Today, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit CloudReady on my Macbook 4,1. I created the USB using a tool in Linux called dd. It took some time, but it worked. I took out an old hard drive, that I originally got from the Macbook itself, and put it in the computer. CloudReady discontinued dual booting in 2018, so I couldn't dual boot it with OS X Mountain Lion.
I booted into the hard drive, so I could see what was on it before I wiped it. It turns out that there was macOS Catalina 10.15.3 on there. I checked out what was on there, and it was just a bunch of hackintosh kexts and such, some dmgs of programs I installed, and some of my music library. I figured that the Catalina partition wasn't very important, so I decided to go through with my install of CloudReady.
I booted into the USB, which took a while, but I wasn't there to see how long it took as I had other matters to attend to. It booted fine and I connected to my WiFi before installing. I installed the OS, which took a bit of time, and booted into the hard drive. It first showed a flashing folder with a question mark in the middle, but it went to the CloudReady logo a bit after that.
It booted into the setup screen, and I set up my Google account and connected to WiFi. One of the things I noticed in the setup was that the touchpad sensitivity was very high. When I finished the setup, I went into the settings and changed it to the slowest option so it was actually usable. After that, I went into the Chrome browser and accepted some permissions for extensions, since I use Brave and not Chrome anymore, I had to accept them.
The next problem I noticed was that the WiFi kept going out after ten or so minutes of use. I knew about the problem because I used Linux on the machine before (maybe another post soon about that experience) but I couldn't do anything about it since CloudReady did not have an option to switch to a proprietary driver.
The final straw and what drove me to put my Mountain Lion hard drive back into the laptop was the Macbook kept on getting super hot. CloudReady would not ramp up the fans like it should, so it kept on getting extremely hot. I didn't like this, as when I am in a classroom, I don't want my fans spinning up super loudly because the OS can't handle cooling very well.
Although I had a fairly negative experience, I noticed some of the stuff was fixed that was an issue in a Previous release of CloudReady. The headphone jack no longer lit up red, which was really good because I don't want a distracting red light in my headphone jack when I take the Macbook places. Suspend was working properly, which is good. I figured out that you can use a PIN in Chrome OS, which is super convenient because I have a long password.
Overall, I would not recommend CloudReady for anyone using a Macbook 4,1 or older in 2020. The experience is not very good, and CloudReady's certification for the machine ended a couple of months ago. If you want a more modern operating system, I would recommend Mountain Lion, as that is what runs best on these old machines. You can use Firefox Legacy and some other software, which I discuss in my other article about Mountain Lion in 2020. That is all for now, thank you for reading.
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