• Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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    20 days ago

    You have a lot of incredible Macs waiting to be grabbed for cheap after Apple discontinued support.

    Before converting my girlfriend’s MacBook Pro to Linux, I never thought it would be possible. I don’t know why but I thought they were some special inaccessible computers.

    It’s just a shame the latest ones aren’t upgradeable. Apparently the last easily upgradeable one was the 2012 MacBook and the 2019 MacPro…not sure though…

    • Loucypher@lemmy.mlOP
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      20 days ago

      even if they cannot be upgraded they are incredibly well built (excluding those with butterfly keyboards, steer away from those) and will likely outlive any PC you might have from the same year

      • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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        20 days ago

        Yeah but since they aren’t upgradeable anymore, you’re often kind of limited by the 8gb of RAM they often come with.

        It’s also difficult to know how much life an SSD still has in it even if one day I could be tempted by a second hand M Mac and Fedora Asahi…

        • Loucypher@lemmy.mlOP
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          20 days ago

          i am not expecting any SSD to be worn out unless the previous owner was into heavy workloads, which isn’t the case for a lot of mac users. You can technically write over the whole SSD hundreds of thousands of time before losing some capacity. Assuming the OS runs on BTRS you’ll be fine as the file system will auto flag bad sectors.

          • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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            20 days ago

            Interesting to know, thanks.

            I don’t remember if you can replace the battery though. That would also be big bet getting on of these used M Macs if that’s not the case…

            • Loucypher@lemmy.mlOP
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              20 days ago

              The battery is definitely replaceable but in latest models used to be glued on… I haven’t checked on the Apple silicon models… worse case the Apple Store can do it for you for 70/80€$ You can also remove the glue yourself, there must be an iFixit tutorial on YouTube for it

              • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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                19 days ago

                Well then I guess Apple Silicon Macs might be on my list when I’ll need something to replace my Surface Go 1 if one day it dies or if Fedora becomes more resource hungry in the future.

        • pressanykeynow@lemmy.world
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          20 days ago

          Your SSD will likely live longer than most of the other hardware. 8gb is surely low but quite enough for running Asahi in daily tasks.

    • maccentric@sh.itjust.works
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      19 days ago

      You can put an NVME ssd into a 2013-2017 MacBook Air or ‘13-‘15 Pro with a $15 adapter

      RAM can’t be upgraded on any Mac laptop post 2012

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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    20 days ago

    i’ve only owned one macbook in my life and it too came from the e-waste bin and it worked well for about 5 years.

    that’s also where i got a lot of hardware that i still use to this day.

    • Loucypher@lemmy.mlOP
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      20 days ago

      if you wanted to run macOS on this then yes, it would definitely be ewaste

      • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
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        20 days ago

        I personally don’t share the same definition of e-waste. Having to install Linux, a custom ROM or modded software to make the machine fully usable doesn’t make it complete e-waste imo. Conputer users should have technical knowledge to do stuff like that.

    • DannyBoy@sh.itjust.works
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      20 days ago

      It still runs decently, I often forget it’s a 10 year old machine. I boot Ubuntu on it for work though, and boot Windows on it for the occasional game. It’s a useful machine.

    • 𝕾𝖕𝖎𝖈𝖞 𝕿𝖚𝖓𝖆@lemmy.world
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      20 days ago

      My wife’s 2019 16" MPB is running pretty great. Probably got another 5 years of life left in it. She uses it to watch YouTube and play Sims 4.

      My 2016 Acer Aspire V3-372T is hanging in there running Debian. 60 FPS YouTube videos are getting to be too much for it anymore. I may have to put the old girl to rest one of these days.

      But hey, it does play Minetest pretty flawlessly.

  • Eugenia@lemmy.ml
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    20 days ago

    I’ve been running Mint and Debian on old hardware too. A Macbook Air 2011 and one from 2015, and a Mac Mini 2014. Mint works great on them AS LONG AS you have at least 4 GB of RAM, especially since it can install the broadcomm wifi driver. Lots of screenshots and images from them here: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/media

  • Panos Alevropoulos@lemmy.ml
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    20 days ago

    I recently flashed Mint on a MacBook Air 2012, but WiFi is really unstable and slow. Probably a driver issue. I had worse luck with Debian and Fedora.

    • willougr@lemmy.world
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      20 days ago

      If you are using an external screen see if wifi improves with it disconnected. This took me far too long to figure out…