Bringing back vintage Macbooks

[Silent Alarm]

Gidday,

so I've been using an old Macbook Pro for about eight years. It's a late 2010 model. Been through a little bit of high school, five years of uni, countless plane trips. As a result it's got a big crack on the screen, the screen axis is all floppy, but most notably the internals are slowwwwwww.

The old hard drive is just backed up full of all sorts of crap, but the issue is it's now so slow I can barely navigate it and delete everything.

The only thing I've ever changed is the battery about twice, the charger half a dozen times. No cosmetic alterations, and most importantly no hard-drive upgrades.

The ol' things done me beautifully.

Anyway, I recently picked up an old Macbook. In perfect nick; no scratches, perfect screen, nice keyboard, and from what I've searched online it is a better processor. It is from around the same era as my Pro, though.

Has anyone ever made an old Mac work well again? All I want to use it for is some internet browsing, the odd resume, and some Spotify or TV streaming. Pretty basic operations. I just need things to run pretty smoothly, basically.

The one thing I've seen is replacing the old optical drive with an SSD. Is this a good idea? Anyone done it? Any similar fixes? Cheers.

 

[SunGirl89]

To check/compare specs, go to https://everymac.com/.

SSD for optical drive is a good idea. MacFixit are good for help and advice: https://www.macfixit.com.au/

 

[ZEV]

I replaced the HD in my early 2011 MacBook Pro with a cheap Crucial SSD and upgraded from 4 gig ram to 16 gig. Like you, I've used it since new for work and it's travelled the world with me and right now it performs beautifully. The GPU is pretty outdated and probably won't handle 5k editing duties but I mainly use it for work i.e. emails, word, excel and it manages to run MYOB on Windows 7 through Parrallels perfectly. I also replaced the optical drive with an extra storage samsung eve 1tb ssd that was floating around.

The only real couple of drawbacks are that now Apple have basically forced it into obsolescence, OS Mojave will not run on a lot older machines. However the old MBP saved my bacon again because i use Microsoft Silverlight extension daily and its not supported on Mojave so yay.

Also the GPU failed in a lot of MBPs from this era so be mindful of that.

But on a day to day basis, (Final Cut Pro X excluded) the early 2011 MBP 13" with upgraded SSD and ram outperforms the top spec'd 2017 MBP 15" I intended to replace it with. Only thing I would do differently is go for the best SSD I could initially and only upgrade to 8 gig ram (16 drains the battery too fast).

Key point though is the SSD makes it way faster and better than when it was brand new.

 

[Gigantic]

I replaced my MacBook Pro's (early 2011) HDD with an SSD (Samsung EVO 250gb SSD) and it effectively gave it a new life.

I've had it for 8 years now and it's still going well. Only thing playing up is the trackpad, which is a bit stiff when clicking, but for a laptop that has gone through 8 years of every day use, that's pretty solid.

A SSD will definitely help and you'll notice a tremendous improvement in performance.

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

I just updated both my daughters to 2 in 1 Dells and sold both of their mid 2012 MBP. They both still worked beautifully. I upgraded them both to Mojave before selling, I believe they were about the oldest model that could run Mojave.

I got more money than what I paid for them which was a bonus.

 

[GAsnr]

Gidday,

so I've been using an old Macbook Pro for about eight years. It's a late 2010 model. Been through a little bit of high school, five years of uni, countless plane trips. As a result it's got a big crack on the screen, the screen axis is all floppy, but most notably the internals are slowwwwwww.

The old hard drive is just backed up full of all sorts of crap, but the issue is it's now so slow I can barely navigate it and delete everything.

The only thing I've ever changed is the battery about twice, the charger half a dozen times. No cosmetic alterations, and most importantly no hard-drive upgrades.

The ol' things done me beautifully.

Anyway, I recently picked up an old Macbook. In perfect nick; no scratches, perfect screen, nice keyboard, and from what I've searched online it is a better processor. It is from around the same era as my Pro, though.

Has anyone ever made an old Mac work well again? All I want to use it for is some internet browsing, the odd resume, and some Spotify or TV streaming. Pretty basic operations. I just need things to run pretty smoothly, basically.

The one thing I've seen is replacing the old optical drive with an SSD. Is this a good idea? Anyone done it? Any similar fixes? Cheers.

I've replaced the optical drive with SSD on my mid 2012 model.

Works a treat. And quite easy to do as well.

 

[Silent Alarm]

Yeah I got a new SSD, it ended up being smaller than the old one but I kept a lot of my old stuff on the other. Doesn't work perfectly, but it works really well. My old Macbook pro from the same era (2011) had lost a few hinges so the screen was flopping, and it just looked used and worn (then again it'd probably been used for six hours minimum a day for nearly ten years).

Rocking the old OG white Macbook at the moment, which is pretty cool – but the best thing is keeping the wolves at the door for another few years.