My first work computer!

[dandeco]

I can't believe I've been working there for over a year now, and only last week...

...marked the first time I removed a glass front panel off an iMac. To be specific, it's this 20" early 2009 iMac. Using those suction tools made taking the pane; off and putting it back on WAY easier than I thought, especially since it's got magnets under the bezel. This model they wanted me to take a hard drive out of, only we didn't know until actually opening it that it already had the hard drive removed! So I put it back together and we listed it online without a hard drive. (My boss's father used it for a while, and I had installed Mac OS El Capitan for him to use on it then.

On Monday I tested three Apple Xserves! These things were SO bulky and heavy and awkward to carry! Two were the late 2006 model and had video output issues, but the third was an early 2009 model that worked pretty well, even with the hard drives removed. I did have to bring my MiniDisplay-to-DVI adapter from home in order to test it on one of my test monitors...

 

[TwoH]

Great stuff!

20” iMacs were always a pain to take apart.. so many screws just to get to a hard drive.

 

[dandeco]

This week marked the first time I replaced a hard drive in one of the later Apple Airport Time Capsule units!

The fact that it takes a standard 3.5" SATA hard drive made it a lot easier, since we stockpile on SATA hard drives we securely wipe.

We had also gotten a huge load of laptops this week, including Chromebooks and MacBook Pros. Since at my job they consider Macs a higher priority, I started on those Thursday afternoon...

There was a batch of unibody 15" MacBook Pros, including a couple of 2010 models and some early 2011 models that I loaded hard drives into and installed MacOS 10.13 High Sierra onto. Since they had slower USB 2.0 ports, the install on each one could take close to an hour. There were also some 13" MacBook Pros, including a mid-2009 model and some of the popular 2012 model I haven't gotten to yet, because we've run out of 500 and 750 GB hard drives for me to load into them. But none of them had batteries installed, so of course I had to note that on the labels I'd place onto the case.

We also got a bunch of 15" Retina MacBook Pros, the 2014 model. These do have the batteries intact and working, but no SSD.

We had stockpiled on Apple PCIe SSDs that we've taken out of broken MacBook Airs for a long time, and so I was able to pop some in and then wipe and install Mac OS 11 Big Sur onto them. Too bad we can't do a secure (three-pass) wipe on Apple's SSDs the way we do with traditional hard drives...
Of course on these Retina Pros, the only easily serviceable part is the SSD. It was the beginning of the end when it came to user-serviceability on Mac laptops (even the battery on the second-generation MacBook Airs is easy to replace compared to the battery in these Pros!)

Because when printing labels I would switch from the white roll (for labeling Mac and PC spec sheets) to the red roll (for any Chromebooks still managed by school districts), we found a DYMO LabelWriter 450 Twin-Turbo printer we were able to get working, and so I loaded both label rolls into the printer and hooked it up to my 15" unibody MacBook Pro, so now the option to print the kind of label I need is a lot easier!

BTW, I don't know if this violates any rules on this forum, but if anyone's interested in buying some of the stuff I reset or refurbish, here's the link to our eBay store! (Doesn't hurt for me to spread the word of our business.)

 

[Bodhitree]

Great thread! It’s very interesting to see what happens to these old devices when they are recycled.

 

[dandeco]

A few more pics...

We recently got a good amount of 7th-generation iPod Nanos from a school district. Each one has 16 GB storage and is Space Gray. Me and another employee kept a couple for myself (and with mine it was to test to see if they could still sync music from iTunes), and I was able to wipe/reset the rest using my MacBook and a USB 3.0 hub.

Testing an Apple 27" LED Cinema Display as part of re-wiping the hard drive in a 2014 1.4 GHz i5 Mac Mini that was returned to us for some reason. The KillDisk USB drives wouldn't work, so I had to do a 3-pass secure hard drive wipe with a Mac OS 11 Big Sur installer.

Yesterday, I had to test a bunch of wireless Dell keyboards and mice that used a USB receiver. I was able to boot my 2012 15" unibody MacBook Pro into the Windows Boot Camp partition to test them, even if I had to download a couple of Dell/Logitech applications for pairing the keyboards and mice.

We got a 24" LED Cinema Display in that had a broken front panel, so before we could re-sell it I removed the glass front panel chunks using those suction cup tools for aluminum iMacs.

 

[coso]

Wow this thread is fascinating

 

[ferko86]

More work pics from this past month relating to Macs...

View attachment 1784353
Earlier in the month my supervisor's sister wanted me to get this 24" iMac from 2007 set up so their father (who owns the company) can use it, largely for web browsing and such. So I formatted the drive in Mac OS Journaled and installed Mac OS X El Capitan on it, as that's the highest it'll support.

View attachment 1784354
View attachment 1784355
At my job they've had me test Apple keyboards at times, mostly the 2007-present wired keyboards, as they get a LOT of them and found that they're more prone to failure and such. I test them using KeyboardTester.com on my 21" iMac, but since the webpage doesn't recognize some of the Mac keys, I find other ways to test them, particularly the function keys. The older 2003-2007 -style keyboards they don't really have me test, as my supervisor finds them to be built much better (this is one reason why I use one with the iMac as my main keyboard!)

View attachment 1784356
In testing a batch of Canon ZR200 MiniDV camcorders, we got a FireWire 4-pin to 9-pin cable for me to use so I can test the DV ports on these types of camcorders. I even installed iMovie HD 6 onto my work iMac, as I find it somewhat easier to work with importing DV footage. (After all, the original iMovie from 1999 was designed to only import DV footage anyways!)

View attachment 1784357
We also recently got a batch of 13" MacBook Pros from 2010-2012 from a school district. Unfortunately the schools put a firmware lock on them, so that complicates things somewhat. At least they all already had the hard drives removed! A few didn't have RAM installed, so I'd put 4 GB of the stuff in to make sure they boot properly, and so we're going to sell them on our eBay store as "For Parts," as people will still buy such computers. (They've had me pull the motherboard out of quite a few physically-damaged PCs for resell.) It's also too bad, because I was looking to maybe get one of those 2012 MacBook Pros for my growing collection of older Macs (I do at least want a better "older" Intel Mac laptop with USB 3.0, Thunderbolt and a working SuperDrive for the collection.)

For the 2010 models (or earlier) of (iMac,Mac mini or Macbooks) you can remove RAM and add a completely random RAM and reset the PRAM to avoid the firmware lock . But I guess you already knew this. Just in case you would like to sell them instead of recycling. Just saying

 

[dandeco]

For the 2010 models (or earlier) of (iMac,Mac mini or Macbooks) you can remove RAM and add a completely random RAM and reset the PRAM to avoid the firmware lock . But I guess you already knew this. Just in case you would like to sell them instead of recycling. Just saying

Yep, that I know, and have done so with this 2006 17" Core Duo iMac I got for my collection...

 

[ferko86]

Yep, that I know, and have done so with this 2006 17" Core Duo iMac I got for my collection...
View attachment 1947393

Looks awesome.

What is the company name? Is it possible to order online? want to order some for friends and family in the US.

 

[gagigu]

A few more pics...

View attachment 1946588
We recently got a good amount of 7th-generation iPod Nanos from a school district. Each one has 16 GB storage and is Space Gray. Me and another employee kept a couple for myself (and with mine it was to test to see if they could still sync music from iTunes), and I was able to wipe/reset the rest using my MacBook and a USB 3.0 hub.

View attachment 1946589
Testing an Apple 27" LED Cinema Display as part of re-wiping the hard drive in a 2014 1.4 GHz i5 Mac Mini that was returned to us for some reason. The KillDisk USB drives wouldn't work, so I had to do a 3-pass secure hard drive wipe with a Mac OS 11 Big Sur installer.

View attachment 1946590
Yesterday, I had to test a bunch of wireless Dell keyboards and mice that used a USB receiver. I was able to boot my 2012 15" unibody MacBook Pro into the Windows Boot Camp partition to test them, even if I had to download a couple of Dell/Logitech applications for pairing the keyboards and mice.

View attachment 1946591
We got a 24" LED Cinema Display in that had a broken front panel, so before we could re-sell it I removed the glass front panel chunks using those suction cup tools for aluminum iMacs.

If you have some broken 24'' Cinema Displays, can I ask you to measure the panel? I'm planing to put a 24'' Cinema into an iMac 6.1 (white one) with 24'' screen and a M1 Mini inside to have "old school" look and modern hardware.


And I don't know if you already figured out but if you put your keyboard settings into the menu at the top, you can show the keyboard layout and it shows you also every pushed key on every keyboard (pictures attached below):

 

[dandeco]

Looks awesome.

What is the company name? Is it possible to order online? want to order some for friends and family in the US.

Data Recycling of New England. Here's our eBay store...

| eBay

 

[dandeco]

Some more nifty updates...

I recently made a few Mac OS 12 Monterey USB installers for when I wipe and install the SSD on any Macs I'm preparing for resell.

The install went successfully on these early 2015 11" MacBook Airs.

We also got this 2006 Core Duo MacBook Pro. But the video output wasn't so good; the screen was all pixelated and with many lines. Since it wasn't worth reselling with a bad video module, I removed the hard drive from the Pro and we labeled it to be recycled. (It wasn't that much different from when I put an SSD in my 15" aluminum PowerBook G4.)

But we DID also get a batch of 13" Retina MacBook Pros from a school district. Any that are in pretty good shape, I'd pop an Apple PCIe SSD into the Pro, wipe the SSD and install a Mac OS version on it. So far, most of them are early 2015 models that I was able to install Mac OS 12 Monterey on, but so far one of them was a late 2013 model that I installed Mac OS 11 Big Sur on. Despite the only user-serviceable part being the SSD, these are pretty good Pros; in addition to the Retina display I like how they also came with an HDMI port and two Thunderbolt ports (as this was when Thunderbolt was already taking over on the Mac laptops from Ethernet, FireWire and any other video-out ports.)

But because the school district mixed-and-matched some of the bottom panels on these, the serial numbers could be wrong, so on each one I'd have to pop in my testing SSD and get the proper serial number and processor specs (as on most of these, EveryMac gives me more than one possible configuration.)

 

[dandeco]

A few recent random pics...

We recently got a batch of cameras and camcorders that I was to test. One of them was a Canon ZR500 camcorder, and I was able to test its' DV port using my 2012 MacBook Pro's FireWire port. (But if I couldn't, we do have a FireWire-to-Thunderbolt adapter available for that.)

I had also needed to do some iPad-related work recently. With this iPad that a buyer returned to us (as it only supports up to iOS 12), I wiped and reset it using Apple Configurator 2, our software of choice for wiping and resetting iPads (especially if we're working on multiple iPads at once.)

We recently got a couple of mid-2017 13" MacBook Pros (the lower-end models without the Touch Bar), and so we had to order the appropriate Apple USB-C charger for them (as we couldn't find one in the lot). But since it came in this week, I was able to wipe them. One of the MacBook Pros had the screen partly detatched, so that one I labeled and prepared for resell with a blank SSD. But the other one here, I was able to wipe and install Mac OS 12 Monterey on. They both don't have their Wi-Fi cards, though. Also, this was the first time I worked on a MacBook using the infamous "butterfly" keyboard, and I will admit it felt flimsier and less-springy than the usual Apple scissors-mechanism keyboards I'm more familiar with (i.e. on my M1 MacBook Air and my 2012 i7 MacBook Pro.) I'm glad I didn't end up buying a Mac laptop with a "butterfly" keyboard.

 

[dandeco]

For roughly four weeks, that is, from mid-March to a couple weeks ago, I was largely working on iPads...

They were all older iPads with the 30-pin connector. Many of them were 2nd-generation models (16 GB Wi-Fi version), but there were some of the thick 1st-gen iPads (seen here) and a few 3rd-gen iPads. Some were cellular models, so I had to note what carrier they had, and (if applicable) remove the SIM card. I would plug four iPads at once into my USB 3.0 hub plugged into my 2012 MacBook Pro and run Apple Configurator 2 to wipe and reset them, along with noting if any were still managed (logging their serial numbers and organizing them by school district or whatever).

Watching the March 8th Apple event as I work on the iPads!

A couple of weeks ago, I FINALLY finished with those old iPads, over a thousand of them, and got started on a batch of MacBooks!

The lot largely consisted of 2nd-generation MacBook Airs, most of them early 2015 models in a mix of 11" and 13" versions. The 2015 models I was able to wipe their SSDs and install Mac OS 12 Monterey onto! Most of these came from a local public school district that assigned Mac laptops to all the teachers. No doubt the district was most likely upgrading to the M1 MacBook Airs or something and sent us all these old Intel ones.

There were also several 2011 models with the original MagSafe connection, which I installed Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra onto. There were also a few 2012 MacBook Airs I installed Catalina onto and a few 2013-2014 Airs that I put Big Sur on.

Wiping and installing four 11" MacBook Airs at once! It was a neat idea, something almost the size of a netbook but far more powerful.

A 13" Retina MacBook Pro from 2013 that had somehow gotten into the mix that I wiped and installed Mac OS 11 Big Sur onto.

Here's my workspace after being re-organized and a new shelf for storing laptops onto was built. Here I'm working on five 11" MacBook Airs at once!

My supervisor had me put some of the 11" Airs aside so we can wipe a whole batch of those proprietary Apple SSDs using them. We can't do a multi-pass wipe on them using anything (not even the Mac OS installers), due to the way Apple designed those SSDs, so I just wipe each SSD, shut down the MacBook Air, remove the drive and put it in a box of freshly-wiped SSDs, then pop the next one to be wiped into the Air and power it back on. Today I got 85 of those 128 GB SSDs erased, along with a couple of 256 GB SSDs.

Also included in this lot was a 2018 13" Touch Bar MacBook Pro! Trying to wipe it was a pain to reset, due to that T2 chip prohibiting booting from an external USB drive, along with having to use the Internet Recovery to re-install the operating system. And as if that weren't enough, it was still managed by the school district, so we're going to have to contact them about this and the Airs we found to still have firmware locks.

 

[gagigu]

Can I ask you what you're doing with all those old Apple hardware? I mean I'm pretty sure nobody will (and can) use those old iPads for productivity things.

 

[dandeco]

Can I ask you what you're doing with all those old Apple hardware? I mean I'm pretty sure nobody will (and can) use those old iPads for productivity things.

Any of it that's operational and in decent physical condition, we sell them on our eBay store. There are people that will indeed buy such hardware, even buying damaged/broken ones for parts! (I did that once, actually.)

 

[dandeco]

Heh, when I was working on all those MacBooks, a couple of my co-workers commented that my worked area looked kind of like an Apple Store's Genius Bar! And it kind of does here...

But for now I'm going to be working on unusual miscellaneous stuff (like walkie-talkies) before moving on to the Lightning-connection iPads.

 

[dandeco]

Here I am attempting a Windows 10 virtual machine via VMWare Fusion on my 2012 15" MacBook Pro for using our custom applications for logging device serial numbers and the like, but connecting to our server is a lot more difficult to do compared to when I use my Windows 10 Boot Camp partition.

Now I am working on Lightning-connection iPads. A bunch of 4th-generation models and some faintly newer ones. (I even a first-generation 10" iPad Pro! Several of the more recent iPad and iPad Air models I get and wipe using Apple Configurator 2 even get iPadOS 15.5 installed on them!

 

[dandeco]

I've been working on those Lightning connector iPads for three weeks now and I am nearly finished with them. There are some newer models that have that "Unlock to use USB accessories" thing, so I have to restart them in Recovery Mode in order to wipe and reset them, but it works.

Here I'm watching the Apple WWDC 2022 event as I work! I did have to plug headphones into the iMac, but that was OK.

 

[dandeco]

Been working a lot of iPads at my job (and I even managed to get my own 7th-gen 128 GB Wi-Fi iPad as part of it!), and this week I decided to upgrade my desktop work computer (I largely use it for making and printing labels)...

It's a mid-2017 21.5" iMac. There are a few small chips on the bezel, but is otherwise fine. The HDD in it was also recently given a complete wipe, so that helped. Here I am using Migration Assistant to transfer my files from the 2013 iMac to the new one. I let this process happen overnight...

Mandatory shot of the "About This Mac" screen. It's the non-Retina model, but for my purposes here, that should suit me just fine. This way I can have a Mac desktop at work that will support Mac OS 13 Ventura when it comes out this autumn. The 16 GB of RAM should certainly help, too!

Wiping the drive on the 2013 iMac via SecureDisk before getting ready for us to list it online for resell. After the wipe was completed, I removed the "Work Computer" sticker.

 

[dandeco]

Last week, I took my first vacation from my job since I started working there 21 months ago. And when I came back in today, I found a pile of stuff for me to do, including wiping and resetting a few Macs...

This included a couple of True-Tone 3rd-generation 13" MacBook Airs from 2019. But because of the T2 Chip, I couldn't easily boot into a Mac OS USB installer by default, and it required an administrator password to do so. But I found a workaround; I would use the built-in Recovery Mode to install the Mac OS version it shipped with (in this case, Mac OS 10.15 Catalina), and among completing I would set up a temporary admin account with easy password, enable booting from external drives, and then boot from the Mac OS 12 Monterey installer to wipe the SSD again and install Monterey onto it. It takes noticeably longer than it does on the 2nd-generation MacBook Airs, but it's worth it and keeps me busy on my job.

 

[dandeco]

This week we re-arranged my workspace so I can get more iPads wiped/reset at once...

A neat thing about this setup is that I can use one Mac to wipe six Lightning-connection iPads at once, and the other to wipe six 30 pin-connection iPads at the same time!

 

[tharper]

Fantastic job you have there!

Always nice to see "retro" tech.

- Tristan

 

[dandeco]

Lately we got a whole batch of Intel unibody Mac Minis from a school district. The majority of them are mid-2010 models, the last one to come with an optical disc drive...

With each one, I run this DOS-based KillDisk application to safely erase the internal hard drive, and then I re-install Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra onto them. But so far many of them have had firmware locks. BUT, because these are pre-2011 models, I simply remove a RAM module (each one came with a 4 GB and 1 GB RAM stick) and reset the NVRAM three times, and then I can boot to the KillDisk USB drive.

 

[TheDauterive]

After two years I just found this thread. So where do you sell these things and how many of these keyboards can I buy?