Is this when I make my move to Linux?

I’ve written about my intention to move away from the Apple ecosystem this year as I continue to break my reliance on big tech oligarchies and billionaire tech bros. I’ve started the process by replacing my Apple Watch with my old Pebble Time Steel, which is still more than functional now that Pebble is back in business. When October rolls around, I plan to replace my iPhone 15 Pro with a Google Pixel phone running GrapheneOS and may even go so far as to replace my iPad Mini 6 with a Pixel tablet, also running GrapheneOS.

That leaves my iMac desktop computer and my MacBook Pro laptop, both of which are getting old to begin with. The iMac is one of the last Intel processor Macs made before the move to Apple Silicon in 2020, while the MacBook Pro is one of the first running an Apple Silicon chip, the M1. The iMac is officially out of support as it is unable to upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe, so it no longer receives security and OS updates from Apple. As it is an Intel Mac, I’m looking at the possibility of installing and running Linux on it as the primary, if not only, operating system.

This past week, however, I discovered an issue large enough where I may need to replace my MacBook. After updating to the latest version of MacOS Tahoe, 26.3, my 1 TB SanDisk external SSD drive no longer will mount on the MacBook Pro. When I initially connected the SanDisk to the MacBook, I did get a prompt asking if I wanted to allow access to the device, which I did, but the drive doesn’t appear in the Finder, doesn’t show up in Disk Utility, and, as far as I can tell, it’s not even listed when I run diskutil in Terminal. The drive does show up on all of my other devices, even my iPhone, when connected. I’ve tried different USB-C cables, reformatted the drive, and I just wiped and reloaded the MacBook. None of these steps have resolved the issue.

It turns out the issue may be with Tahoe itself, with no resolution currently in site. This article from AppleInsider, written two weeks ago, reports:

A number of users have taken to online support forums and social media to try and get help with an external drive issue in macOS Tahoe 26.3. Affected users are finding that external drives are not mounting properly, despite previously working fine.

The AppleInsider editorial team has also encountered the issue, with some seeing problems predominantly with SSDs. In our videographer’s case, the drives he uses daily fail to work properly at mount at times, with read and write speeds sometimes going down to a few megabytes per second, and forcing reboots.

Other accounts we’ve seen are more severe failures. The drives just fail to mount entirely.

That last sentence is exactly what I’m experiencing.

I use my MacBook Pro for photo editing, work, writing on this blog, and just about everything else the average user does with a computer. The photo editing is important in this case as I use my external drive to store my recent photos locally for editing, with a network copy and Time Machine as my local backups and an online copy on both BackBlaze and SmugMug for my offsite backups. I also back up to the SanDisk when I work with data on the MacBook while away from home. The inability to do so is a significant problem when it comes to ensuring I won’t lose my data.

I think I’m going to look at the used ThinkPads at my local computer shop this weekend.