I find old laptops all over the place and can get them working as good as new with minimal effort. I work for the VA and find vets in need that don't have a computer and gift them. It's a very rewarding hobby. I often steal parts from another machine to service another but many of the machines I fix just need a clean reinstall and a new power cord. Keep up the fixes.
Hi from Australia! I do this too kind of. I get bulk lots of thrown out, old or decommissioned school/govt PCs, scrub them down, maybe add a new stick of ram or an SSD and pass them on to folks that need them :-)
I'd love to do something like this in the UK- do a community project that gives kids/people in need tech. Its v hard to find the computers here though. As far as I'm aware
A couple of months ago I was given a MacBook Pro 17" 2011. The owner told me it was way to slow to work with anymore. I bought a 46,99 Euro (just over 50 Dollar) 500GB Crucial SSD, put it in and did a fresh install. It has an i7 and with the SSD it works really fast and great. More than enough for surfing, office, simple HD Video editing.
My brother in law was about to dispose of a "non working" MacBook Pro 15 inch mid 2012. I asked him to give it to me. Only problem was a bad battery and looked like new. I purchased a cheap used battery on ebay. Latter on upgraded to a 250GB SSD and maxed it to 16GB of RAM. Upgraded to Catalina and now planning to replace the heat sink thermal compound before upgrading to Monterey by using the Open Core Legacy Patcher. It is my daily driver and I love it. It came with the power adapter and everything looks brand new. Even the keyboard. I also purchased a funky multicolor shell case protector. I'm happy.
Another hard to believe deal from Luke “the-luckiest-deal-finder-on-earth” Miani. Well done by the way, great video! I’m glad to see more projects like this again in the near future
Just picked up a totally free mid 2009 17" MacBook Pro with 8GB ram included & separately a free 240gb SSD - Freecycle is the way to go. The battery is okish, may change at a later time - see how it goes. The cycle count is only 81 but it was left uncharged for several years so only holds charge for 2-3 hours. My only cost so far is a £5 usb WiFi dongle as the WiFi card was not working and a £6 enclosure to convert the M2 SSD to SATA. Using OpenCore-Patcher it now happily runs Monterey 12.4 and with Quartz Debug the screen res is running 960x600 HiDPi (although its not a retina screen it looks as good to my eyes). Considering the graphics are only NVIDA GeForce 9400M 256MB it's running very well. Good luck, go hunting - you never know!
Its a shame Apple have chosen the way they have. Appreciate that they want to innovate but its a shame their innovations are at the cost of repairability and upgradabililty.
@@willm5032 i mean they can at least attempt to make it easier. it's such a pain in the ass trying to change a macbook battery. and the software locks on the iphone too
@@willm5032 Yeah, they "innovate" on purpose to make it virtually impossible for people to do anything to "their" Apple products. They're fighting Right to Repair, but frankly, even if they end up having to comply, they've made it so difficult to do anything without super expensive equipment, it's going to be tough to do your own work like this anyway. Unless you have Louis Rossman skills!
i just got a 2010 MacBook Pro for $115 on ebay and maxed it out for cheap with 8gb RAM and 240gb SSD... Nice little laptop for work and even got Catalina running on it smooth as hell
They work surprisingly well with an SSD and 8GB of RAM, but the CPU usage does spike with modern web browsing. I used one of these late 2008 MBPs for a decade, good unit.
@@mohammedb4ig a laptop with an optimized os would almost never beat a laptop with plain better specs. Plus, if you really want an optized experience, use Chrome OS, Linux, or Windows 10S. Also, I've used a cheap macbook (300$); it's slow, clunky, and can barely run any applications due to its age. As opposed to a 300$ Windows laptop I used which could at least download any application I wanted and ran pretty okay
Thanks to your channel, I learned enough to take a chance on a $12 iMac someone had. Turns out it's a late 2015 21.5" iMac with a quad-core i5, 8 GB of RAM, and a 1TB drive. All it needed was an OS! I'm about to install Mojave and enjoy! Thanks! :D
Your videos are awesome, and I really admire the mindset and philosophy of repurposing old equipment that's still perfectly useful, and giving it a new lease of life, saving it from ending up in a landfill. I'm typing this from a late 2011 macbook pro that I just watched this video on
Great find. That was the machine that convinced me to switch to Mac. Lots of ports, easy to tweak. All the benefits of OS X plus you could run any other OS in a VM. Great for development use. Even had digital optical input/output which was fantastic for recording and something that I can't believe Apple dropped.
I got a 13” mid 2012 MacBook Pro for 15$ without ram and a dead battery and hard drive. Put 12gbs of ram, a 480gb ssd and a new battery and it runs like new.
I just bought two Macbook Pros for $20 off FB Marketplace in San Diego. One was a 15 inch from early 2011 and the other a 13 inch from mid 2012. Both were missing hard drives and RAM. After they were added, both machines worked!!!
I've done a few fixes myself for F&F. My mom who is not very tech savvy was looking at purchasing a brand new laptop a few years ago. I got her a 2012 Macbook Pro that I bought at a pawn shop 3 years ago for under $75. It was marked as "broken - does not boot". It actually did boot but had the Folder icon. Brought it home and imagined my surprise when I opened it. It had a 240GB SSD and 4GB RAM - not too shabby. Installed High Sierra and gave it to my mom as a surprise present. She uses it for email, web surfing, and watching RUclips videos. This 2012 Macbook Pro is still going strong!
I’m planning on buying the 2015 MacBook Pro, and I’ll get it an old Thunderbolt Display. Nice to see Micro Center on another channel besides Austin Evans’s channel.
absolutely recommended. I bought mine last year very cheap because it was "broken" according to the owner and aesthetically it looked really bad. It turns out that he erased the disk partition with the operating system. I cleaned it up, installed macOS from a usb, and got a very powerful machine for little money. the battery had only 230 cycles! it was the best deal of my life. Also, It is the latest model that you can open, clean and update by yourself without problems, the keyboard is amazing and it is still compatible with new versions of macOS (runs really well) go for it!
@@cl_0ud470 technically it was not a steal. after i bought it, had the blinking question mark sign when booting so i thought 'probably the ssd is dead' and i was ready to buy a new one but then i got the idea to boot it from an external hard drive that a friend lent me and format the ssd to see if it was working… and it was. It seems to be that the owner didn't know what that sign meant and simply thought it was totally broken.
I got a free 2009 MacBook Pro 13" from a high school where my mother used to work. They were throwing it away, and she asked if she could take it. She then gave it to me since she didn't know if it was working. Over the years, I maxed out the RAM to 8 GB, swapped out the HDD for a cheap SSD, upgraded to macOS Mojave via the patch from dosdude1, and replaced the speakers and battery. Still works great to this day!
Nothing more rewarding than a rescue project. I have a 2012 11" macbook air with the upgraded i7 and 8gb of ram that i got for FREE because the shift key was stuck and it only booted into safe mode. Took it apart and reseated the keyboard ribbon cable which fixed both issues.
I still use my late 2008 unibody MacBook with upgraded ram and an ssd and I upgraded it to Mac OS Catalina it’s very very slow but I’m kinda broke and have no money to spare so I made the best of what I have.😂( overall tho I don’t use it very much simply because of how slow it is)
Keep in mind with some of these old ones you might need to change out the battery too! sometimes those cycles can be pretty high, so they can't keep a charge.
I got an old MacBook Pro from Mid 2009, slapped 8 GBs of RAM, a 500 GB SSD and a new battery in there and installed macOS Catalina with dosdue1's patcher. It works just fine. Monterey and Big Sur are possible but they don't look good and don't function flawlessly so I'll stick with 10.15
This reminds me of when I sold my 2009 Unibody on e-bay. Logic board was kaput, I removed the HD and listed it as broken/parts only. The guy who bought it was pissed as he just thought it needed a new HD. Guy it literally said broken/parts only in the title and 5 times in the description.
I will be doing this exact upgrade in a few days. I just won a bid for a 2008 15 inch. Just under $35 including shipping. only issue that I'm aware of is there's no OS installed on it. I as well have the dosdude patcher on a flash drive so, I'll be installing that. I'll use it as it is for now but, I'll eventually upgrade the RAM and change it over to an SSD.
You would be surprised how far you can go with the DosDude or Mr. Macintosh patchers. I'm typing this on a 2010 Mac Pro with 32gig of ram and a 1tb ssd running the Monterey OS. Smooth sailing so far.
Sold my late 2008 Macbook Aluminum and bought mid 2010 Macbook Pro for 110$. Don't know why I love this era of Macbook so much😂. Maybe next i will get the 2012 model.
"schools are throwing out devices" This 100% we recently had a garage sale where we sold ~160 Dell Optiplexes with 2nd and 3rd gen core i5, with 8GB of RAM(no drive because i was given only 4 weeks notice and had no time to wipe them but they would have had 240GB SSDs) And we sold them for $10/each if you bought 2 or more you got a free monitor for each I bought two Mac Pro 4.1 for $50 each and a MacBook Pro 13 from 2009. Wish i could share what school i work for, buit we'll soon be selling off close to 2 dozzen 2015 Mac Mini with i think 5000 or 6000 series mobile i5 processors(the year before they switched to quad core Intel T series desktop processors)
I used that exact same SSD in a 2011 iMac 21.5 that a computer repair shop was throwing away. The thing looked like new and worked fine! I think it was just being trashed due to its slow HDD. I now use it quite often, and it’s really fast for a 12 year old computer! As usual, great video Luke!
Next to my home office I have two offices at universities; a while ago I bought two of these beauts so I didn't have to schlep anything around any longer. Total cost around 550 euros/600USD. One was a 15" with a damaged (but not broken) display, but as I'm using an external display that really doesn't matter. Slightly decadent approach perhaps, but I'm really happy with it.
I’m actually trying to do this on a 2015 MacBook Pro.. I just need a display assembly but a good one cost like $300+ and I only spent $150 for the MacBook Pro lol
It's crazy this was my first Mac and I was still using this up to about 7 years ago for 5 years straight before that. And honestly if I still have the original MagSafe charger there's really no reason why it won't boot back up just fine today.
I got something similar a little while back, I was looking through eBay and found a 2006 MacBook for $15 listed as "For Parts or Repair" I am not proud of the actual purchase itself, because the problem wasn't actually that bad, it took me 20 minutes & not all that much money to fix once I called in my friend... the password was forgotten... yep, so the seller forgot the password, and we (me & my friend) booted into Terminal ad made an admin account on that puppy and gave me a new account. it was free and only cost me at most 20 minutes... one of the best deals I got in a while.
Great video Luke! I would say that in order to make this video most useful for regular viewers then you should post up the retail price of that SSD in the total cost (since these deals for a free SSD are very rare and also dependent upon your proximity to a MicroCenter; the closest one to me is in Atlanta, GA, some 5 hours away for example). Still, you listed tons of helpful resources for regular folk and I think its absolutely fantastic that (for you) you were able to rescue a perfectly capable MacBook with decently modern MacOS on an SSD and with 8GB of memory for $36! Of course you always manage to find these kinds of deals that I can never manage to find but its still quite impressive! Full disclosure: I’m really only posting this comment because I just got a new Magic Keyboard for my brand new iPad Pro 12.9 and I wanted to experience the typing experience! Other than the necessarily small trackpad, this thing makes my iPad feel and function almost as well as a MacBook! 😮
I UPDATED MINE WITH THE MAX EVERYTHING THRU OWC. MAXED OUT RAM AND GOT A NICE SSD FOR IT AND IT WAS STILL SO SLOW SO I GAVE IT TO MY BROTHER. THAT WAS MY 1ST MacBook Pro IT WAS AWESOME WHEN THE OS X THAT CAME WITH IT. BUT APPLE NO LONGER SENDS OUT SECURITY UPDATES SO I JUST GAVE IT AWAY.
Hey I just got a Mac Pro 4,1 2x Xeon 2.33ghz quad core (I guess since it has 2 CPU’s it has an octa core) with a gt 120 and a 1tb HDD it even came with some goodies like a deck link SDI 4K and a scsi pci card it was a whopping 420$ (nice👌) but I love it Edit: oh yeah and 12gb of ram
ok but please don't forget that is core duo, capable of MAYBE run safari with catalina. i think that those computer are more usable with lion or mountain lion because at least you can use old software and old hardware on them. like connecting ipods and reading cds
actually, they don't go bad after upgrading to an SSD, they go bad because of the way Apple set them up. basically the finish of the aluminum inside the laptop where the HDD/SSD sit is pretty rough, and the way apple set the SATA flex is that it goes "under" the SSD and it is slightly loose, so when you're travelling with your MacBook the flex will rub against the rough aluminum surface and eventually the isolation on the flex will be exposed and start shorting with the aluminum body. i just had this exact problem happen to me last week after almost 10 years of use with my 2012 13" unibody, and i only found out this was actually the issue after nearly 8 hours of troubleshooting and finding a single comment on the official apple forums that mentioned something about this - used a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter and my MacBook booted from my SSD just fine and works flawlessly. luckily these SATA flex cables are cheap though, and this issue can easily be avoided if you put some tape to thicken the isolation of the flex cable where it goes between the SSD and the aluminum. i've had an SSD on this 2012 13" unibody ever since i got it back in 2012 and i've upgraded the SSD twice from 128GB in 2012 to 500GB in 2016 and to 1TB last year.
I'm picking up one of these with the original box and paperwork today for 40 bux! It was a Craigslist find, it's missing a harddrive and I'm guessing the owner just doesn't know it's worth more or just doesn't care.
Luke! Three things!!! One is your videos for the Macs are so great and wonderful, thank you for creating your channel!!!! Two, is: the screen LOOKED SO BAD… how would one work on a computer with a screen continuous movement? And IF THAT is or THERE is a way to comfortably enjoy the computer while looking at it THEN? What we all want to know and SEE is how well does the laptop work in todays world, what’s the hang-ups?
8:34 thtas actually not true, ive got here an late 2008 mac book core 2 duo running monterey without any proplems. yes its a little bit louder and slower but it has got full app support for every single 2022 app
It’s kinda mind blowing to think that you can give real life back to a machine that came out a year after the first iPhone. Word processing, web browsing, general productivity stuff etc. is TOTALLY viable on a machine like this. Say what you want about apple, but a design/build quality/legacy support system that makes ANY tech last this long is something to be impressed with. In theory (especially if you were using a lighter Linux OS) you could bring a 2008 premium PC laptop back to life and make it “the same level” or even better in the same price range, but It wouldn’t look nearly as clean or be up to snuff with most modern interfaces, most often at least. An old thinkPad would probably be the best option for PC aesthetics IMO.
Yeah, I'm always doing stuff like this. I have this weird fascination with rescue computers. The thing is that no one cares. I fixed up a bunch of Optiplex 9020s that I was given for free. Just like in this video, all they needed were new SSDs and one or two needed RAM upgrades. But yeah, no one cares. It took me like two years just to give them all away. Those were perfectly good PCs, too. Quad-core i7s, 8GB of RAM... you could get real work done on them. That is, if you didn't already have something newer, which basically everyone does these days. Oh well. They were fun to play around with. The joys of being a tech nerd.
Thats a good deal. I actually have a mid 2011 i5 21inch imac i found in the recycling centre for free, only thing i done was a ssd and a front panel glass for 29 pounds
So after watching this I took a trip to goodwill and found a late 2009 white MacBook seems that it just needs ram. I only paid 14$ !!! Just ordered some ram let’s hope that was the only issue
Luke Miani is the King of the "I bought a MacBook for 50 cents" story. Absolutely brilliant. He has found his niche in the crowded RUclips tech review market.
Love this type of project video Luke, done something similar with a mid 2012 MacBook Pro and was able to dump a Windows PC, now enjoy full integration with my iPad and iPhone, thanks for sharing 👍😃
![I bought a huge PILE of 32 MacBooks for cheap. Can I fix them? [Part 1]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/DowXEdFiFWQ/mqdefault.jpg)
![I bought a huge PILE of 32 MacBooks for cheap. Can I fix them? [Part 1]](/img/tr.png)
I find old laptops all over the place and can get them working as good as new with minimal effort. I work for the VA and find vets in need that don't have a computer and gift them. It's a very rewarding hobby. I often steal parts from another machine to service another but many of the machines I fix just need a clean reinstall and a new power cord. Keep up the fixes.
@ᗩՏᕼIՏᕼ ᗷᗴᕼᗩᖇᖇY Get a job. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
The Veterans Administration is lucky to have an employee like yourself. Good work.
Hi from Australia! I do this too kind of. I get bulk lots of thrown out, old or decommissioned school/govt PCs, scrub them down, maybe add a new stick of ram or an SSD and pass them on to folks that need them :-)
I'd love to do something like this in the UK- do a community project that gives kids/people in need tech. Its v hard to find the computers here though. As far as I'm aware
Very cool.
Easy to replace battery, RAM and hard drive, those were the days 😅
Yeah
Well now you gotta take out 999,999,999 screws change the RAM, battery and hard drive
@@peyton_1524 Except now you have to just replace the whole MacBook!
It is today too. But you have to escape the Apple prison.
How much you give me the price for this MacBook Pro 16"
A couple of months ago I was given a MacBook Pro 17" 2011. The owner told me it was way to slow to work with anymore. I bought a 46,99 Euro (just over 50 Dollar) 500GB Crucial SSD, put it in and did a fresh install. It has an i7 and with the SSD it works really fast and great. More than enough for surfing, office, simple HD Video editing.
Until the GPU craps itself... My 17 2011 is still chugging along great
These Macs have notorious GPU issues, however there are tutorials to disable the dGPU and only use the Intel HD Graphics one.
@@LeeVxt then I have an excuse to buy an M1x Laptop, or an M2x whenever this happens
:-)
@@NobelTech I haven’t had any luck getting the change to stick … Do you have a link to the fix?
@@NobelTech link???
My brother in law was about to dispose of a "non working" MacBook Pro 15 inch mid 2012. I asked him to give it to me.
Only problem was a bad battery and looked like new. I purchased a cheap used battery on ebay. Latter on upgraded to a 250GB SSD and maxed it to 16GB of RAM.
Upgraded to Catalina and now planning to replace the heat sink thermal compound before upgrading to Monterey by using the Open Core Legacy Patcher.
It is my daily driver and I love it. It came with the power adapter and everything looks brand new. Even the keyboard. I also purchased a funky multicolor shell case protector. I'm happy.
Another hard to believe deal from Luke “the-luckiest-deal-finder-on-earth” Miani.
Well done by the way, great video! I’m glad to see more projects like this again in the near future
Hahaha. ...exactly
I've been going to Goodwill's for years, never found a laptop much less a MacBook
i would say ive beaten him once or twice, once got a 2015 15 inch 2.5ghz macbook pro, with a 512gb ssd for 40 bucks :P
@@harlow1126 solid AF man, even with intel iris graphics only😀
Just picked up a totally free mid 2009 17" MacBook Pro with 8GB ram included & separately a free 240gb SSD - Freecycle is the way to go. The battery is okish, may change at a later time - see how it goes. The cycle count is only 81 but it was left uncharged for several years so only holds charge for 2-3 hours. My only cost so far is a £5 usb WiFi dongle as the WiFi card was not working and a £6 enclosure to convert the M2 SSD to SATA.
Using OpenCore-Patcher it now happily runs Monterey 12.4 and with Quartz Debug the screen res is running 960x600 HiDPi (although its not a retina screen it looks as good to my eyes). Considering the graphics are only NVIDA GeForce 9400M 256MB it's running very well. Good luck, go hunting - you never know!
I'm going to miss those kind of projects in the future. Imagine this with a 2016+ MacBook Pro.
it's such a pain removing the batteries from those.
edit: changing out the speakers is relatively easy though.
Its a shame Apple have chosen the way they have. Appreciate that they want to innovate but its a shame their innovations are at the cost of repairability and upgradabililty.
@@willm5032 i mean they can at least attempt to make it easier. it's such a pain in the ass trying to change a macbook battery. and the software locks on the iphone too
@@willm5032 Yeah, they "innovate" on purpose to make it virtually impossible for people to do anything to "their" Apple products. They're fighting Right to Repair, but frankly, even if they end up having to comply, they've made it so difficult to do anything without super expensive equipment, it's going to be tough to do your own work like this anyway. Unless you have Louis Rossman skills!
@@mbrock5532 Yuuup, you're not wrong
*luke in an apple store sees a macbook*: "I'm gonna go check that out"
i just got a 2010 MacBook Pro for $115 on ebay and maxed it out for cheap with 8gb RAM and 240gb SSD... Nice little laptop for work and even got Catalina running on it smooth as hell
I love how we're coming back to the hardware side of your channel. Though I'm afraid for the future of the unrepairable Macs.
Excellent content without clickbait speculation! Luke is back!!!
@@whaletrain7070 can I get proof since I don’t know if it was real or not
@@whaletrain7070 proof of it being click bait or not, I’m not sure
@@whaletrain7070 thanks man 👍
They work surprisingly well with an SSD and 8GB of RAM, but the CPU usage does spike with modern web browsing. I used one of these late 2008 MBPs for a decade, good unit.
I'd love a remake of the "Best Macs under $200". Maybe some with different price points as well though.
macbook air 2015 11" are the best for that price
@@mohammedb4ig but they are extremely slow, best to be more patient and save up some more money to buy the 2016 pro or 2018 MacBook air refresh
if you're on any kind of budget, please don't get a mac. It will almost always be a better deal with MUCH better performance to get a windows pc
@@weegle. nah macs are greatly optimized. best to get a mac (for basic tasks. you can’t do anything with a $200 laptop)
@@mohammedb4ig a laptop with an optimized os would almost never beat a laptop with plain better specs. Plus, if you really want an optized experience, use Chrome OS, Linux, or Windows 10S. Also, I've used a cheap macbook (300$); it's slow, clunky, and can barely run any applications due to its age. As opposed to a 300$ Windows laptop I used which could at least download any application I wanted and ran pretty okay
Thanks to your channel, I learned enough to take a chance on a $12 iMac someone had. Turns out it's a late 2015 21.5" iMac with a quad-core i5, 8 GB of RAM, and a 1TB drive. All it needed was an OS! I'm about to install Mojave and enjoy! Thanks! :D
Your videos are awesome, and I really admire the mindset and philosophy of repurposing old equipment that's still perfectly useful, and giving it a new lease of life, saving it from ending up in a landfill. I'm typing this from a late 2011 macbook pro that I just watched this video on
I have the same laptop that I bought in late 2008, 8gb of ram and a512 gb SSD. Still works great.
Still rocking a 2010 MacBook Pro 15" with 16 GB RAM and a 500GB SSD 😍. Gonna upgrade this year
“Let me look in my RAM drawer” haha the most Luke quote ever. Great video as always. ! Thanks
Great find. That was the machine that convinced me to switch to Mac. Lots of ports, easy to tweak. All the benefits of OS X plus you could run any other OS in a VM. Great for development use. Even had digital optical input/output which was fantastic for recording and something that I can't believe Apple dropped.
when I see Mac and cheese out of the corner of my eye im gonna go check it out
I got a 13” mid 2012 MacBook Pro for 15$ without ram and a dead battery and hard drive. Put 12gbs of ram, a 480gb ssd and a new battery and it runs like new.
I just bought two Macbook Pros for $20 off FB Marketplace in San Diego. One was a 15 inch from early 2011 and the other a 13 inch from mid 2012. Both were missing hard drives and RAM. After they were added, both machines worked!!!
Coupon is in store only. I haven't had my hopes and dreams destroyed like that in quite a while.
Me too
Nice pickup. I really appreciate your deep dives into Apple device repair. Most people assume devices are trash far too early. Great job Luke.
I've done a few fixes myself for F&F. My mom who is not very tech savvy was looking at purchasing a brand new laptop a few years ago. I got her a 2012 Macbook Pro that I bought at a pawn shop 3 years ago for under $75. It was marked as "broken - does not boot". It actually did boot but had the Folder icon. Brought it home and imagined my surprise when I opened it. It had a 240GB SSD and 4GB RAM - not too shabby. Installed High Sierra and gave it to my mom as a surprise present. She uses it for email, web surfing, and watching RUclips videos. This 2012 Macbook Pro is still going strong!
I’m planning on buying the 2015 MacBook Pro, and I’ll get it an old Thunderbolt Display. Nice to see Micro Center on another channel besides Austin Evans’s channel.
absolutely recommended. I bought mine last year very cheap because it was "broken" according to the owner and aesthetically it looked really bad. It turns out that he erased the disk partition with the operating system. I cleaned it up, installed macOS from a usb, and got a very powerful machine for little money. the battery had only 230 cycles! it was the best deal of my life.
Also, It is the latest model that you can open, clean and update by yourself without problems, the keyboard is amazing and it is still compatible with new versions of macOS (runs really well) go for it!
@@gabrielaherrera9937 for your comment, you have gained one subscriber. Thank you for helping me make this decision.
@@gabrielaherrera9937 omg that's a crazy steal. How do they even forget that there is no OS inside the disk. Nice find man
@@cl_0ud470 technically it was not a steal. after i bought it, had the blinking question mark sign when booting so i thought 'probably the ssd is dead' and i was ready to buy a new one but then i got the idea to boot it from an external hard drive that a friend lent me and format the ssd to see if it was working… and it was.
It seems to be that the owner didn't know what that sign meant and simply thought it was totally broken.
What about linus tech tips 💔
I got a free 2009 MacBook Pro 13" from a high school where my mother used to work. They were throwing it away, and she asked if she could take it. She then gave it to me since she didn't know if it was working. Over the years, I maxed out the RAM to 8 GB, swapped out the HDD for a cheap SSD, upgraded to macOS Mojave via the patch from dosdude1, and replaced the speakers and battery. Still works great to this day!
Nothing more rewarding than a rescue project. I have a 2012 11" macbook air with the upgraded i7 and 8gb of ram that i got for FREE because the shift key was stuck and it only booted into safe mode. Took it apart and reseated the keyboard ribbon cable which fixed both issues.
I still use my late 2008 unibody MacBook with upgraded ram and an ssd and I upgraded it to Mac OS Catalina it’s very very slow but I’m kinda broke and have no money to spare so I made the best of what I have.😂( overall tho I don’t use it very much simply because of how slow it is)
Keep in mind with some of these old ones you might need to change out the battery too! sometimes those cycles can be pretty high, so they can't keep a charge.
I got an old MacBook Pro from Mid 2009, slapped 8 GBs of RAM, a 500 GB SSD and a new battery in there and installed macOS Catalina with dosdue1's patcher. It works just fine.
Monterey and Big Sur are possible but they don't look good and don't function flawlessly so I'll stick with 10.15
This reminds me of when I sold my 2009 Unibody on e-bay. Logic board was kaput, I removed the HD and listed it as broken/parts only. The guy who bought it was pissed as he just thought it needed a new HD. Guy it literally said broken/parts only in the title and 5 times in the description.
It is amazing how only RUclipsrs seem to find used Macs in thrift store :-)
Pretty decent video. I would be happy to see that boy in real world test such as office apps, browsing or maybe playing some games.
I will be doing this exact upgrade in a few days. I just won a bid for a 2008 15 inch. Just under $35 including shipping. only issue that I'm aware of is there's no OS installed on it. I as well have the dosdude patcher on a flash drive so, I'll be installing that. I'll use it as it is for now but, I'll eventually upgrade the RAM and change it over to an SSD.
The perfect fit for this would be Elementary OS :)
Absolut not
You would be surprised how far you can go with the DosDude or Mr. Macintosh patchers. I'm typing this on a 2010 Mac Pro with 32gig of ram and a 1tb ssd running the Monterey OS. Smooth sailing so far.
My dear friend, you have approached this project with a true and noble heart and perseverance, and for this reason all of France adores you…
Awesome find. You should adjust your camera shutter speed to prevent the scanlines on the Macbook screen! ;)
I was literally looking at old macbook pros to restore yesterday so this video came perfectly on time!
I really missed these repair videos! So glad they’re back!
Sold my late 2008 Macbook Aluminum and bought mid 2010 Macbook Pro for 110$. Don't know why I love this era of Macbook so much😂. Maybe next i will get the 2012 model.
"schools are throwing out devices"
This 100% we recently had a garage sale where we sold ~160 Dell Optiplexes with 2nd and 3rd gen core i5, with 8GB of RAM(no drive because i was given only 4 weeks notice and had no time to wipe them but they would have had 240GB SSDs) And we sold them for $10/each if you bought 2 or more you got a free monitor for each
I bought two Mac Pro 4.1 for $50 each and a MacBook Pro 13 from 2009. Wish i could share what school i work for, buit we'll soon be selling off close to 2 dozzen 2015 Mac Mini with i think 5000 or 6000 series mobile i5 processors(the year before they switched to quad core Intel T series desktop processors)
You can put Big Sur on those, with opencore legacy patcher.
watching on a 21.5 inch 2009 Mac Its slow as hell but its still going strong for a 12 year old computer
I love fixit. Been using it for my Macs for years!
I used that exact same SSD in a 2011 iMac 21.5 that a computer repair shop was throwing away. The thing looked like new and worked fine! I think it was just being trashed due to its slow HDD. I now use it quite often, and it’s really fast for a 12 year old computer! As usual, great video Luke!
Hey in the ad… it’s my man Sam Kohl promoting CleanMyMac X!!
I didn’t know Samothy Cookothy did that
Got a 2012 MacBook for $300 + $100 for ram and hdd, it’s not particularly fast but it can edit 4K video so that’s cool.
Yup can install Big Sur with open core legacy patcher.
Next to my home office I have two offices at universities; a while ago I bought two of these beauts so I didn't have to schlep anything around any longer. Total cost around 550 euros/600USD. One was a 15" with a damaged (but not broken) display, but as I'm using an external display that really doesn't matter. Slightly decadent approach perhaps, but I'm really happy with it.
I’m actually trying to do this on a 2015 MacBook Pro.. I just need a display assembly but a good one cost like $300+ and I only spent $150 for the MacBook Pro lol
It's crazy this was my first Mac and I was still using this up to about 7 years ago for 5 years straight before that. And honestly if I still have the original MagSafe charger there's really no reason why it won't boot back up just fine today.
I got something similar a little while back, I was looking through eBay and found a 2006 MacBook for $15 listed as "For Parts or Repair" I am not proud of the actual purchase itself, because the problem wasn't actually that bad, it took me 20 minutes & not all that much money to fix once I called in my friend...
the password was forgotten... yep, so the seller forgot the password, and we (me & my friend) booted into Terminal ad made an admin account on that puppy and gave me a new account. it was free and only cost me at most 20 minutes... one of the best deals I got in a while.
Great video Luke! I would say that in order to make this video most useful for regular viewers then you should post up the retail price of that SSD in the total cost (since these deals for a free SSD are very rare and also dependent upon your proximity to a MicroCenter; the closest one to me is in Atlanta, GA, some 5 hours away for example). Still, you listed tons of helpful resources for regular folk and I think its absolutely fantastic that (for you) you were able to rescue a perfectly capable MacBook with decently modern MacOS on an SSD and with 8GB of memory for $36! Of course you always manage to find these kinds of deals that I can never manage to find but its still quite impressive! Full disclosure: I’m really only posting this comment because I just got a new Magic Keyboard for my brand new iPad Pro 12.9 and I wanted to experience the typing experience! Other than the necessarily small trackpad, this thing makes my iPad feel and function almost as well as a MacBook! 😮
this is better than the modern macbooks, easy battery replacement, easy hard drive removal, easy ram upgrades. what's not to like?
Party in the city where the heat is on
All night, on the beach till the break of dawn
"Welcome to Miani"
"Bienvenidos a Miani"
Haha, glad to find I'm not the only one to sing that in my head when I get a notification from Luke!
Very cool video. Where'd you got that nice wallpaper from?
Please use static precautions you could be killing your chips.
I UPDATED MINE WITH THE MAX EVERYTHING THRU OWC. MAXED OUT RAM AND GOT A NICE SSD FOR IT AND IT WAS STILL SO SLOW SO I GAVE IT TO MY BROTHER. THAT WAS MY 1ST MacBook Pro IT WAS AWESOME WHEN THE OS X THAT CAME WITH IT. BUT APPLE NO LONGER SENDS OUT SECURITY UPDATES SO I JUST GAVE IT AWAY.
Tried Big Sur on my 7,1 MacBook Pro runs well enough. Mojave definitely runs better though but it’s still usable. Acceleration is available now.
I daily a 15 in 2009 MacBook pro and I absolutely love it
This is crazy! Good job Luke!
Luka, du hier?
@@iNerdJan ja
dude this is crazy!!! I have to replace a battery and speakers in a 2013 MBP and the cost is $$.
Somehow I can't picture LM in a Goodwill store .... Unreal how you get so lucky .... 😀
This was my first modern Mac. Such a good computer.
Hey I just got a Mac Pro 4,1 2x Xeon 2.33ghz quad core (I guess since it has 2 CPU’s it has an octa core) with a gt 120 and a 1tb HDD it even came with some goodies like a deck link SDI 4K and a scsi pci card it was a whopping 420$ (nice👌) but I love it
Edit: oh yeah and 12gb of ram
I've never seen any laptops at Goodwill before.
ok but please don't forget that is core duo, capable of MAYBE run safari with catalina. i think that those computer are more usable with lion or mountain lion because at least you can use old software and old hardware on them. like connecting ipods and reading cds
A mac.. with ports and a swappable battery. How amazing!
I would like to see you do a step by step of the patch tool and some things to do and not do and what to watch out for.
This kind of video are so much better than the so called "leaks" ones.
For people browsing the internet etc this would do the job probably better then some cheap pc newer then the Mac
Don't forget the thermal paste !!! They need it !
I love these montages! They look so fancy and cool!! Keep it up! I honestly think you should have a million subscribers
DosDude is my hero. Wish you could interview him!
Did you consider replacing the SATA cable? I've found that a lot of MacBooks in the 2009-2013 era had the SATA cables go bad after upgrading to SSD.
actually, they don't go bad after upgrading to an SSD, they go bad because of the way Apple set them up.
basically the finish of the aluminum inside the laptop where the HDD/SSD sit is pretty rough, and the way apple set the SATA flex is that it goes "under" the SSD and it is slightly loose, so when you're travelling with your MacBook the flex will rub against the rough aluminum surface and eventually the isolation on the flex will be exposed and start shorting with the aluminum body.
i just had this exact problem happen to me last week after almost 10 years of use with my 2012 13" unibody, and i only found out this was actually the issue after nearly 8 hours of troubleshooting and finding a single comment on the official apple forums that mentioned something about this - used a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter and my MacBook booted from my SSD just fine and works flawlessly.
luckily these SATA flex cables are cheap though, and this issue can easily be avoided if you put some tape to thicken the isolation of the flex cable where it goes between the SSD and the aluminum.
i've had an SSD on this 2012 13" unibody ever since i got it back in 2012 and i've upgraded the SSD twice from 128GB in 2012 to 500GB in 2016 and to 1TB last year.
I'm picking up one of these with the original box and paperwork today for 40 bux! It was a Craigslist find, it's missing a harddrive and I'm guessing the owner just doesn't know it's worth more or just doesn't care.
Luke! Three things!!! One is your videos for the Macs are so great and wonderful, thank you for creating your channel!!!! Two, is: the screen LOOKED SO BAD… how would one work on a computer with a screen continuous movement? And IF THAT is or THERE is a way to comfortably enjoy the computer while looking at it THEN? What we all want to know and SEE is how well does the laptop work in todays world, what’s the hang-ups?
I’m the Old school and I love this type of 💻 🙋♂️
8:34 thtas actually not true, ive got here an late 2008 mac book core 2 duo running monterey without any proplems. yes its a little bit louder and slower but it has got full app support for every single 2022 app
In the video: i bought it for $20.
In the description: $36
Real price: $200
XD
The right to repair out the window thesedays. Awesome lamps btw.
I am watching this video on an original unibody.
Running Big Sur with graphics acceleration with open core.
Will dosdude1 do a patcher for Monterey?
As a windows user over the years, Im happy i switched to the 2017 macbook pro.
Honestly on Mac's 2012 or older I just install Linux as it's much faster than newer versions of Mac OS
It’s kinda mind blowing to think that you can give real life back to a machine that came out a year after the first iPhone. Word processing, web browsing, general productivity stuff etc. is TOTALLY viable on a machine like this. Say what you want about apple, but a design/build quality/legacy support system that makes ANY tech last this long is something to be impressed with.
In theory (especially if you were using a lighter Linux OS) you could bring a 2008 premium PC laptop back to life and make it “the same level” or even better in the same price range, but It wouldn’t look nearly as clean or be up to snuff with most modern interfaces, most often at least. An old thinkPad would probably be the best option for PC aesthetics IMO.
Yeah, I'm always doing stuff like this. I have this weird fascination with rescue computers. The thing is that no one cares. I fixed up a bunch of Optiplex 9020s that I was given for free. Just like in this video, all they needed were new SSDs and one or two needed RAM upgrades.
But yeah, no one cares. It took me like two years just to give them all away. Those were perfectly good PCs, too. Quad-core i7s, 8GB of RAM... you could get real work done on them.
That is, if you didn't already have something newer, which basically everyone does these days. Oh well. They were fun to play around with. The joys of being a tech nerd.
Thats a good deal. I actually have a mid 2011 i5 21inch imac i found in the recycling centre for free, only thing i done was a ssd and a front panel glass for 29 pounds
Mac OS 12 has a patcher now on legacy open core
the quality of your video is great!!
mine was 45 and it was just a ram misplacement lol macbook pro 2010 13 in running linux didnt know about the patcher
Luke is really flexing micro centre. ;)
So after watching this I took a trip to goodwill and found a late 2009 white MacBook seems that it just needs ram. I only paid 14$ !!! Just ordered some ram let’s hope that was the only issue
Luke Miani is the King of the "I bought a MacBook for 50 cents" story. Absolutely brilliant. He has found his niche in the crowded RUclips tech review market.
Change the thermal-paste Luke.
Holly crap that's a cool lamp!
Wait since when do MacBook’s end up at Goodwill?
You could build a MacBook from all separate parts, maybe even non matching ones
Love this type of project video Luke, done something similar with a mid 2012 MacBook Pro and was able to dump a Windows PC, now enjoy full integration with my iPad and iPhone, thanks for sharing 👍😃