The apartment lost a roommate this month. Nice guy, but a bit of a hoarder. He left us seven laptops when he moved out. Seven. We had a stack of six up by the TV and we thought we'd found them all, but then he came back for another load of stuff and another MacBook Pro appeared on top of the pile.
Yes, MacBook Pro. Yes, "another".
They were all Macs of various stripes; another roommate took the Pro that just worked right off the bat, but this one seemed slightly more recent and had nothing obvious the matter with it, other than it wouldn't turn on. I did some poking about and finally got it to boot by digging up a 100W power supply. I'm not sure it's supposed to need a brick that hefty. The model number says it's of early 2018 vintage, which in theory would have come with an 87W supply. That already blows my mind, as the chonkiest brick any of my Windows/Linux laptops needs is 19V at 2.5A. But 100W did get it to turn on and work flawlessly, except for a completely b0rked battery.
Having seen said ex-roommate's workflow, I understand why having no battery made the thing useless to him, and why he didn't bother with a just-post-warranty repair. The battery failure would have happened just as Apple Care ran out, and he's a software developer who needed an up-to-date computer that Just Fucking Worked. Buying a new one and either expensing it or writing it off on taxes later was the path of least resistance.
I, on the other hand, have four other laptops and therefore an infinite amount of time to dick around with this thing. I can take it down to the Apple Store and have them do it for $200, which sounded stupid at first but looks more and more tempting now that I know this thing cost $1200 to start with, and that a couple of mildly sticky keys means Apple probably owes me a new keyboard (and, because of the design, completely new case) for free. Alternatively, I can do it myself and come away with a set of iFixit screwdriver bits and a lot of new information about how to break into yet another computer I'm not supposed to be able to open. "No user serviceable parts" my ass. That is a pet peeve of mine right up there with "things I can't read". The last time I bought a computer, I owned it for less than 24 hours before I took it to bits and installed a second hard drive.
The specs on it are in the same general range as the Windows 10 computer I bought at the start of lockdown, but for two things. Firstly, it has way more RAM. And secondly, I have to admit, the Retina display is really pretty. Not pretty enough I'd pay Apple prices for it, but more than pretty enough to keep one I got for free. Or, at least, for the price of a third-party charger.
The keyboard takes quite a bit of getting used to, even aside from the over-enthusiastic N and Return. The keys on MacBooks have a way shorter throw than anything I've ever found on a PC laptop, even ones marketed as "soft touch". And I am mildly disgruntled that you can't pry them apart to clean them, but whatever. Again: Free 15" MacBook Pro.
The rest of the stack were also mostly Macs, aside from a lone Asus that I took and converted to Ubuntu when it came to light that nobody had any idea what the Windows password was. I posted the old ones to Craigslist, essentially for beer money -- prices on eBay are all over the place, especially for parts machines, and I'm not familiar with the vintage Mac market. I found a collector to buy the ancient PowerBook, which turns out to A) still more or less work, and B) be old enough to drink.
(It runs OS X. I remember when OS X was a big upheaval, and pissed off everyone who wanted their OS 9 software to keep working. The PowerBook was manufactured in 2000. I feel old now.)
He's also interested in a black A1181 that has no video and won't get past the boot chime. We exchanged contact info with all the trepidation I normally feel when giving my phone number to some dude I've known for all of five minutes, but it turns out he does actually just want to talk about old Macs. Sure, why not.
At one point he asked if I'd gone to MIT, which is apparently the natural conclusion around here when someone speaks knowledgeably about restoring computers that are almost as old as you are. No, I've just been tinkering with my own gear for the past thirty years. The screwdriver set I use to break into things that aren't held together with glue and pentalobe/Torx screws was bought at an actual, physical Radio Shack just before I left for college. Girls basically didn't do any of that when I started, which is why I spent the first weekend of every semester roaming the women's floor of my dorm plugging everyone's VCR in for them, and a couple of years charging people a certain percentage of the spindle to burn their blank CDs for them. Girls still might not do any of that for all I know, but I live in a blue state where no one would dare say so.
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