Don't know for certain, but off the top of my head, I'd have thought it a good possibility.
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What have you done with an early Intel recently?
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I’m almost completely certain they’re interchangeable.
They rely on the same LVDS connector. All unibody MBPs have LED backlighting and need no supplementary inverter board. The Hi-res glossy and antiglare displays were minor, CTO options which could be easily drop-picked from parts assembly at the origin factory. Moreover, the unibody era far pre-dates the cryptographic parts pairing which emerged with the post-T2/bridgeOS era of Macs.
The key considerations TBD, as @DCBassman observed, are the possibility of very slight variations with the lengths of wifi/BT antennae cables and the aforementioned iSight. I do know the iSight camera uses the same socket across 2009 through 2011 (and, likely, mid-2012) models across the 13/15/17 spread.
I’ve tinkered mostly with the 13-inch variants over the years — mid-2009, mid-2010, and both earl/late 2011 — and as memory serves, because of the smaller space, tolerances on the 13s tend to be a slight bit more tight.
That is: something like the speaker/wifi card minor redesign for 2011 on the 13-inch may complicate fitment issues with the length of the cables originating with the pre-2011s. Same goes for flat cables used for the ODD (the physical spacing differs). On the 15s I’ve been tinkering with lately, both early 2011s, those tolerances are noticeably more forgiving than what I’m accustomed to with the 13s.
Definitely not on the ones here. On my 2009, there's another LVDS-like cable on the other side of the setup for camera and mic, nothing like the 2011s
Enclosure showed up today. As I'd hoped, it had the power to spin up a Western Digital RE drive. The REs are enterprise level drives, the kind you'd find in a data center. Which is why I try to get them whenever I can. This one is 6TB and I have two.
But LOL, this one is worse than the other - 55% of health on the SMART status.
Ah well, the drive enclosure is for both 3.5 and 2.5 drives and right now it doesn't matter if I lose anything on it. I also have a few 3TB and 1TB drives, so when this one fails, I'l replace it.
That said, this drive did a couple years as the network drive in my G4 'NAS'. And it never had a problem being recognized on boot so we shall see.
Finally, someone on Amazon actually used a Seagate Ironwolf 22TB drive in this enclosure. It's advertised as 20TB. So, I've got some room for expansion.
But LOL, this one is worse than the other - 55% of health on the SMART status.
Ah well, the drive enclosure is for both 3.5 and 2.5 drives and right now it doesn't matter if I lose anything on it. I also have a few 3TB and 1TB drives, so when this one fails, I'l replace it.That said, this drive did a couple years as the network drive in my G4 'NAS'. And it never had a problem being recognized on boot so we shall see.
Finally, someone on Amazon actually used a Seagate Ironwolf 22TB drive in this enclosure. It's advertised as 20TB. So, I've got some room for expansion.
Yah, I’mma eat crow. In my (weaksauce) defence, I last futzed with a mid-2009 13-inch MBP around when I had to replace said MBP after it was killed by a punctured can of coconut water. That was around August 2011. But I’ve also tinkered with a mid-2010 more recently than that.
From iFixit, the 2009 and 2010:
Mixing up a lime marinade…
But @ToniCH — this shouldn’t impact you with the 15-inch. From the mid-2010 iFixit page, you can see the iSight cable finds the socket a bit more to the left and proximal to the person tinkering with it (sandwiched between the wifi flat cable and the ODD cable), but overall appears to be about the same basic length the 2011 uses:
At cursory glance on iFixit, the wifi/BT cables appear to be almost exactly as they appear on the 2011s.
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MBP 15" late 2011 running Sequoia: realised earlier today that I cannot change the wallpaper. Irritating. Can't find any obvious reason on the 'Unsupported Macs' thread for this OS. Might just blow it away and go back to something earlier.
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Beyond that niggle, how's the general performance?
I am currently setting up a DosDude1-Mojave/HFS+ & Pop_OS! Linux dual-boot on a 2009 C2D MBP 15". Pics and details in a few days to a week. (If your late-'11 has an i7, be very sure it's adequately cooled at all times; MacsFanControl is a must.)
As Apple pursues its twin goals of artificial-obsolescence of earlier hardware as well as pleasing its intelligence-gathering patrons, all versions of the MacOS contain significant, and escalating, amounts of bloat. What matters is how obtrusive it is, and how easy it is to disable. (Catalina/APFS/32bit-kill is the clear line-of-demarcation; not ten minutes before posting this, I received a service-call to restore an "ugraded"-to-Monterey 21.5" 2015 iMac whose owner complained that it was noticeably slower than his 21.5" 2011 iMac with High Sierra. Yet go anywhere on MacRumors, and there are threads galore on how to snailify (or destroy) old Macs even further by tearing them apart for ram and SSD upgrades to permit OCLP/Ventura/Sonoma/Sequoia, which is just ridiculous.)So what you’re saying is Sonoma is bloatware.
Your Mileage May Vary applies here.
Currently, I'm running Ventura on a couple of unsupported Macs that are even older than your client's machine and I've not experienced any slowdown. On the contrary, they both go like the clappers and one program in particular that previously took up to an hour to decrypt files under Snow Leopard to High Sierra now complete this task in a couple of minutes.
My experiences have been predominantly positive. Your mileage may vary.
At least the PRAM battery isn't soldered to the motherboard - and there are places you can (reliably?) get them.
From my experience with mysteriously dead A1181s (and A1181s that would power on immediately on plugging in the MagSafe), I've read comments that have led me to believe that an improperly grounded motherboard may have short circuted power circuitry keeping them from booting. Other suspects I've thought of could be the MagSafe board and the battery charging board. I can't conclusively say. Up until recently though I didn't realize that the A1181 even had a removable PRAM battery. And getting to it, while annyoing and time consuming, isn't procedurally too difficult (at least compared to the iMac repair I just did).
I'd say changing out the PRAM battery is worth a shot.
Your Mileage May Vary applies here.
Currently, I'm running Ventura on a couple of unsupported Macs that are even older than your client's machine and I've not experienced any slowdown. On the contrary, they both go like the clappers and one program in particular that previously took up to an hour to decrypt files under Snow Leopard to High Sierra now complete this task in a couple of minutes.
My experiences have been predominantly positive. Your mileage may vary.
The adhesive strip kits are as inexpensive as CAD$5.
I paid even less for my 21.5-inch iMac.
Bending Apple to your whims will never happen. That ship sailed last decade. They don’t care.
Lacking that, find workarounds to the situation rather than grouse about what already happened. If it means opening an iMac and spending a little more time to get the OEM HDD out and/or to upgrade the fusion drive setup (and, yes, charging the labour of doing the work), then indulge your client and give them a few more years of good use, even if the idea of APFS and OCLP and whatever repulses you.
tl;dr: You‘re not going to win over anyone here, and I doubt you’ll win over a bunch of new clients that way, either.
The 2013 Mac Pro always came equipped with an SSD as standard.
I've run it with High Sierra and I've found that the general performance is far superior on Ventura - including the elimination of several bugs that caused inconveniences when using the former.
Regarding the decryption, there is no disk-access on the Mac itself. It's carried out on another device that's connected to the Mac via Ethernet or Wi-fi. As I stated before, the process of communication between the two devices was excruciatingly long under High Sierra and its predecessors, usually requiring me to wait an hour till it was completed. With Ventura, everything is wrapped up in a few minutes and that's a tremendous improvement for me.
Precisely and unless the drive/RAM develop faults, this will be a one-off task. You wouldn't need to dismantle it perpetually. In my opinion, OCLP is a fantastic boon that helps to save countless machines from ending up being abandoned - very likely on a landfill or in a recycling centre and instead continuing to remain viable for users who require access to current/recent software.
To minghold — ::clears her throat:: — THIS IS THE WHOLE POINT!
My example was a client's machine, remember? What do you suppose the labor charge is going to be for the finicky process of taking one of those apart? --It'll easily exceed the value of the machine.The adhesive strip kits are as inexpensive as CAD$5.
They're going to find out that that's reciprocal.
Virtually every customer I get with a "made-slow" machine couldn't care less about keeping up with the bleeding edge. When I offer an inexpensive option that involves restoring their library of paid-for 32bit software as well as replacing crummy Safari with a modern-browser without paying for more hardware or embracing the subscription-model racket, as well as killing all the strangling telemetry so their computer runs twice as fast it did original and five times faster than under Catalina or Monterey, they're delighted. And there's a hundred of them for every CC professional clamoring for the latest plug-ins.
The 2013 Mac Pro is a Xeon-processor machine, and a rare model compared to the far more numerous intel iMacs, Minis, and laptops. The "What have you done with an early Xeon recently?" thread is over thataway.The 2013 Mac Pro always came equipped with an SSD as standard.
You have an unusual set-up featuring a Xeon machine net-connected to "another device" performing an unusual process that no one consulting these MacRumors threads for early-intel Mac advice is going to ever chance into before the monkeys are done duplicating Shakespeare, and this headless-clown corner-case was initially offered as representative of a presumptive order-of-magnitude speed improvement a forum browser could receive by mere dint of installing an OCLP/APFS operating-system on their unsupported computer. (On a raw guess, I'd surmise it took over five year's worth of screaming before Apple got around to fixing this rarely-encountered bug indigenous to Xeon trash-cans.)I've run it with High Sierra and I've found that the general performance is far superior on Ventura - including the elimination of several bugs that caused inconveniences when using the former. Regarding the decryption, there is no disk-access on the Mac itself. It's carried out on another device that's connected to the Mac via Ethernet or Wi-fi. As I stated before, the process of communication between the two devices was excruciatingly long under High Sierra and its predecessors, usually requiring me to wait an hour till it was completed. With Ventura, everything is wrapped up in a few minutes and that's a tremendous improvement for me.
"(U)sers who require access to current/recent software" are a distinct minority of total users, and a goodly chunk of them would be satisfied to hear about Chromium-legacy being compatable with their existing HFS+ OS. Corporate-purchasing agents don't browse old-model forums anyway; they churn in/out new stuff and write if off both under capital-investment and depreciation. Meanwhile, 95% of the "countless machines" ending up abandoned are iMacs, Minis, and 13" DVD Macbooks with rotational-drives suffering under an inappropriate APFS operating-system that Apple deliberately hoodwinked their users into installing (note absolutely every Apple.com forum's first suggestion to almost any roblem being to "update the operating-system!", that being a total lie that only makes things worse, and still leaves always-worthless Safari in an unsupported state as of 2024). E.g., the 2019 base-model 27" iMac came with a rotational-drive, and was an immediate dog upon "upgrading" to Catalina. (I had the owner of one of these, trudging along under then-current Monterery, trade the thing to me, plus cash, in exchange for a 2017 w/SSD running Mojave/HFS+ with Safari chucked off the dock & replaced.)
Putting on a more recent, unsupported APFS operating-system doesn't address the primary causal issue of why they were retired. And the blame isn't rotational-drives themselves; it was Apple's deliberate targeting of them for ground-to-an-early-death even while it was still selling machines with them. I.e., an SSD doesn't care if the OS constantly tosses hundreds of miscellaneous telemetry 'reads' at it. With its APFS OSes beginning with Catalina especially, Apple completely inverted previously-standard protocol limiting disk-access. Henceforth, the drive would be hammered in an attempt to drive it to early death if an HDD.
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What will I be doing with an early Intel in the near future?
I’m so glad you, Mx. Rhetorical, asked!
Being at the very, very end of what constitutes an early Intel Mac, my late-2013 21.5-inch iMac quad-i5/2.9 overhaul is likely to happen sometime this coming week — pending arrival of two more components. What I’ll be doing is running a few benchmarks before shutting down everything, servicing, and upgrading the following:
What I have is the CPU (which arrived this week) and the NVMe m.2 blade (the latter comes from a long-gone 13-inch rMBP whose display I maimed in 2020). The RAM and SATA SSD should be here by, I’m guessing, no later than Tuesday.
If other user benchmarks offer any hints, what I’ll end up with is a system some 60 per cent quicker overall — 50 per cent of it being the faster CPU with twice the threads, while the remaining coming from both wider memory headroom, coupled with ending the highly annoying I/O bottlenecks of such a laggard of a spinner. I do expect things to run warmer, which is fine, since I’m cleaning out eleven years of dust and freshening up all thermal paste with Noctua NT-H2.
This iMac is the only Mac I’ve ever had which has any personalization affixed to its case.
But why do this? Why not just get another Mac?
Because I like to reduce what waste goes into waste streams.
This upgrade ought to be not unlike levelling up to a mid-level, mid-2017 21.5-inch iMac quad i5/3.4 model (display resolution and Thunderbolt specs notwithstanding) — all without procuring a second physical machine which, locally, still trades for about CAD$500–600. I don’t need two!
Total expected cost for this upgrade, including adhesive strip kit: about CAD$100 (or $200, if including what I paid for the NVMe blade and m.2 adapter four years ago).
I’ll probably keep High Sierra (currently on HFS+) running on it for now, but I do plan to bump that to Mojave (on APFS) soonish and to have that on the blade. I’m still vacillating on whether it’s worth my while to also install a partition with one of the infernal macOS builds (maybe an OCLP-patched Monterey, idk). We’ll see.
But I’m excited! I’ll be sure to take pics and share here how it went!
I’m so glad you, Mx. Rhetorical, asked!
Being at the very, very end of what constitutes an early Intel Mac, my late-2013 21.5-inch iMac quad-i5/2.9 overhaul is likely to happen sometime this coming week — pending arrival of two more components. What I’ll be doing is running a few benchmarks before shutting down everything, servicing, and upgrading the following:
- CPU, to quad i7/3.5GHz;
- RAM, from 8GB to 16GB; and
- storage, from 1TB/5400rpm spinner to 500GB WD Blue NVMe SSD and 500GB WD Blue SATA SSD (no need to bump up capacity for why I use it)
What I have is the CPU (which arrived this week) and the NVMe m.2 blade (the latter comes from a long-gone 13-inch rMBP whose display I maimed in 2020). The RAM and SATA SSD should be here by, I’m guessing, no later than Tuesday.
If other user benchmarks offer any hints, what I’ll end up with is a system some 60 per cent quicker overall — 50 per cent of it being the faster CPU with twice the threads, while the remaining coming from both wider memory headroom, coupled with ending the highly annoying I/O bottlenecks of such a laggard of a spinner. I do expect things to run warmer, which is fine, since I’m cleaning out eleven years of dust and freshening up all thermal paste with Noctua NT-H2.
This iMac is the only Mac I’ve ever had which has any personalization affixed to its case.
But why do this? Why not just get another Mac?
Because I like to reduce what waste goes into waste streams.
This upgrade ought to be not unlike levelling up to a mid-level, mid-2017 21.5-inch iMac quad i5/3.4 model (display resolution and Thunderbolt specs notwithstanding) — all without procuring a second physical machine which, locally, still trades for about CAD$500–600. I don’t need two!
Total expected cost for this upgrade, including adhesive strip kit: about CAD$100 (or $200, if including what I paid for the NVMe blade and m.2 adapter four years ago).
I’ll probably keep High Sierra (currently on HFS+) running on it for now, but I do plan to bump that to Mojave (on APFS) soonish and to have that on the blade. I’m still vacillating on whether it’s worth my while to also install a partition with one of the infernal macOS builds (maybe an OCLP-patched Monterey, idk). We’ll see.
But I’m excited! I’ll be sure to take pics and share here how it went!
Intel manufacture the Xeon CPU and this is a thread and sub-forum for early Intel Apple Macintosh computers and my machine fits right into that category.
Rare? They're easily found. A search on eBay UK yielded listings for over 180 machines currently available for sale.
No thanks. I'm staying right here.
Snipped for conciseness.
I never claimed that I was using the Mac Pro for that task but anyway there's no set parameters for how computers should be used - which has always made them so exciting because of the possibilities. If you think that's unusual, just wait till I figure out how to incorporate an early Intel Mac into building one of these:
Anyway, moving onto more constructive discussions...
I'm also excited for you and I'm sure that I won't be the only one.
Please do! It sounds like a fun project.