Despite a general lack of real-world experience, many teenagers are overly confident in their opinions, often to the point of brashness and arrogance. In the late 90s and early 00s I was no different, firmly entrenched in a clichéd belief that Apple computers weren’t worth the silicon they were etched onto—even though I’d never actually used one. Eventually, thanks to a very good friend in college, a bit of Linux knowledge, and Apple’s switch to Intel processors, I finally abandoned this one irrational belief. Now, I maintain an array of Apple laptops for my own personal use that are not only surprisingly repairable and hacker-friendly but also serve as excellent, inexpensive Linux machines.
Of course, I will have ruffled a few feathers suggesting Apple laptops are repairable and inexpensive. This is certainly not true of their phones or their newer computers, but there was a time before 2016 when Apple built some impressively high quality, robust laptops that use standard parts, have removable batteries, and, thanks to Apple dropping support for these older machines in their latest operating systems, can also be found for sale for next to nothing. In a way that’s similar to buying a luxury car that’s only a few years old and letting someone else eat the bulk of the depreciation, a high quality laptop from this era is only one Linux install away from being a usable and relatively powerful machine at an excellent bargain.
The History Lesson
To be fair to my teenage self though, Apple used to use less-mainstream PowerPC processors which meant there was very little software cross-compatibility with x86 PCs. It was also an era before broadband meant that most people could move their work into cloud and the browser, allowing them to be more agnostic about their operating system. Using an Apple when I was a teenager was therefore a much different experience than it is today. My first Apple was from this PowerPC era though; my ThinkPad T43 broke mid-way through college and a friend of mine gave me an old PowerBook G4 that had stopped working for her. Rather than have no computer at all, I swallowed my pride and was able to get the laptop working well enough to finish college with it. Part of the reason this repair was even possible was thanks to a major hacker-friendly aspect of Apple computers: they run Unix. (Note for commenters: technically Apple’s OS is Unix-like but they have carried a UNIX certification since 2007.)
I had used Unix somewhat in Solaris-based labs in college but, as I mentioned in a piece about installing Gentoo on one of my MacBooks, I was also getting pretty deep into the Linux world at the time as well. Linux was also designed to be Unix-like, so most of the basic commands and tools available for it have nearly one-to-one analogs in Unix. The PowerBook’s main problem, along with a battery that needed a warranty replacement, was a corrupted filesystem and disk drive that I was able to repair using my new Linux knowledge. This realization marked a major turning point for me which helped tear down most of my biases against Apple computers.
Over the next few years or so I grew quite fond of the PowerBook, partially because I liked its 12″, netbook-like form factor and also because the operating system never seemed to crash. As a Linux user, my system crashes were mostly self-inflicted, but they did happen. As a former Windows user as well, the fact that it wouldn’t randomly bluescreen itself through no fault of my own was quite a revelation. Apple was a few years into their Intel years at this point as well, and seeing how easily these computers did things my PowerBook could never do, including running Windows, I saved up enough money to buy my first MacBook Pro, a mid-2009 model which I still use to this day. Since then I’ve acquired four other Apple laptops, most of which run Linux or a patched version of macOS that lets older, unsupported machines run modern versions of Apple’s operating system.
So if you’ve slogged through my coming-of-age story and are still curious about picking up an old Mac for whatever reason—a friend or family member has one gathering dust, you’re tired of looking at the bland styling of older ThinkPads while simultaneously growing frustrated with the declining quality of their newer ones, or just want to go against the grain a bit and do something different—I’ll try and help by sharing some tips and guidelines I’ve picked up through the years.
What to Avoid
Starting with broad categories of older Apple laptops to avoid, the first major red flag are any with the butterfly keyboard that Apple put on various laptops from 2015 to 2019 which were so bad that a number of lawsuits were filed against them. Apple eventually relented and instituted a replacement program for them, but it’s since expired and can cost hundreds of dollars to fix otherwise. The second red flag are models with the T2 security chips. It’s not a complete dealbreaker but does add a lot of hassle if the end goal is a working Linux machine.
Additionally, pay close attention to any laptops with discrete graphics cards. Some older MacBooks have Nvidia graphics, which is almost always going to provide a below-average experience for a Linux user especially for Apple laptops of this vintage. Others have AMD graphics which do have better Linux support, but there were severe problems with the 15″ and 17″ Mac around the 2011 models. Discrete graphics is not something to avoid completely like laptops with butterfly keyboards, but it’s worth investigating the specific model year for problems if a graphics card is included. A final note is to be aware of “Staingate” which is a problem which impacted some Retina displays between 2012 and 2015. This of course is not an exhaustive list, but covers the major difficult-to-solve problems for this era of Apple laptop.
What to Look For
As for what specific computers are the best from this era for a bit of refurbishment and use, in my opinion the best mix of performance, hackability, and Linux-ability will be from the 2009-2012 Unibody era. These machines come in all sizes and are surprisingly upgradable, with standard SODIMM slots for RAM, 2.5″ laptop drives, an optical drive (which can be changed out for a second hard drive), easily replaceable batteries if you can unscrew the back cover, and plenty of ports. Some older models from this era have Core 2 Duo processors and should be avoided if you have the choice, but there are plenty of others from this era with much more powerful Core i5 or Core i7 processors.
After 2012, though, Apple started making some less-desirable changes for those looking to maintain their computers long-term, like switching to a proprietary M.2-like port for their storage and adding in soldered or otherwise non-upgradable RAM, but these machines can still be worthwhile as many had Core i7 processors and at least 8 GB of RAM and can still run Linux and even modern macOS versions quite capably. The batteries can still be replaced without too much hassle as well.
Of course, a major problem with these computers is that they all have processors that have the Intel Management Engine coprocessor installed, so they’re not the most privacy-oriented machines in existence even if Linux is the chosen operating system. It’s worth noting, though, that some MacBooks from before the unibody era can run the open-source bootloader Libreboot but the tradeoff, as with any system capable of running Libreboot, is that they’re a bit limited in performance even compared to the computers from just a few years later.
Out of the five laptops I own, four are from the pre-butterfly era including my two favorites. Topping the list is a mid-2012 13″ MacBook Pro with Intel graphics that’s a beast of a Debian machine thanks to upgrades to a solid state drive and to 16 GB of RAM. It also has one of the best-feeling laptop keyboards I’ve ever used to write with, and is also the computer I used to experiment with Gentoo.
Second place goes to a 2015 11″ MacBook Air which is a netbook-style Apple that I like for its exceptional portability even though it’s not as upgradable as I might otherwise like. It will have 4 GB of RAM forever, but this is not much of a problem for Debian. I also still have my 2009 MacBook Pro as well, which runs macOS Sonoma thanks to OpenCore Legacy Patcher. This computer’s major weakness is that it has an Nvidia graphics card so it isn’t as good of a Linux machine as the others, and occasionally locks up when running Debian for this reason. But it also has been upgraded with an SSD and 8 GB of RAM so Sonoma still runs pretty well on it despite its age. Sequoia, on the other hand, dropped support for dual-core machines so I’m not sure what I will do with it after Sonoma is no longer supported.
My newest Apple laptop is an M1 MacBook Air, which I was excited about when it launched because I’m a huge fan of ARM-based personal computers for more reasons than one. Although the M1 does have essentially no user-repairability unless you want to go to extremes, I have some hope that this will last me as long as my MacBook Pros have thanks to a complete lack of moving parts and also because of Asahi Linux, a version of Fedora which is built for Apple silicon. Whenever Apple stops providing security patches for this machine, I plan to switch it over to this specialized Linux distribution.
Why Bother?
But why spend all this effort keeping these old machines running at all? If repairability is a major concern, laptops from companies like System76 or Framework are arguably a much better option. Not to mention that, at least according to the best Internet commenters out there, Apple computers aren’t supposed to be fixable, repairable, or upgradable at all. They’re supposed to slowly die as upgrades force them to be less useful.
While this is certainly true for their phones and their more modern machines to some extent, part of the reason I keep these older machines running is to go against the grain and do something different, like a classic car enthusiast who picks a 70s era Volkswagen to drive to and from the office every day instead of a modern Lexus. It’s also because at times I still feel a bit like that teenager I was. While I might be a little wiser now from some life experiences, I believe some amount of teenage rebellion can be put to use stubbornly refusing to buy the latest products year after year from a trillion-dollar company which has become synonymous with planned obsolescence. Take that, Apple!
Opinions. Yes, you are entitled to yours. My opinion is that the last Apple computer that was “good” (according to my own, highly subjective metrics), was the Apple II.
I actually have an Apple ][ with two floppy drives, but the user experience with it is so inferior to, say, a Commodore 64 that I haven’t taken it out of its box in 15 years. I much prefer a Mac SE from less than a decade later. Sometimes I long for the simple pleasures of using ResEdit to find where in a code resource the logic is for “registration was successful”
I was always impressed by the Apple of Yore, where they produced things like the Apple II for something like 17 years straight. Meanwhile some machines they make now are dropped from official support after 3-4 years despite being perfectly usable just so they can sell more machines. Line must go up.
That being said, I do need my computers to be able to easily connect to Wi-Fi, run a modern browser so I can write Hackaday articles, and be relatively portable for on-the-go writing as well; this generally limits my choices to laptops from at least 2007. Might be a fun challenge to do all that with an Apple II emulator on something more portable than original hardware though.
I upgraded a loaded 15″ 16GB 2013-ish Macbook Pro with SSD and it was great, then I had Linux on it, and for mysterious reasons, it would drain the battery when off, draining the battery below the point of rechargeability. Never could solve this, and because I wasn’t using it often, it was costing $40 a pop on batteries, I abandoned it. It’s a shame, there’s not a mark on the machine.
Not likely due to linux:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255586681?sortBy=rank
Shoulda fixed it brah! Go with Christ.
Hi, I have a MacBook air 13 2015 that I need to repair. Where could I buy the parts(resistor, transistors etc) for the logic board repair?
i relate to a lot of this article but for pragmatic reasons i’ve gone in rather the opposite direction.
in the 90s i was not any more impressed by closed proprietary bloated macos than i was by closed proprietary bloated windows. but by the end of the 90s, OS X was coming along and changing all that. and then i only objected to the price. but in 2002 i finally had money of my own and i bought a brand new ‘ultrabook’ style PC laptop, made just before intel started pushing that ‘ultrabook’ word on us. you know, a thin and light 12″ laptop. and it was complete garbage…it generated a ton of heat and some bugs in the factory ACPI settings meant it never ran its fan heavy enough to keep up. i eventually hacked it to run its fan at 100% all the time but it still just absolutely sucked. it cooked its battery so thoroughly that even after a year it was already down to a half hour of battery life.
so i came out of that experience and in 2004 i bought a powerpc ibook. the funny thing is, it cost less than the PC ultrabooks at the time! and it was better in every way. just the most basic step of not releasing the product until they had debugged the cooling system was a giant leap in user experience. its battery life was much better. there were a handful of nuissances with OS X that bothered me until the day i retired it in 2010, but by enlarge OS X was very usable for me. my whole life is browser, PDF viewer, and terminal. and that trio works just as well under OS X as anywhere. rootless X11 was pretty seamless, and the few times i used proprietary interfaces like CoreAudio i found them both documented and reasonable.
in 2010 i bought another PC ultrabook and this one was much more tolerable but again it was as expensive as the mac, and it was too hot, and it had an awful keyboard (lenovo was a few years ahead of mac in adopting butterfly keyboards, i guess). a couple years later i bought a chromebook for 20% of the price and since then i have been extremely happy at the very bottom of the laptop market. today, a celeron n4000 laptop.
and that’s why i’m not interested in old laptops. i’ve got a 4 year old almost-dead battery in this thing (it ate the replacement battery and i’m back to the original one, sigh) and even so i get 12 hour battery life. i’ve “upgraded” to 14″ and it’s still less than 3lbs. it’s a bog-standard PC with UEFI so i barely struggled at all to get linux onto it. and i’m buying laptops that cost less than $200, and they largely last me about 5 years. i’ve had great luck getting replacement parts (keyboards and batteries) or whole spare parts-tops.
used laptops are absurdly cheap and still quite powerful but when i’m looking at new laptops under $200, ‘absurdly cheap’ doesn’t stand out. and you suffer the same running a web browser locally, whether you have a used high-end laptop or a new low-end laptop. and battery life has really improved a lot across the board in the last decade.
i think a big part of the difference between me and OP is that i can’t imagine having multiple laptops on purpose. i have my daily driver, and then i have a pile of laptops i’ve discarded from that role. one of the old laptops sits on the workbench and the rest of them have been used as loaners when the daily driver breaks. currently the loaner pile is all broken though, and my daily driver is almost worn out enough to consider replacing it.
the biggest thing that bums me out about this whole process is a lot of things have flaws from day 1, and buying a new one just gives you a new set of day 1 flaws. it doesn’t really resolve anything. i do replace things from accumulated damage like i’d like to but sometimes it’s the fundamental design flaws that really motivate the replacement. and that’s a bummer. in that context, it might be nice to switch to apple and only have accumulated damage instead of a pile of day 1 flaws. but an apple old enough to be cheap might have a lot of accumulated damage…
a quick search shows the 2015 macbook air is at an attractive price point and has a replaceable battery but has the day 1 flaw of a fan. in a thin and light laptop? what is this, the 1990s? apple quality is a mythology, man. i gave up fans on laptops in 2012 with my first chromebook.
I kinda agree with your comment, even though I don’t have much experience with Apple stuff.
Enterprise-grade laptops are expensive when new, but are well built, often have good quality service-manuals, have plenty of spare parts for upgrades/repairs (including batteries), and are common enough to have good Linux support. This makes them very durable.
On the other side, I often had to service or use consumer-grade laptops. They’re IMO a lot worse when it comes to maintenance and durability, with questionable design choices (cooling, wifi chips, low number of connectors), no manual and poor quality parts (glossy displays, keyboard, brittle plastic clamshells, 5.4krpm HDDs, only 3rd party replacement batteries). They’re usually worn-out and discarded after ~5 years.
It took me months looking for something durable enough, with decent upgrade abilities, acceptable performance, good Linux support and cost-effective.
So the Dell Latitude I bought brand new 14 years ago is eventually getting replaced with a used Lenovo Thinkpad + upgrades.
Regarding the multiple laptops, with the exception of the 11″ Air that I bought used recently because I like the netbook form-factor so much and the 13″ Pro I bought new in 2012, all the other laptops were either given or are currently being used by family members. But it is nice to have a few extra machines around for non-laptop, portable-adjacent tasks. For example, I ran the 2012 MBP as a media center for a few years where it just sat in the basement hooked up to an HDMI cable that ran through a wall to a TV.
I really like a mid-2012 MacBook Pro I have that is running High Sierra. (It can run maybe two or three versions more recent than that, but who cares?). I tricked it out with a 240 GB SSD and 16 GB of RAM. Eventually the lack of updates is going to make the web unusable on it, and I’ll have to install Linux. But for now it is fine as is. That machined aluminum feels really nice, and it even has a working DVD burner that I will never use.
An underappreciated advantage of old laptops that no longer receive Chrome updates is that uBlock Origin will always work on them. A slightly-vulnerable-to-buffer-overflow laptop with uBlock Origin is worth a lot more to me than a laptop cluttered with scammy ads because I can run a good ad blocker.
*can’t run
Brave browser (which is based) on Chrome has ad blocking built in!
closing bracket in the wrong place :(
“Linux was also designed to be Unix-like” . Ahem ? Like-but-not ? Why is Linux only Unix-like and not a Unix ?
linux basically started as a kernel to go with GNU tools, and GNU stands for GNU’s Not Unix.
seems pretty academic to me but generally things that actually exist these days are almost always referred to as unix-like. not sure who in this world today feels like they own the right to call their product ‘unix’.
The literal owner of the trademark has the right to call their product Unix, and to hand out (or sell) permission.
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/Brandfees.htm
Linux as a whole never got Unix certification as they never found a value in it, though a couple specific distributions got the certification.
Because this …. https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
Basically to be called UNIX it must be certified.
And this …. https://posix.opengroup.org/ which is different but …
In The Old Days(tm), AT&T owned the trademark “Unix”. You couldn’t type those four letters together as a single word without paying them a licensing fee. Hence, lots of different names popped up to indicate Unixyness but without containing the four letters that must not be typed into a single standalone word. Ultrix, HP/UX, DG/UX, Irix, AIX, AUX, DC/OSx, Venix, Xenix, and scores of others. If the name ended in X, it was Unix without the trademark.
Hence, Linux, Minix… all trademark avoidance.
Mac OSX? Officially the X was the roman numeral for ten, and it was the version and Mac OS9, so… but yeah, it ran Carnegie Mellon’s Mach 3 with a BSD compatibility layer.
The (US) Federal Government needed a way to say “we need to buy a Unix machine” without specifying a particular trademark, so deep down in the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) the term “POSIX” was coined. This specified a pretty decent set of Unix-like features. If you bought a “POSIX-compliant” machine then you were getting something close enough to the other Unixes that life wouldn’t be too bad.
Fun fact: Windows NT’s deep-down interface was an operating system with more than a passing resemblance to DEC’s VMS. When you write a device driver, the functions that begin with “_nt” are the actual kernel calls. There have been different “personality layers” above that over the years. The Win32 subsystem is famous, but there was also one to run console-mode OS/2 applications and one to run POSIX applications (Microsoft Interix was the last, but there were others – note the trailing X in the name!). Interix sort of worked, barely, much of the time. I have no idea how WSL1 fits into this – let me know. Once Microsoft did this, they could sell NT even to bid specs that wanted POSIX, and everything went to crap.
I used to do a LOT of porting. As long as you remembered that Ultrix and SunOS were BSD derivatives and basically all the others were System V based then you wouldn’t find TOO many gotchas at the application-developer level. Best of luck if you had to deal with things at the kernel level, but that was very rare for me.
After a long succession of buyouts and bankruptcies, it looks like The Open Group owns the Unix trademark and Xinios (???) is somehow connected to the historical codebase through some chain of bankrupcy sales and who-knows-what machinations that left them with the wreckage of SCO Xenix. Not that anyone cares now, honestly – everything that “matters/you can make a living at” is Linux (begat Android), Windows, or MacOSX (begat iOS), at least deep down.
It really irks me that practically all of the world’s surviving OSes were written before 1977. Yes, I know there are exceptions – VxWorks, MVS, but these are tiny niches.
Why bother? Because you get a decent, cheap laptop for just a little work… I’m typing this on a 2011 Macbook Pro that’s running Mint. It boots and runs as quickly as my 2YO council-issue (i.e. low spec) Dell, and cost just £50. Even after I’d doubled the RAM to 16Gb with 2nd hand memory, bought a charger and fitted a used SSD I had lying around I still had change from £100. Battery is at 50% capacity, which is more than enough for my usage patterns.
The machine I had before this was a HP 250G5, bought new for nearly £600, which turned out to be a total and utter crock which fell to bits before my eyes in less than five years. By the tiem it died – motherboard failure – the screen/lid was only held on with gaffa tape, as the hinges had simply collapsed. No chance of anything like that happening to this altogether better made Apple product, housed in it’s nice aluminium case. I hope to get another two or three years out of this machine before I start looking for a newer one to do the same thing with.
This isn’t accurate; even the officially supported early 2020 MacBook Air is dual core. OCLP should support Sequoia on all your Intel machines, with the usual bugs and caveats.
Nice article otherwise. I love to see appreciation for the mid-2010s MacBook Airs, particularly the wonderful 11″ model I’m using to read this 😋 They’re a joy to work on, aside from the soldered RAM, and nice to practice board-level repairs as well since the schematics are readily available and common issues well-documented. They can also take standard NVMe SSDs with a cheap third-party adapter card.
Yes I stand corrected. I’ll have to give it another shot; I did install Sequoia on my 2012 MBP with the i7 processor and the performance was pretty poor despite the number of cores, so I’m not expecting much out of the 2009 MBP with the Core 2 Duo. Sonoma does run pretty well on both of them comparatively, although the 2009 is perhaps unsurprisingly less good at running even that version. At least I have a year and a half to figure it out before Apple drops support though!
It was long before 2016 since Apple laptops used standard parts. More like Mid 2012.
I have a Macbook Pro 11,3 (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) which runs Linux beautifully, but it was top of the line when new so the spec is still quite decent – i7 cpu, 16GB ram, 1TB PCIe ssd (not decent enough for Apple of course, who dropped support for it in 2021 with macOS 12 Monterey).
The only things replaceable in that model are the ssd (requires a M.2 -> Apple adapter card) and the battery (which is glued down so hard that it took me hours to get the old swollen one out using very careful application of adhesive remover from an iFixit kit).
It has NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M graphics which work fine with the open source Nouveau driver + X11, but you can use the Intel igpu instead for less heat and power (requires some EFI boot hackery because Apple’s firmware disables the igpu if it doesn’t detect macOS – see https://github.com/0xbb/gpu-switch#macbook-pro-113-and-115-notes ).
I’d never actually buy a Macbook for the purpose of running Linux, you’d be far better off with a used Thinkpad T-series or something like that which is fully upgradeable and probably cheaper.
free tip, probably worth as much as the paper it’s printed on :)
bloated batteries don’t need to be removed carefully. drain them first!! (two exclamation points, for safety) and then just boldly pry that sucker off and accept that you’ll probably tear the envelope
hahah half the reason i’m posting this is to get someone to tell me why i shouldn’t do that but i just know it’s how it’s done all over
I’m chip agnostic and an actual fan of PowerPC but I miss the Intel Interregnum. Had work done on the house and the workmen stole a bunch of stuff as one does: three laptops incl. one white plastic Mac, a Toshiba and a Chromebook but left the MacBook Pro and Mini Server. Go figure.
I’m a fan of keeping old laptops alive when they have an interesting design. Something like a Sony Vaio P with its ultrawide display or in modern times an Asus Zenbook Duo or a Lenovo Yoga Book 9i. Everything else is commodity graded on usability. Since Apple decided the front edge of the wrist rest should be sharp and that they’d shun touchscreens more than a decade after the Microsoft Surface they’ve fallen pretty low on my commodity preference list.
Good read. I own quite a few Apple computers as well including a couple of Macbooks and the older they are, the better. Although if you want to run macOS, having a Metal capable machine is great.
In 2023 I got a 2013 MBP for really cheap and it still works really well as a backup machine for messing around. Running macOS Sequoia is good enough on it with OCLP. But where it really shines is indeed Linux!
I don’t see the appeal of old MacBooks over old Windows Laptops. You can get much more recent hardware for less than what a comparable MacBook would costs. Installing Linux is usually a breeze on those and replacement batteries are mostly available. If you want cheaper and are willing get your hands dirty convert a Chromebook to Linux (https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/supported-devices.html#device-listing). Used Alderlake-U Chromebooks with 16GB RAM and an 512GB NVME SSD can go for 250-300€ here.
I could not care less what my laptop looks like. I ran Tecras for about a dozen years and then switched to Ts. Aside from batteries giving up after a long while (replaceable in a few seconds) I never had a problem. I ran a Tecra and then a T43 as servers by placing them bottom-side-up on top of a bookcase for years and years without ever seeing them and rarely thinking about them. I admit that in 1995 I bought a brand new something-or-other branded laptop with Hercules graphics and a 386 with a 287 co-processor because that was the only laptop available at the time that could run Linux and cost less than $2k.
2008 MacBook Pros 17″ were for me, for a few years anyway, the most beautiful laptops ever made, like a piece of perfectly machined aluminum. Engineering-wise, they had serious issues with the power management system.
You see, Steve Jobs didn’t want people carrying around large power bricks for their Macbooks so they engineered this model so that it would sip power off the battery if the power supply could not supply the energy it needed. This led to MANY of these models exhibiting odd behaviors over tim like only powering up on battery and turning off when plugged into power.
Had to keep buying this model after 6 or so months, so went through about 4 machines. Since it’s an issue with the PMU, fixing these is almost not worth the trouble. I still have one that I use occasionally but surprisingly fell in love with Google’s Chromebook Pixel, the original model (sadly 4GB soldered memory) is a gorgeous solid chunk of aluminum, easy to put Linux on.
Later switched to Google PixelBook, solid aluminum ultrathin convertible which decent specs for a Chromebook (16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, i7) and just kept ChromeOS on it because I loved having a system that can run a highly-optimized Chrome browser along with Android and Linux desktop side by side. Fold it into tablet form, it becomes the most powerful ultra-large Android tablet ever seen. Fold it back into laptop mode and use VS Code or KiCad without missing a beat.
Bought a Razer BladePro laptop because it was highly inspired by that 2008 MacBook Pro model I fell in love with but nothing about the laptop felt right to me. It had some stupendous bling, especially when firing up FL Studio which turned the RGB keyboard into a visualizer, but a big chunk of aluminum as a gaming laptop is unpleasant.
In the meantime, I rediscovered my old love or Thinkpads and now using a P52 Xeon which has served me for years and will likely for many more. Best thing is batteries and other accessories are CHEAP!
I, for one love the “bland design” of the thinkpads. And I can’t really say bad things about my X1 Yoga…
I’m using refurbished X Model Thinkpads for ages now, and I never had any real problem with them.
But I’ll have to say: I recently got a 2013 13″ Macbook Pro (512GB SSD, 16GB Ram for 25 bucks) and I really like it. What surprised my the most was how smooth and intuitive the large touchpad works.
In a way that’s similar to buying a luxury car that’s only a few years old, keeping it in shape will rapidly become more difficult and more expensive over time when parts are required. :P
This is funny. Also I don’t know how it works, but I put an SSD in a Nehalem iMac and it booted the Windows 10 that was installed 🤷🏼♂️.
It’s just a Core i5, so I guess it makes sense. Had 20GB of 1066Mt/s RAM in it.
Personal history, as short as I can, plus I’m old and memory maybe not amazing right now.
Way back in jr high we all built our own 386/486 from the motherboard up, and I knew every spec, benchmark, etc. no internet at that time but bought a hand me down 28.8 modem and sorta kinda made it work. Otherwise it was wolfenstein or maybe Descent. Through high school and college we all maintained deep knowledge and periodically upgraded our IBM clones, pentium, etc.
My friends all along had be hacking away on Linux boxes, and at least are now high-level tech officer types.
Through college we all continued modifying and upgrading our own hardware. My friends moved on to actually working in Tech, and I tried and failed several times to build a linux box.
After college, with my first real job, I got sick of constantly upgrading my IBM clones, plus keeping up with compatibilities, windows being constantly enshittified etc plus the real life time demands of a demanding new career and I gave up. I stomached up and paid like $2k for a macbook, just in time for Apple to drop support for PowerPC or whatever and to go to intel based, basically bricking my hardware that cost 10% of my income, a year or two later. Still liked MacOSX etc way more than windows, plus had a mac mini I used for unix/linux software during grad school and have had about 2, maybe 3 mac laptops since. I consider $1-2k every 7 or 8years decent tithe to pay for a basically trouble free user experience. Currently typing this on a macbook air that I can toss in backpack and forget about.
thx
So many caveats and gotchas.
Old Apple gear still carries an apple-tax and is all but useless on top of it, as it no longer runs the latest macos and is far from the ideal platform for linux.
Just get an old thinkpad and be done.
A small correction here: since relatively recently you can actually run libreboot on thinkpads as new as t480 due to a cve in the very manglement engine it, among other stuff, aims to neuter.
However, there’s a catch: the patchsets the port relies on are WIP in the mainline coreboot. Also, t480{,s} are the only new-ish thinkpads currently supported, with some work being done for e470 and e460, although the vulnerability itself works across 6th-8th (skl to kbl-r) gen CPUs, which translates to 60-80 thinkpads.
As an old man, age 67 from the economic chaos country Norway, I stated with computers in about 1985. Present day, as from about 2010 the Thinkpad series have been my tool. Not with Windows, because it’s faulty and hair raising dangerous. So my latest laptop friends are a ThinkPad 14, ThinkPad E490 and a ThinkPad E 14 gen 2. All Intel. E 14 is my daily tool. Installed with Linux Fedora it’s nothing to drag it down. The others – also Linux. And my Brand new Asus CX34 Chromebook Plus does a great job. Mac? MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are both in the closet, hoping for one day to return into daylight. I’ve never purchased a brand new laptop and why should I? Because inside my head I’m still 16 years old who love to dismantle, fix and try everything as possible to get what’s impossible to be possible. Greeting from Norway.
M1 has soldered storage, you’re gonna wear it out.
PCs have gotten worse, buttons are so important for usability… and the PCs do trackpads worse… but some have buttons.
My favorite apple that I have is my powerbook 140 and my 68030 all in one with a cd.