Ask HN: What to do with a old MacBook Pro? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What to do with a old MacBook Pro?

5 pointsquietthrow9 comments

I have a 2011, 17inch MacBook Pro and when I tried to update it to the last OS X I found that it won't as this laptop has entered unsupported hardware territory.

the laptop works just fine even today (2.5 Ghz intel i7), 8GB Ram and 512GB SSD. Other than the fact that its a bit heavy compared to the new MacBooks it works fine for everyday tasks. The keyboard is superb!

I am looking to understand what all I can do with this laptop. I could sell it to some kid but I feel with the unsupported hardware and OS I am duping them? Other option is I can give it to apple - while they won't pay me they will recycle it.

My Questions:

* What are folks doing when they encounter this situation? Linux? kids? some other interesting project?

* Do you follow any rules where after certain x amount of time, you simply trade in the apple hardware so as to get something reasonable for it and use it towards the next hardware. In essence have a certain amount of 'working capital' that is constantly used towards the hardware but that capital is < than the full price of the laptop (due to the trade in money gotten as part of every trade in cycle)

FWIW, I just upgraded my late 2011 macbook pro to Catalina using http://dosdude1.com/catalina/ because I needed the latest XCode.

It's working fine, though you need to live with the fact that it's now a "compromised" system.

I could sell it to some kid but I feel with the unsupported hardware and OS I am duping them? Other option is I can give it to apple - while they won't pay me they will recycle it.

Giving it to a kid is another option. It will run Linux just fine.

I'm at the same point with my MBP2012-pre-retina.

The last one without ram soldered to the board so you can upgrade it.

It's still my daily driver in 2020 with 16gb ram and an ssd.

I was looking at the 2020-MBP with the new keyboard but beyond some graphics/performance improvements in games, I'm not seeing a compelling argument to upgrade.

Having it on the LAN plugged into some external hard drives as a no-additional-spend NAS might work.

I have the same model as you and love it. I didn't think about Apple stopping updates to it. Is your laptop actually utilizing the full 16gb of ram? I upgraded to 8gb but was not sure if 16gb is fully supported or not as Apple said it wasn't.

I have an old mid 2012 27" iMac in a similar situation except that it's extremely slow and almost unusable. I'm thinking about keeping it until its supported by end of this year and then move to Linux.

Too bad such an expensive computer at the time its barely unusable specially on XCode.

My 2011 Mac mini was extremely slow for a while (early in its life) and the cause turned out to be the hard drive's slowly failing.

I made a home media server with plex when faced with the same question.

I kept my old laptop (used to be win7, now Ubuntu) since my printer only support USB printing. Other than that you can keep it for side projects within your LAN =)

My 2011's SATA cable kept going bad, so I finally just sold it to someone and got a 2015. Awesome decision.

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