This fucking Macbook!
My Macbook Pro is still out of commission, and I’m unfortunately left waiting for Unisys Australia to get parts in and arrange a home visit. It’s supposed to be 2 to 5 business days, and with the federal holiday last week I think they still have another day or two to live up to that.
So I started playing around with the old (old) Macbook Pro Greg sent me away with. I got it to boot by resetting the NVRAM, and thought maybe I had it licked. It has OSX Lion on it, as it’s a late-2011 17" MBP with the 2nd-gen i7 and no discrete graphics card, so it won’t go to Big Sur. I can put up to High Sierra on it, but I had to go there by way of Sierra first due to some issue or another (it refused to upgrade straight to it). Since I wasn’t sure what data Greg might have on it, I dropped another hard disk into it (remember when you could do that?) before I started.
It went catatonic a couple of times, but it got there. It stayed working overnight long enough to download the OS update, but after rebooting it was broken again. Reset the NVRAM again, and it’s fine… then I accidentally started Photo Booth and that screwed everything up. After a reboot, multiple tries of resetting it, it wouldn’t work, so I gave up. Today, reset the NVRAM again and it’s fine.
I’m suspecting there’s some minor issue with the logic board of it - it still acts up when it’s running off battery, but the battery looks in really good health (it seems it was replaced at some point). Activating the webcam is enough to send it right off the deep end, but sometimes it’ll do it on it’s own with no reason. When it does so, both the heatsinks on the back of the unit and the power supply heat up significantly.
I had originally thought it was maybe the aftermarket RAM that’s in it, as I know the iMac was deeply unhappy with non-Apple RAM in it, but I don’t think that’s the case either.
So what to do with it? I don’t think there’s much to do with it… even buying a logic board replacement for it is a significant investment, and it’s really not worth it. I don’t think I’d use it for anything either, I’d only use a Mac for work and with it not having access to the current security patches pretty much rules it out for that purpose. I guess if I decided I wanted to start collecting Apple computers again I have another unit for the shelf? Greg said to sell it off for parts otherwise, but considering I don’t actually know what’s broken I wouldn’t really do much but sell the entire thing, and I don’t know if it’s worth anything.
Update 2021-02-04: Someone from Apple’s contractor company called today, they’re coming on Monday! Apparently they’ll be fixing it at my dining room table which is kinda neat, but it’ll probably happen at work so I can’t very well sticky-beak.
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