What have you done with an early Intel recently?

[ToniCH]

I hear that. I've got two kryoM.2's running in a cMP myself but I've a feeling both might be getting ditched soon to free up a slot and that Lycom just peaked my interest. Thanks.

There are lots of threads about the cMP PCIe cards in the Mac Pro section, I suggest you read few of those to get a good feeling about what is good and what is not. 👍 That is how I spotted this card, I knew what to look for. I had to buy the whole machine to get it but there was plenty of other stuff included so it was a great deal and now I have a backup machine too.

 

[DCBassman]

Reducing to just one, read it, one, Mac. The iMac 21.5 2011 is up for sale, which leaves me with the 2011 MBP.

 

[ToniCH]

Reducing to just one, read it, one, Mac. The iMac 21.5 2011 is up for sale, which leaves me with the 2011 MBP.

Are you giving up on macs or are you getting ready to upgrade to something better, bigger and/or faster?

 

[MBAir2010]

Are you giving up on macs or are you getting ready to upgrade to something better, bigger and/or faster?

I think I have given up on my Intel Macs for a while.
along with several iPods and other older items.

the newer M1 ones are just easier to use.

 

[DCBassman]

Are you giving up on macs or are you getting ready to upgrade to something better, bigger and/or faster?

Just downsizing, really. MBP is running Monterey, and will serve as my main PC when away from home. As I keep an Asus S200E running W10 just for my small business, I can afford to mess around more with daily-use machines. And I actually have reasonable investment in the MBP in terms of battery, etc.

 

[ojfd]

Reducing to just one, read it, one, Mac. The iMac 21.5 2011 is up for sale, which leaves me with the 2011 MBP.

Good choice.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I like the iMac (especially the early Intel stuff) format but if I were to choose just one, I’d have gone with the portable as well. Elevated on a stand, with an external monitor, kb/m. Best of both worlds.

 

[headlessmike]

I like the iMac (especially the early Intel stuff) format but if I were to choose just one, I’d have gone with the portable as well. Elevated on a stand, with an external monitor, kb/m. Best of both worlds.

I have a 2010 27" LED Cinema Display that will more or less turn any MacBook from 2008 or newer into an "iMac". Works just as well with my 2010 MacBook as with my M1 mini. They're not that expensive these days either.

 

[DCBassman]

I like the iMac (especially the early Intel stuff) format but if I were to choose just one, I’d have gone with the portable as well. Elevated on a stand, with an external monitor, kb/m. Best of both worlds.

I have a basic stand courtesy of IKEA, and it works well. I also have a spare Magic Mouse 2 and Keyboard 2, so I'm set up for this.

 

[macoda]

Installed Monterey on a late 2009 27" C2D iMac a couple of days ago which for the most part has been running well except for the serious glitching of the graphics when returning from sleep or screensaver, requiring a login cycle to resolve, so it may be a case of just installing Theine and letting this baby run free, electricity bills be damned! The plants need carbon anyway.

 

[avz]

I recently did a first "major" repair on my Late 2008 unibody MacBook as the optical SuperDrive stopped accepting the discs. I had a spare one that was also manufactured in October 2008 that still works. Previously I only had to replace a battery and a speaker(techically a subwoofer I think).

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Expanded my poorman NAS, relocated my office hub and all verified working correctly via 08 MacBook.

 

[ojfd]

Had to replace HDD flex cable in my 13" MBP 2011 daily driver. Out of the blue the saves of simple documents or quitting apps started taking ~ 1 minute. DiskWarrior, when booted from external volume, was locating the directories for almost forever. Luckily, I had unused spare cable from 2010 model. With a little trickery, despite it being a bit too long for the 2011 model, I was able to fit it in.

Now everything is back to normal. It is the second case of HDD flex cable going bad in my 13" unibody MBPs that I've bought used in the past 5 years.

 

[DCBassman]

Further shenanigans with the early-2011 MBP. Had it running reasonably well on Monterey, then decided to screw it all up and go for Sonoma. It wasn't too bad, but Bluetooth didn't work at all. I have had all sorts of problems with Apple Bluetooth and Linux, which I'd love to solve, because this will ultimately be a Linux machine, and my only Mac. I've ordered a replacement Airport card in the faint hope that that it will improve things. Doesn't give me better wifi, but upgrades to BT 4.0. Chipset is BCM94331PCIEBT4AX. I'm hoping that will play better in Linux, particularly Mint, which has BT problems all its own, and the later versions of MacOS.

 

[ToniCH]

Most non working BT issues with OCLP and Sonoma are fixed by PRAM reset, like we have posted before. Hope you investigate before ordering the airport card, its not a trivial job always to upgrade old MBPs.

Never had BT problems yet with mac+Mint.

 

[DCBassman]

Never had BT problems yet with mac+Mint.

Since Mint 21+, never had anything BUT problems. Before that, it seemed to be flawless.Will do the PRAM reset, which I had not remembered...
I've got rid of all my Apple BT peripherals as I've gone along, except for the last matching pair of Magic 2 Mouse and keyboard, which I paid good money for. All the others came as part of deals in some way. I will now do the PRAM reset and see what happens!
Merry Christmas!

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

So, the dream of idiot comes true .
2x 6-core Xeons (don't yet know all details), no HDD/SSD, 64 GB RAM, GF980 Ti (No Boot Screen). A big field for experiments. (I know they works, tested with 1 of my HDDs with Mojave & Quadro2000). Which forum do I need to look for info now?

 

[Jack Neill]

Not sure if either of these Macs qualify as EI but it is cool.. I bought a i3/8/128 2018 Mini at a pawn shop and threw 16gb of ram taken from my Strix to bump to 16gb albeit at 2133 which is lame but not a deal breaker. I am using a 2013 21.5 in TDM to display the mini. Enjoying some Macintoshing while on PTO.

 

[headlessmike]

While on Christimas vacation from work I've been using my 2010 Core 2 Duo MacBook running Sonoma for some coding while sitting on the sofa next to my wife who's playing video games. I'm writing some simulations that will eventually run on a supercomputer, but for coding and testing this old Mac works brilliantly. I'm even able to squeeze out a few hours of use running on the original battery (which only has 103 cycles on in).

 

[MacFoxG4]

Took my 2012 non-retina MBP on a trip recently. I take classes online and there was one assignment I couldn't finish before the trip, so I had to take this laptop with me. This is the most modern laptop I own nowadays. Definitely recommend putting this laptop in a backpack instead of an duffel bag because I did the latter and my shoulder was sore for a while afterwards. Did some creative writing on the laptop too. I took my 2006 MBP on a trip last year (just so I could do some creative writing) and the battery would pop out every time I took it out of my laptop case (too snug of a fit I guess). The 2012 doesn't do that thanks to it's battery placement and it fits better in the laptop case than the 2006 did, so I prefer taking the 2012 on trips now.

I also removed the Mojave partition on here and replaced it with Ubuntu again, giving me a triple boot of Lion, Windows 10, and Ubuntu. I had Mojave on here to see if Space Cadet Pinball would run under WINE in Mojave and it does. However, I really don't need to play that game on here and I just simply didn't need Mojave on here. I chose Ubuntu for variety. I tried Linux Mint, but some of the settings I am used to having in Ubuntu either don't exist or are located in an inconvenient place. I also tried to remap the copy and paste keyboard shortcuts to make it Cmd +C/Cmd + V like it is in macOS, but was unsuccessful. I could have tried patched Ventura or Sonoma on here, but between having an M2 Mini and being disillusioned with patched macOS, I haven't bothered experimenting with those on here. Lion is on here because of old Universal binary apps and because EyeTV 2 won't work on anything newer than Lion. While I do have those old apps running on older Macs, I like having them on this laptop just in case.

 

[DouglasCarroll]

Took my 2012 non-retina MBP on a trip recently. I take classes online and there was one assignment I couldn't finish before the trip, so I had to take this laptop with me. This is the most modern laptop I own nowadays. Definitely recommend putting this laptop in a backpack instead of an duffel bag because I did the latter and my shoulder was sore for a while afterwards. Did some creative writing on the laptop too. I took my 2006 MBP on a trip last year (just so I could do some creative writing) and the battery would pop out every time I took it out of my laptop case (too snug of a fit I guess). The 2012 doesn't do that thanks to it's battery placement and it fits better in the laptop case than the 2006 did, so I prefer taking the 2012 on trips now.

I also removed the Mojave partition on here and replaced it with Ubuntu again, giving me a triple boot of Lion, Windows 10, and Ubuntu. I had Mojave on here to see if Space Cadet Pinball would run under WINE in Mojave and it does. However, I really don't need to play that game on here and I just simply didn't need Mojave on here. I chose Ubuntu for variety. I tried Linux Mint, but some of the settings I am used to having in Ubuntu either don't exist or are located in an inconvenient place. I also tried to remap the copy and paste keyboard shortcuts to make it Cmd +C/Cmd + V like it is in macOS, but was unsuccessful. I could have tried patched Ventura or Sonoma on here, but between having an M2 Mini and being disillusioned with patched macOS, I haven't bothered experimenting with those on here. Lion is on here because of old Universal binary apps and because EyeTV 2 won't work on anything newer than Lion. While I do have those old apps running on older Macs, I like having them on this laptop just in case.

This is one of my favorite laptops also. I triple boot Mojave, Catalina and Windows 10 on mine and it has never let me down.

My next project for mine is to put an internal blu-ray drive in it for portable blu-ray ripping.

Nice write up.

😀

 

[eyoungren]

Ordered another Sena Parani UD100. The first time I ordered one was because I had damaged the BT antenna on my E:09 Mac Mini. Now, I was finally in the position to order one for my MacPro. The MP handles BT fine, but there's a lot of 'stuff' in the way (case, monitors made of metal, etc) so I can walk off into the kitchen and my headphones will disconnect. Heck, I can even be sitting at the desk with the MP literally three feet away, lean forward and it will disconnect.

Ordered from the same eBay vendor as I did last time because this particular vendor includes the longer antenna which is good for 1000 meters. The short little default antenna is only good for 100-300 meters. Going to drop this one into one of the front USB ports on the MP so the antenna will stick out past my Cinema Displays. Shouldn't be a problem at that point.

Bonus: The UD100 can handle up to 7 simultaneous connections (another reason I got the first one for the E:09 MM) and it's also BT 4.0. So, giving my MP a bit of a BT upgrade.

Oh, and if anyone wonders - I found this particular BT dongle because I was looking for a dongle that worked with Mac OS X specifically. And it does. All you need to do is disable the internal BT via terminal and tell it to use the UD100 instead. It appears as native BT in the menubar (although, like with most dongles, you can't turn it off).

 

[yui999]

MBA 2012 not the fastest in the world 11"

I tried to get 16GB RAM on my MBA 2012, but the EEPROM programmer would not read the SPI ROM, so it stayed at 8GB.

The CPU was removed from the MBP 2012 and a 2.9GHz dual-core was installed the first time but it beeped and would not boot.

The second time I installed 2.5GHz and the fan didn't spin up either.

The third time I installed 2.5GHz and it booted.

I originally installed and removed the CPU not knowing if it was working properly.

Therefore, the speed is slow because it is PCIe 2.0x2, but it is faster than SATA, and it is easy to carry around because the weight of the machine is physically light.

Here is a link to an NVMe compatible adapter for the 2012 MBA.

M.2 NVME SSD Adapter for MacBook Air Early 2013 A1398 for Macbook Pro 2012 A1425 A1398 MC975 MC976 MD212 MD213 ME662 ME664 ME665 - AliExpress 7

Smarter Shopping, Better Living! Aliexpress.com

www.aliexpress.us

 

[DouglasCarroll]

MBA 2012 not the fastest in the world 11"

I tried to get 16GB RAM on my MBA 2012, but the EEPROM programmer would not read the SPI ROM, so it stayed at 8GB.

The CPU was removed from the MBP 2012 and a 2.9GHz dual-core was installed the first time but it beeped and would not boot.

The second time I installed 2.5GHz and the fan didn't spin up either.

The third time I installed 2.5GHz and it booted.

I originally installed and removed the CPU not knowing if it was working properly.

Therefore, the speed is slow because it is PCIe 2.0x2, but it is faster than SATA, and it is easy to carry around because the weight of the machine is physically light.

Here is a link to an NVMe compatible adapter for the 2012 MBA.

M.2 NVME SSD Adapter for MacBook Air Early 2013 A1398 for Macbook Pro 2012 A1425 A1398 MC975 MC976 MD212 MD213 ME662 ME664 ME665 - AliExpress 7

Smarter Shopping, Better Living! Aliexpress.com

www.aliexpress.us

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The bummer that I found with replacing the internal SSD in Apple laptops is that every time there was a firmware update from Apple, it would NOT install with a 3rd party SSD installed...I always had to open the machine and replace the SSD with the original Apple one to get the firmware updated and then afterwards re-install the 3rd party SSD. Was a huge pain in the ass. I eventually found a larger 1TB Apple Original SSD to replace the smaller one in my 2015 MacBook Pro and all of my hassles went away.

Anyways, something to be aware of when selecting a "cheap adapter and 3rd party SSD".

 

[yui999]

The bummer that I found with replacing the internal SSD in Apple laptops is that every time there was a firmware update from Apple, it would NOT install with a 3rd party SSD installed...I always had to open the machine and replace the SSD with the original Apple one to get the firmware updated and then afterwards re-install the 3rd party SSD. Was a huge pain in the ass. I eventually found a larger 1TB Apple Original SSD to replace the smaller one in my 2015 MacBook Pro and all of my hassles went away.

Anyways, something to be aware of when selecting a "cheap adapter and 3rd party SSD".

Yes, it is.

The MBP 2015 13" was a gift to my son and I don't have it with me, but when I called him I asked him about it and he didn't update the OS, so I don't know what the outcome would be.

I did a macOS update on this MBA 2011 11".
The update went through as if nothing had happened with OCLP, except that the remaining time under the progress bar was not displayed.

Thanks for your input.