I converted a Macbook into a PC | Hacker News Reader

I converted a Macbook into a PC

community.frame.work

113 pointsstarkparker79 comments

> The Macbook is a 2010 17" so it would have been pretty easy to upgrade and repair (socketed Ram and HDD, screwed in battery) but the age would have made this laptop not only unusably slow but it was also dead as a doornail. Its [sic] one of the still good Macbooks with the glowing apple logo.

This detail from the comments explains why they'd replace hardware rather than simply installing Linux as-is. I was a little perplexed until I saw this.

I'm more perplexed that a reasonably high-end system from 2010 would be considered "unusably slow". There are still many who are satisfied with less. I suppose it depends on what they intend to use it for.

My “late 2014” Mac Mini had indeed become unusably slow (before I installed Debian on it, that is).

It's closer to a RPi 4 than RPi 5 for CPU performance, and neither GPU has much in the way of video transcoding hardware. Something as simple as 1080p60 H.264 playback may be beyond the capabilities of that machine.

> Something as simple as 1080p60 H.264 playback

Where can you even find 60fps video of decent quality? That's framerate I associate more with gaming than video production. Surely 24fps is still the standard today? (I am very ignorant in this regard; please be kind.)

I think most people would generally expect their laptop (especially a high-end model) to be capable of playing a video shot on their phone. But today's low-end phones have much more powerful processors than that old laptop.

I think most would likely watch the video on their phone itself.

I don't think it's unreasonable for people to expect to be able to tag their photos on their laptop, no? It's a very common workflow which is nevertheless kind of a pain to do on a mobile device.

Personally, I often use my laptop to watch game footage (with commentary) on YouTube or Twitch. That’s not a use case everyone will care about, but it’s quite a popular one.

YouTube has a ton of 60fps content

Something as simple as 1080p60 H.264 playback may be beyond the capabilities of that machine.

A 1st-gen i7 (2008) can decode 1080p60 H.264 in software in realtime. Been there, done that.

In 2008 the i7 branding had only been used on desktop chips. Were you running your desktop with a 35W limit?

I recently dug out a 2013 MacBook and I’m surprised at how slow it feels. “Unusably” is of course a subjective measure but I think if I was using this day to day I’d get annoyed.

Replace the HDD with an SSD, max out the RAM, and repaste the CPU whilst hacking it to run the latest MacOs or Linux and you’ll find a a very usable experience.

Source: I just did this with a 2011 MacBook Pro

I did that with a 2012 Mac Mini a few years ago, and it was ok, but not great. A few months ago I replaced it with a little Intel N100 box, and I'm much happier now.

Consider that the utility of old hardware depends on what you want to do with it, as well.

That 2013 model (at least the late 2013 model that I have) añready has an SSD. RAM is soldered if I remember correctly.

Thr issue that mine has - aside from a broken hinge over time - is that one of the thermal sensors is fucked, so the machine puts the fans on full and heavily throttles the CPU. Before that happened (last year) it was a solid machine.

I have an i7/32GB/SSD x230 from 2013 and it's perfectly usable for everything I've thrown at it so far, so ymmv.

I have an x220 and an x201 with SATA SSDs and they both run great, although repasting the cpus is on my list of things to do, as the fans do run more than I'd like.

I have Debian on both but recently I was testing old SSDs and one had windows 10 and even that was perfectly usable.

My main daily driver is a MacBook Pro 64GB M2 Max, so it's not like I live in a world of ancient tech and don't understand the difference.

TBH no windows 8+ feels as fast and responsive as a Linux computer, nor as fast as the my first windows 7 computer on my first SSD.

is macOS at Vista phase?

> "unusably slow". There are still many who are satisfied with less

Who exactly are satisfied with less than a 15 y/o notebook? Why are they on (more than) 15 y/o notebook and not on a smartphone?

> I suppose it depends on what they intend to use it for.

15 notebook is enough to be a glorified typewritter or tty, or to watch some movies (forget about HEVC, x265 and even x264 is troublesome)

              Intel Core i5-540M @ 2.53GHz vs AMD Ryzen 3 4300U
    Clockspeed                      2.5 GHz    2.7 GHz   
    Turbo Speed               Up to 3.1 GHz    Up to 3.7 GHz
    # of Physical Cores      2 (Threads: 4)    4 (Threads: 4)   
    Cache     L1: 128KB, L2: 0.5MB, L3: 3MB    L1: 256KB, L2: 2.0MB, L3: 4MB
    First Seen on Chart             Q1 2010    Q1 2020
    Single Thread Rating       1159(-49.8%)    2307(0.0%)   
    CPU Mark                   1808(-75.7%)    7431(0.0%)

> 15 notebook is enough to be a glorified typewritter

Glorified typewriter is a perfectly acceptable use case. Plenty people out there who just want to write a novel or thesis or email or look up a recipe or Wikipedia. Not everyone is gaming and watching 4k video

> look up a recipe

Do you even internet?

Just try it yourself on some 2c/4t machine from 2010. Sure, you can do it, but it would be an exercise in patience.

I've done it on even older machines and it's perfectly fast.

Maybe it's because I don't use bloatware browsers and keep JS off by default.

Ah, that settles it. You forgot what you aren't everyone else.

I used a laptop from 2010 until recently (2022?). Only downside was some games and software wouldn't run due to minimum OpenGL level. I think I had to upgrade when I needed to use Blender.

Older Macs can’t run the latest macOS. My daughter uses a 2013 MacBook Air for school, and it is limited to macOS Sierra, which none of the evergreen web browsers support any more. I’ve also not been able to find a modern email client to install on it.

(I guess GP’s point that installing Linux would be the sensible course of action is probably true with this laptop).

Firefox 115 ESR still supports Sierra until next year: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-users-macos-101...

Unusual slowness might be experienced if the battery is dead or missing, as the embedded controller / SMC will assert the CPUs bi-directional PROCHOT signal and with that, lock it to the lowest available clock speed (700 MHz-ish on a 2nd gen Core i7, sitting in a 2011 MBP).

If you coerce it to... not do that, the laptop might reset whenever power usage goes up quickly, because it was designed with the expectation that the battery will jump in and act as a reserve.

I thought "aren't MacBooks already PCs, at least between when they were PPC and before they started using ARM", but then this is actually an "engine swap".

They are Personal Computers and I'm dying on that hill

Yes!

People who keep saying PC when they mean a Windows or Linux machine. As if the Apple machines weren't PCs too.

It seems that in the Apple world, PC means "IBM PC-compatible".

> The designation "PC", as used in much of personal computer history, has not meant "personal computer" generally, but rather an x86 computer capable of running the same software that a contemporary IBM or Lenovo PC could.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC%E2%80%93compatible

(Lenovo's mentioned because they bought IBM's PC division.)

I remember being hugely confused by this when I first saw a PC, asked my friend what kind of computer it was, and got the answer "it's a PC". Like being told "it's a computer". Thanks?

This is a fairly recent usage. Back in the day, the term was "IBM-compatible", then later, "Wintel". It wasn't common to treat the term "PC" as being exclusive of Apple hardware until Apple's "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" ad campaign of the mid-2000s.

I think that date could be pushed back to at least 1995. Here's an article dated January 1996 about SoftWindows, for Mac, which uses phrases like "Mac and PC clipboards", "running PC programs", "playing PC games", and "PC sound cards".

https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PC...

Here also is an article about desktop publishing from 1990.

https://archive.org/details/FinancialTimes1990UKEnglish/Sep%...

It talks about "running a Mac-based system and a PC-based system side by side", and how "some text and graphics files can be moved relatively easily between Mac and PC formats". Opposite is an advert for Toshiba's early IBM PC compatible laptops, bragging about winning awards from PC User magazine, which I don't think featured Macs.

But when was any Mac ever called a PC? I don't think the Mac Plus, for instance, was called a PC at any point?

SoftWindows was Windows bundled with x86 emulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC, created in 1986. Note the PC in the name, apparently equivalent in meaning to x86 already. Maybe this was implicitly short for IBM PC Compatible, maybe the term PC was ambiguous back then, and for the next two decades, but I doubt it. (Clearly it is still somewhat ambiguous, though, or I'd have nothing to wrangle about here.)

The full phrase was "IBM PC compatible" and that dates back to the 1980s.

And it was specific to the PC model. The PC was a new architecture and IBM was otherwise better known for their other products at the time.

PC was established long before those Apple commercials.

The key here is that it always included "IBM" in some way. "IBM-compatible" or "IBM PC", or "IBM clone" or something along those lines. "PC" without reference to IBM was not specifically tied to the Wintel ecosystem, at least outside of Mac user circles, until comparatively recently.

Additionally I think in casual context PC has implication that it is the Desktop Computer and not a Laptop which is what the OP has.

I associate the term with something that descends from IBM PCs, which (thank god, for I abhor their usability) macs are not.

I'd even say MacOS is better for casual use out of the box than Windows.

Does anyone else get a horrible feeling inside when seeing these pointless hobby projects? Like, instead of buying a PC, spent many valuable hours doing this.

Maybe it's just because they're time rich and I'm time poor. Perhaps it's similar to how a hungry person feels when they see a food fight on TV.

Revelling in waste.

Yes, but then I tell myself that everyone can benefit from stress-relief, and what works best for stress-relief will depend intricately on the individual.

Do we have important things to do with our free time instead, though? What alternative activity would have made you feel more comfortable? I guess maybe creating great art or curing cancer, but those things sound difficult.

Cool, you've got free time.

Cherish it. Best things in life are free; time is among them.

This is true. I do ... acceptably well at securing free time. I seem to have anxieties about it all the same. I notice a lot of the songs I listen to are about time-anxiety, such as ''Got the time'' and ''Time has come today''.

This is no playing Call of Duty after a hard day of work though. This is work.

Would it be better to you if the person posting this was secretly paid to do this by Framework and it's an ad? (not insinuating that it is, just posing a hypothetical)

Yeah it would be

Which is interesting, because if it came out that it were paid content, I'm sure that would be a scandal in and of itself.

It's like the hungry person is now being bribed, with food, to pretend to waste it. After they finish throwing it around on camera, they can keep what they can scrape off the floor.

For some reason, the Dutch game show, De Grote Donorshow (The Great Donor Show) comes to mind, where 25 people competed to get a kidneys from one terminally ill woman.

Ha! That is awful, thank you for telling me about it.

Not waste; an opposite of it.

First, you can't exactly buy a PC like this. At best you can pay to have one custom-built for you.

Second, this is an exercise of some hardware skills, both mechanical and electronic. The machine, besides being a good working machine, is an excellent conversation piece, including conversations with prospective employers.

Third, it may be a rewarding pastime. If you think that pastime is useless waste, and productive work should consume 100% of your awake time, (re-)watch the movie called "The Shining" as a part of mandatory job safety training.

> you can't exactly buy a PC like this.

This. Apple's case design is unmatched.

Buying a new Mac won't give you a very good experience with (Asahi) Linux yet. ARM Windows sucks too.

This build is a self serviceable Linux dream machine.

I imagine this person got some level of enjoyment from working on this project and then seeing the end result, likely some enjoyment as well everytime they use it, or even just look at it.

Seems you are so busy you forgot what a hobby is and the enjoyment it can bring.

I see the opposite, this person may have learned a lot, and enjoyed themselves in the process. And of course produced less waste.

Feel free to buy a new computer whenever you want, just don't judge those that do not.

When you're time-poor, everything looks like a waste of time. I've been there, full time job with overtime and young kids, barely minutes a day of free time and trying to decide between coding, reading, exercise, TV, and seeing other people with 30+ hours to spend each week, throwing it away on the "dumbest" things like bottle trick shots or counting to a million on YouTube.

Things are better now. I still have less time than young people on YouTube but I'm not so stretched. I have hours a week to spend on things - sometimes with the kids.

I hope you get free of it, the crushing feeling is not nice.

I get the opposite feeling. That's the cool thing about hobbies: they can be totally pointless and that's ok, as long as you enjoy them. I spend time communicating with nerds using old radios and Morse code. I can't think of anything more pointless than that. But doing stuff I enjoy keeps me sane.

Frameworks recent dig at "upgradeable" storage in the new m4 mac mini made me chuckle, upcycling an old macbook shell is even better.

I've wanted to do this same thing for quite some time, with even older hardware, but I'm not confident I could pull it off.

I would love to turn an old PowerBook or an IBM era ThinkPad into a modern machine

I like how he has the Apple logo light still working.

> I like how he has the Apple logo light still working.

At the time, the logo was lit by the lights in the LCD. I had a friend who removed the display case and put rainbow plastic film in between to match the original six-colored logo.

Was just about to say this. Super creative way to light up the logo.

Sounds like a lot of work. I bought a sticker off of Etsy to do that.

It's lit by the backlight in the LCD display. In other words, he didn't do anything extra.

Someone generate a new AI version of the I'm a Mac, I'm a PC commercials based on this :)

I notice that the bluetooth antenna is unplugged not sure if you're using the wifi/bluetooth card from the Mac.

Amazing work!

Is there a longer write up on this somewhere? I'd love to know more about the project and process

OT: what's the current best way to run Windows (guest) on Apple Silicon (macOS as host)?

VMWare, UTM, Virtual Box, etc?

If you're looking to run a .exe file, there are a couple of hypervisors in the market (sometimes found on the high seas). I've tried these on a couple of obscure .exe files:

- Parallels

- VMWare fusion

- Apple's gamekit

Parallels has had the highest coverage, but they've locked down Parallels pretty well, and there is no way to outright own a copy of Parallels (monthly subscription). I think the gamekit project is the most exciting one of these three though!

Parallels still offers a one-time purchase for the most limited edition. If you need to give VMs more than 8GB RAM then you'll need a subscription-only edition, but you can get pretty far with 8GB and 4 cores for a VM that's only running Windows 11 and one application.

Why would you want to?

Come on man, this is hacker news! Because you can is always an acceptable answer!

Plenty of reasons. Joy. Nostalgia. Education. Bragging rights. Desire to reuse.

I have a 2011 MBP running Mint and it works great. Not unreasonably slow at all. I wish the author had at least tried to use Linux, maybe it was the learning curve.

The resulting laptop did have Linux installed, it's right there in the screenshot. The point of the post is showing how the modular nature of Framework boards can be used in all sorts of cool and unexpected ways.

The author said the original hardware was dead, so I don't think it could run anything at all, at any speed.

I was also running mint on a 2011 MacBook Pro. I bought it new in 2011 and used it until early 2023, then the GPU failed for the second time, which requires the logic board to be replaced. It’s a known hardware flaw which will impact all 2011 MBP models with a discrete GPU.

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