Real bummer but no one was able to figure out what was going on with my 2015 13” MacBook Pro. I suspect it was the I/O board because using the trackpad would cause the WIFI to drop intermittently.

Rather than shell out the ~$500 to have the MacBook fixed I am trading it in for $650. Hopefully I get that much. I’m really ambivalent about not getting it fixed. I don’t think Apple makes anything as good/useful as this MacBook.

In the meantime, I am using the iPad Pro as my primary device and it is absolutely useable for 95% of things. That said, I really miss being able to ‘cat’ files from my terminal window. I do a bit of Medicare billing and electronically submitting claims results in a lot of text and XML files being dumped to show the status of submitted claims.

This AM I downloaded some of those status files and still can not figure out how to read them. iOS won’t open the files (even though they’re just plain text) and I have no shell I can drop to so that I can interrogate those files. I need to find a tool to allow me to look at arbitrary non-binary file contents.

Anyway, I expect that I will use my MacBook trade-in credit to buy another machine in the coming months and have been looking at the iMac, Mac Mini and holding my breath that by the time I’m fed up with the iPad and ready to pull the trigger on new hardware Apple will have figured out how to make a useful MacBook Pro.