So I went to the dump a couple weeks ago and came back with something pretty cool. I was dropping off a box of old electronics (which they take for free), and I spotted an Apple product in the pile. Despite being gold in color, I pulled it out and brought it home. After charging it up, I learned that the screen was damaged, probably because the previous owner closed something in the hinge. Otherwise, it functioned perfectly. I wiped out the previous owner’s data and got macOS installed so I could get to About This Mac. I picked up a 2015 12″ MacBook; the base model with a 1.1 GHz Core m processor, 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. Definitely not amazing specs, but it runs Firefox and ssh sessions just as well as anything else. Plus it was free.
I bought a used display assembly on eBay for $120 and used OpenCore Legacy Patcher to get Monterey installed. I’m pretty pleased with my find. I was originally planning on selling it, but it’s only worth about $250, so I think I’m going to use it until the keyboard stops working (this was the first device with Apple’s infamous butterfly keyboard) and then sell it for parts. If finances allow I’ll probably pick up the then-current MacBook Air when that happens.
I have a perfectly good HP laptop with a Ryzen 4500U, but I hate the form factor. It’s a 15″ laptop with a 16:9 display, which is just too damn wide, and the 1080p resolution is barely adequate for a display that size. The trackpad is awful, especially coming from the Surface Book I had previously. Two things Apple laptops do better than anyone else are displays and trackpads. All their displays are 16:10, which strikes a nice balance between width and height, although I think I might prefer 3:2 or 4:3. Apple trackpads are second to none in my opinion. Large, but not too large, and the force touch thing is fantastic. The whole trackpad clicks, so you never have to move your fingers off their target to make a click.
I’ve been making trips to the dump here and there since I got a truck (which is another post I should write), so hopefully the next dump trip has another diamond in the rough waiting for me.