don’t see any real reason to sit across the room from a panel the size of a pool table when I have laptops with better resolution. And, if you’re 18 inches or so from the laptop, it’s perceptually just as big as an olympic-size TV twelve feet away.
So, with that thinking, I generally use my old circa 2011 15″ MacBook Pro as a TV… I like to lay in bed and watch whatever has caught my interest for an hour before passing out – so it works out.
Unfortunately I’ve limped that 15″ MacBook Pro along about as far as I can. It’s on it’s third battery, which is failing, the wall-wart is some aftermarket thing that mostly works, and the AMD Radeon HD 6750M video card in it went out years ago so I hacked it to use the CPU’s integrated graphics full-time – which is sketchy with modern video compression. It’s also big, heavy, and with the second generation i7 in it, runs pretty warm…
So, the other day I retired it and picked up a refurbished “Early 2020″ 13” MacBook Air at Microcenter for $450. It’s an education version of the last Intel laptop Apple made, with a tenth generation i3, 8gigs, and a puny 128G SSD in it… But it still runs better than my 2011, has a better screen and sound, and even runs the latest version of MacOS.
So, yet another Mac to add to the list.
Listening to "Los Angeles" by The Midnight