Correct. And anti glare are always high resolution.
I’ve never used one of the unibody Pros with anti-glare displays. Is the display surface a matte plastic or glass?
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What have you done with an early Intel recently?
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I’ve never used one of the unibody Pros with anti-glare displays. Is the display surface a matte plastic or glass?
Feeling out the 2011 MBP display.... I don't know. It kind of feels like glass but I am not sure. It's cold to the touch but not as cold as the aluminium frame. To me it feels quite hard and "unbendy" - so glass...maybe??
Bezels!
![20240509_202339.jpg]( "20240509_202339.jpg")
Talking of which, here's two MBP 2011s. At the rear, an early, standard resolution. At the front, the new-to-me Late, with anti-glare HiRes display.
I'm now pretty certain that the GPU in the Early is starting to have trouble. Can only run and install MX with nomodeset in the boot parameters. Trying a Mint live usb, it does a lot of weird stuff, including a smeary multicoloured screen, then eventually a lot of text about failing to talk to the Radeon shows up, and it all stops. Have not tried this distro with nomodeset, mainly because I don't yet know how.
The LAte, what ever its GPU problems, also had the wrong spec RAM sticks in it. Having spent another two-hour session at the dentist, which is a 90-mile round trip, I'm a bit too tired to go delving deeper, but I have fitted a brand new SSD and 12GB of correct RAM. Runs and installs MX like a champ, without nomodeset. Will see if the RAM has had any effect on anything else. But not tonight, Josephine!
Talking of which, here's two MBP 2011s. At the rear, an early, standard resolution. At the front, the new-to-me Late, with anti-glare HiRes display.
I'm now pretty certain that the GPU in the Early is starting to have trouble. Can only run and install MX with nomodeset in the boot parameters. Trying a Mint live usb, it does a lot of weird stuff, including a smeary multicoloured screen, then eventually a lot of text about failing to talk to the Radeon shows up, and it all stops. Have not tried this distro with nomodeset, mainly because I don't yet know how.
The LAte, what ever its GPU problems, also had the wrong spec RAM sticks in it. Having spent another two-hour session at the dentist, which is a 90-mile round trip, I'm a bit too tired to go delving deeper, but I have fitted a brand new SSD and 12GB of correct RAM. Runs and installs MX like a champ, without nomodeset. Will see if the RAM has had any effect on anything else. But not tonight, Josephine!
I was messing around with my 2012 Mac Mini and Linux, this time Fedora 40 with KDE and besides the fact that KDE6 is a great release, the Mesa drivers on these HD4000 graphics is insane.
Most games that have a macOS port don't run great under macOS on that Mac but I just attributed it to the poor integrated graphics. NOPE! That's just the os/drivers. Games like Besiege which run with unplayable performance under macOS runs at 40fps in Linux, but also games that would never ever run on that hardware when using Windows, actually do work with Proton.
Teardown, a pretty heavy game with path traced graphics, actually runs (at 15-20fps, and not all assets seem to load in) on Linux. I am very impressed. There were of course games that wouldn't launch, but those require graphics features that didn't exist in 2012 lol.
Most games that have a macOS port don't run great under macOS on that Mac but I just attributed it to the poor integrated graphics. NOPE! That's just the os/drivers. Games like Besiege which run with unplayable performance under macOS runs at 40fps in Linux, but also games that would never ever run on that hardware when using Windows, actually do work with Proton.
Teardown, a pretty heavy game with path traced graphics, actually runs (at 15-20fps, and not all assets seem to load in) on Linux. I am very impressed. There were of course games that wouldn't launch, but those require graphics features that didn't exist in 2012 lol.
So I tried to reinstall the OS on my latest tinkering project, another A1369 with a Pretty Good Condition battery (and the original standard 2 GB RAM). The system used to run High Sierra, until the previous owner nuked it from orbit using macOS Recovery.
The only thing left for the system to boot from was Internet Recovery, which tried to install Lion - and that's when the whole thing basically sputtered and died, giving me the "An error has occured while preparing the installation..." message. The High Sierra nvram fix I posted above didn't work. Changing the system time/date in Terminal didn't work. Apart from some shenanigans from within Internet Recovery's old and busted version of Safari, the only thing I had to do was make a USB installer from the High Sierra installer app, but that didn't work either since the installer "was not available" according to Software Update (which tried to download it even though I was getting it off the Mac App Store?).
From my experience with this, if Lion Internet Recovery is dead, I can only assume that online updating for Tiger is dead too. While making installer USBs isn't that hard or labour intensive, there was something really handy and convenient to using Internet Recovery or macOS Recovery to reinstall the OS.
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Just acquired a MacbookPro 2012 16" Retina 8GB for just 110€.
It has a 1TB Transcend SSD for Mac and a new battery with 20 cycles.
Only tiny caveat: only the tweeters sound working, but it's enough for a video conference.
Sound over TRRS, HDMI or Bluetooth is OK.
It had Sonoma (OCLP) installed, which works absolutely snappy.
I installed Windows 11 Pro, which was immediately activated and is full snappy too.
It really does not feel like a twelve years old notebook, I got a really a good machine with a great screen
(no staingate at all) for the price of a restaurant's menu !
It has a 1TB Transcend SSD for Mac and a new battery with 20 cycles.
Only tiny caveat: only the tweeters sound working, but it's enough for a video conference.
Sound over TRRS, HDMI or Bluetooth is OK.
It had Sonoma (OCLP) installed, which works absolutely snappy.
I installed Windows 11 Pro, which was immediately activated and is full snappy too.
It really does not feel like a twelve years old notebook, I got a really a good machine with a great screen
(no staingate at all) for the price of a restaurant's menu !
Not sure if the group has ever heard of "Mr Macintosh" he has a web site that is quite helpful to me at least. Might want to check it out. He has alot of the installers on his site for free download. https://mrmacintosh.com/ Just an FYI
Today I spent few hours after work installing MacOS and Linuxes to my MBP 6,1 17". Didn't get OCLP and rEFInd to co-operate well enough this time. So, I decided to go with Dosdudes Catalina patcher + 3 Linuxes (Mint and 2 specific purpose OSs) + GRUB + rEFInd and now it works. 👍
Well, almost. One of the Linuxes started to boot slowly after all was done for some reason, during boot it stops and waits for something with timer running 90 seconds before continuing, which is annoying but didn't have energy to troubleshoot it yet. They all boot and run so I am happy with that.
Now some pizza, beer and a movie. 🕺
Edit: typos
Well, almost. One of the Linuxes started to boot slowly after all was done for some reason, during boot it stops and waits for something with timer running 90 seconds before continuing, which is annoying but didn't have energy to troubleshoot it yet. They all boot and run so I am happy with that.
Now some pizza, beer and a movie. 🕺
Edit: typos
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Well, it was wife's turn to choose so... it was some old Ben Stiller comedy (Netflix). Not horrible but not great either. Well, the pizza was a success!Which one?
A day spent between annoying medical issues (not mine) that should not be a problem, and messing with the two Macbook Pro 2011s.
1) I cannot get either one to run any form of macOS at all.
2) By varying means, both run MX Linux wonderfully well.
3) And that seems to be it, so far. Nothing else will boot/run/install/run.
Pop_OS! looked good on the Early. Booted to a live session without too much prodding (still needing nomodeset), installed, but would not run. Probably needed to insert more boot arguments for install, but still learning this stuff, so hey ho...
The Late will do nothing except MX Linux, but does it beautifully, and with no prodding at all. It just all works.
Inspection of the system shows that it hasn't any idea that the duff Radeon exists, which is why it's happy, I suppose!
The Early shows no mention of ANY GPU at all. Not quite sure how that works...
The bottom line: they both work, and both have proper brightness and keyboard backlighting working, out of the box.
Now just have to figure out what to do with two not-quite-identical machines!
1) I cannot get either one to run any form of macOS at all.
2) By varying means, both run MX Linux wonderfully well.
3) And that seems to be it, so far. Nothing else will boot/run/install/run.
Pop_OS! looked good on the Early. Booted to a live session without too much prodding (still needing nomodeset), installed, but would not run. Probably needed to insert more boot arguments for install, but still learning this stuff, so hey ho...
The Late will do nothing except MX Linux, but does it beautifully, and with no prodding at all. It just all works.
Inspection of the system shows that it hasn't any idea that the duff Radeon exists, which is why it's happy, I suppose!
The Early shows no mention of ANY GPU at all. Not quite sure how that works...
The bottom line: they both work, and both have proper brightness and keyboard backlighting working, out of the box.
Now just have to figure out what to do with two not-quite-identical machines!
I've an idea that if I can return the Early to absolute untouched factory spec, ie never turned on, then I might get macOS to install. But everything I've tried has failed, and I'm naggingly aware that this might be the GPU finally dying, as after all, it is 13 years old. That's a good run for one of these, and I've probably not helped it any with all the messing around I've done.
Well, the 2011 GPU's started dying a long time ago. My brother had one from new and I think the GPU died when 3-4 years old. It's a miracle that there still are some that run 13 years later. I have two of those 2011 15" machines - an early and late 2011. The early is pretty much beyond salvation, it used to work with the software fix but not anymore, it doesn't allow OS install (some Linuxes go half way before it fails, MacOS no chance) and I no longer can do the sw fix. So, its pretty much spare parts machine now. The late one still works perfectly but is rarely used by my wife and I expect it to fail at some point too.
If the 2012 logic board swap to the 2011 chassis works (no confirmation yet, just a rumor) it would be a perfect solution as the 2012 is the pinnacle of the unibody MBPs (I have one, its great). But, it is be possible to find complete MBP 2012s in very reasonable prices and the working logic boards are usually overpriced so I am not sure if its worth the trouble to do the logic board swap anymore.
If the 2012 logic board swap to the 2011 chassis works (no confirmation yet, just a rumor) it would be a perfect solution as the 2012 is the pinnacle of the unibody MBPs (I have one, its great). But, it is be possible to find complete MBP 2012s in very reasonable prices and the working logic boards are usually overpriced so I am not sure if its worth the trouble to do the logic board swap anymore.
Another slight annoyance with the new-to-me Late 2011 is that the battery seemed worn out. MX identifies it an an iFixit replacement. Then I looked properly at the aftermarket charger that came with it. It's a 60W unit, and this Macbook needs an 85W. Thinking the battery duff, I ordered a new el-cheapo one off eBay. The, as the afternoon progressed, I realised the battery was not too bad after all, it just seemed to need a cycle or two on the correct-rating charger. Oh well...
Agreed. I did some research, and it seems to me that just getting a 2012 is the answer. Looking at the two boards side by side seemed to me to show no easy way to swap them over.
Before you trash your Early, try MX with and without nomodeset. You never know...
Have you looked at the battery with Coconut battery or similar software? I install it to all of my Macbooks. And do the calibration to the battery also.
IMHO it gives some good info. Below some examples.
I might give it a try but I have no hope left for this machine anymore. It has the top of the line display and working optical drive, don't know if any other stuff is any good though. Work yes, but no use for slow wifi cards etc. stuff. Screws and HDD brackets are of course always useful to have.
IMHO it gives some good info. Below some examples.
I don't trash my Macs so no worries. I've used MX in one of my Lenovos during the Corona years when wife needed MS Teams conferencing for her work. Works perfectly and no problems in many years. Very stable distro.
I might give it a try but I have no hope left for this machine anymore. It has the top of the line display and working optical drive, don't know if any other stuff is any good though. Work yes, but no use for slow wifi cards etc. stuff. Screws and HDD brackets are of course always useful to have.
Attachments
The USA (ANSI) keyboard has also one key less. You never can map an european Keyboard completely.
The Dutch mostly use the ASNI layout too for some reason. So there's one European layout that'll work at least.
Spent a day with OCLP/Sonoma on my late2008 2,93GHz c2duo 15" MBP5,1
First impression was poor. Lot's of lags and beach-balls.
After some tweaks the system performance gradually improved significantly.
Actually at the end of the day I'm really impressed now, how 16y old hardware is able to cope with the latest macOS.
Proved to be in decent working condition: Browsing, email, iCloud-Sync, Music/Video-Streaming, VLC/DVD through optical drive, DEVONthink, LibreOffice6, Numbers, Pages, PDF-Editing, VPN/RDP, GoogleMaps through Firefox, ...
Havn't tested Foto-Editing/Video-Editing or VMware Fusion so far.
Many thanks to the OCLP-team for their outstanding work!
![OCLP Sonoma.png]( "OCLP Sonoma.png")
Tweaks:
- reducing graphic-/animation-overload with Onyx (the old fashioned way from the PPC-times)
and through SystemPreferences (reduced transparency, more contrast)
- no Widgets, StageManager etc.
- shutting-off foto-indexing through terminal ("photoanalysisd" and "mediaanalysisd")
BassJump-ressurection:
- combined audio-output-device (internal-speakers and BassJump)
- SoundSource for Audio-Control
My late 2008 2,52GHz c2duo 15" MBP5,1 does fine with Mojave and Ventura.
Installation of Ventura was a bit tricky and needs USB-Keyboard/Mouse with attached throught USB2-Hub.
I don't dare to try OCLP/Sonoma on that machine, since the first late2008 15" suffer from a faulty GPU (the 2,4 / 2,53 / 2,8 GHz models)
My 2,93GHz MBP5,1 originally had been a 2,8GHz MBP5,1 but happend to suffer from a faulty GPU.
Luckily I found a 2,93 model for 40 bucks because of a damaged display and swapping logic-boards was successful.
First impression was poor. Lot's of lags and beach-balls.
After some tweaks the system performance gradually improved significantly.
Actually at the end of the day I'm really impressed now, how 16y old hardware is able to cope with the latest macOS.
Proved to be in decent working condition: Browsing, email, iCloud-Sync, Music/Video-Streaming, VLC/DVD through optical drive, DEVONthink, LibreOffice6, Numbers, Pages, PDF-Editing, VPN/RDP, GoogleMaps through Firefox, ...
Havn't tested Foto-Editing/Video-Editing or VMware Fusion so far.
Many thanks to the OCLP-team for their outstanding work!
Tweaks:
- reducing graphic-/animation-overload with Onyx (the old fashioned way from the PPC-times)
and through SystemPreferences (reduced transparency, more contrast)
- no Widgets, StageManager etc.
- shutting-off foto-indexing through terminal ("photoanalysisd" and "mediaanalysisd")
BassJump-ressurection:
- combined audio-output-device (internal-speakers and BassJump)
- SoundSource for Audio-Control
My late 2008 2,52GHz c2duo 15" MBP5,1 does fine with Mojave and Ventura.
Installation of Ventura was a bit tricky and needs USB-Keyboard/Mouse with attached throught USB2-Hub.
I don't dare to try OCLP/Sonoma on that machine, since the first late2008 15" suffer from a faulty GPU (the 2,4 / 2,53 / 2,8 GHz models)
My 2,93GHz MBP5,1 originally had been a 2,8GHz MBP5,1 but happend to suffer from a faulty GPU.
Luckily I found a 2,93 model for 40 bucks because of a damaged display and swapping logic-boards was successful.
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- Acquired an early 2013 13" Retina MBP (2.6ghz i5, 8gb RAM) in great condition, and installed Sonoma on it. Nice condition screen too; no delamination, but a few dead pixels. This is my new work/office mobile machine.
- Moved the Debian 12 SSD from my Blackbook to my 2010 13" MBP (2.66ghz, 16gb RAM), reinstalled GRUB, and that machine is now my Linux machine, retired from daily work/office use. Much better and more pleasant screen to look at.
- Put a new SSD in my Blackbook, and copied my Whitebook 10.8 install to that machine via TDM (both machines are 2008 2.4ghz with 6gb RAM). The Whitebook is my music recording machine, and the Blackbook has now become my couch machine for when I come home from work at 10pm-12am. The Blackbook now has a brand new top case/keyboard and bezel that I spent too much money on, but I wanted an almost-perfect condition Blackbook
- Awaiting delivery of a new top case for my 2011 11" MBA (1.6ghz i5, 4gb RAM running HS), as the keys have always been sticky and the trackpad has come loose due to a swollen battery. This machine was a rescue that I bought six years ago and I could never get the keyboard cleaned well enough of the gunk that someone spilled on it, even after removing each key one by one and cleaning underneath with iso alcohol. Works great otherwise.
- Moved the Debian 12 SSD from my Blackbook to my 2010 13" MBP (2.66ghz, 16gb RAM), reinstalled GRUB, and that machine is now my Linux machine, retired from daily work/office use. Much better and more pleasant screen to look at.
- Put a new SSD in my Blackbook, and copied my Whitebook 10.8 install to that machine via TDM (both machines are 2008 2.4ghz with 6gb RAM). The Whitebook is my music recording machine, and the Blackbook has now become my couch machine for when I come home from work at 10pm-12am. The Blackbook now has a brand new top case/keyboard and bezel that I spent too much money on, but I wanted an almost-perfect condition Blackbook
- Awaiting delivery of a new top case for my 2011 11" MBA (1.6ghz i5, 4gb RAM running HS), as the keys have always been sticky and the trackpad has come loose due to a swollen battery. This machine was a rescue that I bought six years ago and I could never get the keyboard cleaned well enough of the gunk that someone spilled on it, even after removing each key one by one and cleaning underneath with iso alcohol. Works great otherwise.
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Reinstalling systems on A1342. Partitioned first SSD (500 Gb Kingston) to 3 partitions. Planned usage - SnowLeo, HighSierra (possibly as main) & reserved for some other Mac OS, if I decide to make some experiments again . Second SSD (same capacity & model) used by Debian entirely, currently not bootable until I reinstall rEFInd.
. Second SSD (same capacity & model) used by Debian entirely, currently not bootable until I reinstall rEFInd.
Yesterday:
Prepped the Mac Mini for sale, with a 240GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, it might make someone a nice little server, be it macOS or Linux.
The rest of the day was Macbook Pro 8,2 day, and it wasn't good if your ambition is to actually run macOS on them.
What's even more annoying is that all I can find that runs well is MX Linux. All well and good, and I like MX a lot. But it might be nice if one of them ran something, anything, else. The Macbook 2,1 also runs MX and will continue to do so, because it is one of the few x86 distros and isn't a bloody awkward mess like Arch or raw Debian.
I will have to find out what will run on one or the other 8,2s, because they have different problems, albeit derived from the same basic GPU failure. On that basis, it will be the 8,2 Late which retains MX, because it runs it out of the box and the display is *lovely* and it's faster and I don't want to screw it up any further. So I'll try and learn how to do nomodeset installs of many distros on the early 8,2.
What all this means is that I have only one Mac that actually will run macOS, the iMac 12,1, and that runs Sonoma pretty well due to being totally maxed out. I cannot imagine macOS 15 will run on it, no matter the best efforts of OCLP to overcome whatever Apple will do to thwart this kind of thing. So that will also become a Linux machine or be sold for someone else to play with.
There are just 17 months before Windows 10 hits end of life. Unlike running an old macOS with various tweaks and different browsers, W10 will be very vulnerable from that point on, and I won't want to run it. I also don't particularly like W11, as it takes choices away from the user in very bad ways, IMHO.
So for me, on whatever hardware, the future is eventually Linux.
Prepped the Mac Mini for sale, with a 240GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, it might make someone a nice little server, be it macOS or Linux.
The rest of the day was Macbook Pro 8,2 day, and it wasn't good if your ambition is to actually run macOS on them.
What's even more annoying is that all I can find that runs well is MX Linux. All well and good, and I like MX a lot. But it might be nice if one of them ran something, anything, else. The Macbook 2,1 also runs MX and will continue to do so, because it is one of the few x86 distros and isn't a bloody awkward mess like Arch or raw Debian.
I will have to find out what will run on one or the other 8,2s, because they have different problems, albeit derived from the same basic GPU failure. On that basis, it will be the 8,2 Late which retains MX, because it runs it out of the box and the display is *lovely* and it's faster and I don't want to screw it up any further. So I'll try and learn how to do nomodeset installs of many distros on the early 8,2.
What all this means is that I have only one Mac that actually will run macOS, the iMac 12,1, and that runs Sonoma pretty well due to being totally maxed out. I cannot imagine macOS 15 will run on it, no matter the best efforts of OCLP to overcome whatever Apple will do to thwart this kind of thing. So that will also become a Linux machine or be sold for someone else to play with.
There are just 17 months before Windows 10 hits end of life. Unlike running an old macOS with various tweaks and different browsers, W10 will be very vulnerable from that point on, and I won't want to run it. I also don't particularly like W11, as it takes choices away from the user in very bad ways, IMHO.
So for me, on whatever hardware, the future is eventually Linux.