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My MBP Retina journey (2012 & 2015 gen)
- Thread starter vorob
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you could get a cover to hide those stickers but that will hide the apple logo thoDespite your advice against it, I still went ahead and bought myself a Touch Bar model of the 2018 MacBook Pro. It has an i7 2.2GHz 6-core processor, AMD 555X with 4GB, and 256GB of storage. If it turns out to be fine, then I'll sell my 2015 model.
The device is still on its way to me, but it should be without issues, everything works, and the keyboard is clean. The only problem is the sticker marks, which is a bit of a challenge since they've been exposed to sunlight. I might try placing it under direct sunlight to see if it helps.
I managed to quickly find another lot and bought it, now I own a 2018 MacBook Pro 15. It came without an operating system, which turned out to be quite a hassle. The Internet restore feature only downloads the factory operating system, which is High Sierra. However, I encountered an error when trying to install it.
I researched the issue online and discovered that you need to fix the date via terminal to proceed with the installation. “Nice” and “friendly” work, Apple.
Anyway my goal was to install macOS Sonoma on the MacBook. Unfortunately, you can't create an installer officially on an older MacBook. To do this, I would need the macOS Sonoma app file, which can be converted into a bootable USB flash drive using terminal commands. However, I couldn't find the macOS Sonoma app file anywhere on the Internet—only in pkg format. My MacBook, being unsupported, wouldn’t allow me to unpack Sonoma pkg 🥴
To work around this, I created a Monterey installer since that's the latest operating system I can install on my 2015 MacBook. Now, I'm going to use this installer to set up the operating system on the 2018 MacBook.
I researched the issue online and discovered that you need to fix the date via terminal to proceed with the installation. “Nice” and “friendly” work, Apple.
Anyway my goal was to install macOS Sonoma on the MacBook. Unfortunately, you can't create an installer officially on an older MacBook. To do this, I would need the macOS Sonoma app file, which can be converted into a bootable USB flash drive using terminal commands. However, I couldn't find the macOS Sonoma app file anywhere on the Internet—only in pkg format. My MacBook, being unsupported, wouldn’t allow me to unpack Sonoma pkg 🥴
To work around this, I created a Monterey installer since that's the latest operating system I can install on my 2015 MacBook. Now, I'm going to use this installer to set up the operating system on the 2018 MacBook.
Installing a clean macOS was even harder than I thought! The previous owner had deleted everything from the SSD, and I couldn't use an external drive to install Monterey since I needed to authorize the drive. However, there was no admin account available, which is required for this authorization. Although I found some advice online, it was ultimately easier to install the base OS (High Sierra), which recreated everything I needed. But I couldn't install High Sierra because it requested some HTTPS files. To solve this, I altered the NVRAM data to use a non-HTTPS link. With that, I was able to install High Sierra, enable the external boot device, and then install Monterey on my machine.
