Show off your Early Intel Macs!

[rampancy]

Speaking of 2008 MacBook 4,1s...

The MacBook 4,1 I rescued from the junk pile of a local computer repair shop earlier (part of a bundle of four A1181s he gave me for $40) is almost fully operational now, with a cheapo new battery from Amazon (hopefully it won't start a house fire), a new SuperDrive (from an eBay lot of 10 brand new slot-loading SuperDrives for $40!), maxed out RAM, a fresh dose of AS5, and an SSD.

I originally intended to install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on it, but the SSD (a new 240 GB WD Green) simply refused to work in it. The Ubuntu installer on the Live CD wouldn't see it. My Snow Leopard installer DVD wouldn't see it. But it worked just fine when I put it in an external drive enclosure. This really stumps me, as I have a 240 GB WD Green SSD in one of my MacBook Pro 1,1s and it works just fine.

I noticed that the date of manufacture on the WD Green I just bought was March 2021 - maybe the newer firmware on this drive precludes it from working on laptops with old SATA I connections?

In any case, I wrangled an old OCZ Vertex 3 with an 10.7 install and MacBook's running quite nicely on it. Didn't OCZs SSDs have a reputation for unreliability and premature failure? I'm looking to maybe use dosdude1's patcher to bump this machine up to 10.8 or 10.9, but in the meantime I'm keeping a close eye on the SSD's SMART stats...

 

[eyoungren]

Speaking of 2008 MacBook 4,1s...

The MacBook 4,1 I rescued from the junk pile of a local computer repair shop earlier (part of a bundle of four A1181s he gave me for $40) is almost fully operational now, with a cheapo new battery from Amazon (hopefully it won't start a house fire), a new SuperDrive (from an eBay lot of 10 brand new slot-loading SuperDrives for $40!), maxed out RAM, a fresh dose of AS5, and an SSD.

I originally intended to install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on it, but the SSD (a new 240 GB WD Green) simply refused to work in it. The Ubuntu installer on the Live CD wouldn't see it. My Snow Leopard installer DVD wouldn't see it. But it worked just fine when I put it in an external drive enclosure. This really stumps me, as I have a 240 GB WD Green SSD in one of my MacBook Pro 1,1s and it works just fine.

I noticed that the date of manufacture on the WD Green I just bought was March 2021 - maybe the newer firmware on this drive precludes it from working on laptops with old SATA I connections?

In any case, I wrangled an old OCZ Vertex 3 with an 10.7 install and MacBook's running quite nicely on it. Didn't OCZs SSDs have a reputation for unreliability and premature failure? I'm looking to maybe use dosdude1's patcher to bump this machine up to 10.8 or 10.9, but in the meantime I'm keeping a close eye on the SSD's SMART stats...

I would guess your new SSD is SATA III. The external enclosure negates that particular thing which would be why it's seen when in the case.

 

[rampancy]

I would guess your new SSD is SATA III. The external enclosure negates that particular thing which would be would it's seen when in the case.

But isn't SATA III backwards compatible with SATA I/II? I've got plenty of SATA III SSDs working just fine in the MacBooks in my collection, even my Core Duo-based MacBooks/Pros.

 

[B S Magnet]

But isn't SATA III backwards compatible with SATA I/II? I've got plenty of SATA III SSDs working just fine in the MacBooks in my collection, even my Core Duo-based MacBooks/Pros.

The answer is “it depends on the chip set which the drive (SSD or HDD) is using.”

Some chip sets can auto-negotiate to an earlier SATA standard like SATA I or II, whereas others either do not or else require jumpers to manually tell the chip set to negotiate an earlier SATA standard.

With SSDs in the 2.5-inch form factor, there aren’t many which feature those physical jumpers, so it falls to the drive’s internal chip set. The ones which don’t switch down to SATA I or II are going to have trouble when connected to a SATA I or II bus (such as what’s in many of the earlier Intel Macs and Power Mac G5s).

Unfortunately, it’s kind of annoying, shy of either knowing of a particular SATA III drive which you’ve confirmed does auto-negotiate, buying a new-old stock SATA II or I drive (which may be more spendy-per-GB these days), or going with a generic m.2-to-2.5-inch SATA adapter and using an m.2 SATA NGFF (which generally tend to be designed for broadest compatibility, including on legacy gear). This last option is the one I went with for a SATA I-only 2008 MBP.

 

[originaldotexe]

How did you get a device like that for free?👀

i got it from my uncle, and he got it from one of our family friends who used to play music with my dad and mom. the family friend just didnt need it anymore i guess, so he asked my uncle if he wanted it and my uncle gave it to me since he knows i like that stuff. i also got my 2010 macbook and my daily driver laptop (thinkpad t530) from my uncle, he's pretty good to me

 

[K two]

Steve Jobs-era quality and Tim_Apple-era greed in one screen shot! This old Mini still perfectly useful on the latest Monterey Beta 7 courtesy of OCLP _030.

 

[AL1630]

Steve Jobs-era quality and Tim_Apple-era greed in one screen shot! This old Mini still perfectly useful on the latest Monterey Beta 7 courtesy of OCLP _030.

View attachment 1845165

Love to see old hardware running cutting edge software! Proves time and time again that old machines can do the job just as well as new ones.

 

[Slix]

Steve Jobs-era quality and Tim_Apple-era greed in one screen shot! This old Mini still perfectly useful on the latest Monterey Beta 7 courtesy of OCLP _030.

View attachment 1845165

How smooth is it? I'm running the beta for Monterey on a 2015 iMac with a spinning hard drive at work and it occasionally seems to lock up for a minute while opening apps and such, but other times seems to be fine. And that's an officially supported machine!

 

[K two]

How smooth is it? I'm running the beta for Monterey on a 2015 iMac with a spinning hard drive at work and it occasionally seems to lock up for a minute while opening apps and such, but other times seems to be fine. And that's an officially supported machine!

Ditch the spinning rust and your problems will cease.

 

[Slix]

Ditch the spinning rust and your problems will cease.

I have a feeling it would, but I'm not gonna open this thing up just for that. I think the later betas have gotten a little better, so it could be beta issues too.

 

[K two]

I have a feeling it would, but I'm not gonna open this thing up just for that. I think the later betas have gotten a little better, so it could be beta issues too.

A SSD precludes the write-to-disk delays you are experiencing. The only spinning rust drive left in any of our macs is a SSHDD, basically a mini-Fusion Drive and will be SSD-replaced if SMART shows a decline.

 

[SecretSquirrel]

These are my two recent finds:

Both manufactured in 08, weeks 22 and 39 and have fully working graphics chips. Both were sold for parts so need some work. Lucky I now have a large stock of parts from a previous misadventure!

Fun times ahead!

 

[rampancy]

Congrats on your find! Those two machines look gorgeous - I assume they're later model Macs with the revised GT8600m?

Also, is it just me, or is the keyboard on the first MacBook Pro dented inward?

 

[0423MAC]

Here are some images of my Early 2015 Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro. I've been holding off from buying a new MacBook Pro until they release an M1 mac with more ports. I can't wait to see what they've got in store for us!

I've waited all these months to quote you.

Are you getting the 14" or the 16" model?

 

[SecretSquirrel]

Congrats on your find! Those two machines look gorgeous - I assume they're later model Macs with the revised GT8600m?

Also, is it just me, or is the keyboard on the first MacBook Pro dented inward?

I've no idea. Given the manufacturing dates, I'd guess one is a definite no but the other might be. Will find out when I open them up to re paste. I think it's a trick of the light, it's in very good condition, unlike the second one which really needs it's metalwork changed.

 

[Amethyst1]

I've no idea.

Is there a green dot sticker on the RAM bridge? If so, the GPU is definitely the revised variant.

 

[SecretSquirrel]

Is there a green dot sticker on the RAM bridge? If so, the GPU is definitely the revised variant.

No, no green dots but there's some discussion on another thread which suggests machines manufactured around week 36 may have had the 603 variant from new. I'll let you knew what I find.

 

[SecretSquirrel]

Well, I thought I'd checked both machines @Amethyst1 for the lucky green dot but what did I find when stripping the earlier machine down for re-pasting?

Yes, my wife thinks I need glasses, and she may be right! It still needed re-pasting, there wasn't much compound on the heatsink and what there was, was hard and dry. A nice surprise for a Sunday evening!

 

[tompaulman]

These are my two recent finds:
View attachment 1875857
Both manufactured in 08, weeks 22 and 39 and have fully working graphics chips. Both were sold for parts so need some work. Lucky I now have a large stock of parts from a previous misadventure!

Those aluminium MacBooks (and PowerBooks) are my favorite Apple laptop design ever. I used to own the very first MBP with Core Duo processor until 2015 when it was 9 years old and well outdated. I finished my college studies with it. Good memories. The keyboard is still my favorite laptop keyboard to type on.

 

[rampancy]

Thanks to a misunderstanding (who knew that A1181 and A1151 could look so similar when the font is so small?), I now have these beauties in my collection:

This is really the first time I've ever actually handled and used a 17" MacBook Pro, outside of a few minutes at an Apple Store. It's big. Bigger than I ever expected. And the battery still works!

Thermally, it seems to have held up better than my hoard of 15" MBPs; at idle, it hovers around 30-40 deg. C, while my 15" machines generally seem to hover at around 50-60. Does the larger size afford better cooling and airflow? (N.B. I'm still holding out on replacing the thermal grease - I'm still traumatized from when I killed a perfectly good A1211 after replacing the thermal paste...)

Another thing to note is that I discovered that the A1151 uses a 12.7 mm optical drive, as opposed to the 9.5 mm drives I've seen in the A1181. (Did the A1211 or A1150 use this size of optical drive too?) Does anyone know why this is? I'd love to use one of my brand-new 9.5 mm eBay dual-layer SuperDrives in this machine, but the brackets don't properly align with the drive's screw holes due to the height difference. Apart from that though, it looks like it should fit. I'd love to think of a solution which doesn't involve me just duct taping the drive to the bracket, or just duct taping the drive to the machine altogether.

The black MacBook 4,1 seemed dead, but all it needed was another set of RAM modules and it was good to go. And it even has a fully working optical drive too, to boot. With 4 GB, an SSD, and Xubuntu, it's an surprisingly capable machine.

 

[Needleroozer]

Thanks to a misunderstanding (who knew that A1181 and A1151 could look so similar when the font is so small?), I now have these beauties in my collection:

View attachment 1903685

This is really the first time I've ever actually handled and used a 17" MacBook Pro, outside of a few minutes at an Apple Store. It's big. Bigger than I ever expected. And the battery still works!

Thermally, it seems to have held up better than my hoard of 15" MBPs; at idle, it hovers around 30-40 deg. C, while my 15" machines generally seem to hover at around 50-60. Does the larger size afford better cooling and airflow? (N.B. I'm still holding out on replacing the thermal grease - I'm still traumatized from when I killed a perfectly good A1211 after replacing the thermal paste...)

Another thing to note is that I discovered that the A1151 uses a 12.7 mm optical drive, as opposed to the 9.5 mm drives I've seen in the A1181. (Did the A1211 or A1150 use this size of optical drive too?) Does anyone know why this is? I'd love to use one of my brand-new 9.5 mm eBay dual-layer SuperDrives in this machine, but the brackets don't properly align with the drive's screw holes due to the height difference. Apart from that though, it looks like it should fit. I'd love to think of a solution which doesn't involve me just duct taping the drive to the bracket, or just duct taping the drive to the machine altogether.

The black MacBook 4,1 seemed dead, but all it needed was another set of RAM modules and it was good to go. And it even has a fully working optical drive too, to boot. With 4 GB, an SSD, and Xubuntu, it's an surprisingly capable machine.

With respect to the optical drives:
- The 15” pre-unibody Pros use IDE-based 9.5mm drives, while their 17” counterparts use 12.7mm drives (you can see this without taking the computer apart by looking at where the optical slot is in the side of the chassis - the 17” chassis has the slot right next to the top case, while it’s more centered on the 15” chassis).
- Looking at MacTracker, the first few years of 17” Pro had a faster drive (8x vs. 4x or 6x). Since the 15” and 17” models are the same thickness, I’m not sure why Apple chose to differentiate based on chassis size. Maybe there were power draw concerns?
- To mount a 9.5mm drive to a 12.7mm chassis, I’d look at making a spacer with a 3D printer or drilling some holes in thin aluminum to shift the drive’s location.

 

[rampancy]

the 17” chassis has the slot right next to the top case, while it’s more centered on the 15” chassis

This actually may be the kicker. The drive slot itself may be positioned in such a way that it would make a 9.5 mm drive unusable; though I'd have to open up the ol' battleship again to actually check. One other possibilty I've thought about is using the optical drive brackets from a 15" MacBook Pro in the 17", it seems like the only difference between the two drive brackets is the added depth to account for the extra bottom thickness of the 12.7 mm drive.

I wonder if power concerns and drive speeds may very well have been why they went with the 12.7 mm drive; maybe they just didn't have 8x SuperDrives available in a slot-loading 9.5 mm form factor in 2006.

 

[Needleroozer]

This actually may be the kicker. The drive slot itself may be positioned in such a way that it would make a 9.5 mm drive unusable; though I'd have to open up the ol' battleship again to actually check. One other possibilty I've thought about is using the optical drive brackets from a 15" MacBook Pro in the 17", it seems like the only difference between the two drive brackets is the added depth to account for the extra bottom thickness of the 12.7 mm drive.

I wonder if power concerns and drive speeds may very well have been why they went with the 12.7 mm drive; maybe they just didn't have 8x SuperDrives available in a slot-loading 9.5 mm form factor in 2006.

The drive slot is at the top of the drive housing for both drives; the 9.5mm drive is just not filling the whole vertical space available to it (that’s why the Bluetooth module on a 15” MacBook Pro is located directly above the optical drive as opposed to over by the hard drive).
I had a 12.7mm drive from an iMac and took a few pictures comparing it to a 9.5mm drive from an A1260. Only the screw holes on the “left” side line up. The ones in the back are a screw diameter too low, and the “right side” is referenced off the bottom of the drive on the 12.7mm drive rather than the top.

I would have checked with my mostly-dead A1151, but I don’t seem to have all its parts on hand.
This iFixit guide shows three brackets on the A1151. The “left side” bracket in step 14 should move directly over. The back bracket in step 16 will wind up being too high relative to a 9.5mm optical drive, but you should be able to fix this with a plastic washer or two. The “right side” bracket in step 17 will fit but you won’t be able to screw into it - you could either drill a new hole in the bracket or just duct tape it and hope the other two points of contact are adequate.

 

[Jack Neill]

Got the MB 5,2 out today and did some Early 2009 Macintoshing.

 

[rampancy]

Got the MB 5,2 out today and did some Early 2009 Macintoshing. View attachment 1907044

It's great seeing people still using their MacBook 5,2s. Mine has become my daily driver, when I'm not tinkering with Linux on my 4,1...

(PS: Totally not envious of your dual 4 GB DDR2-800 SO-DIMMs, which must have cost you a fortune.)