internetometer

i’m not an apple glazer.. i promise…

recently, i found a Mid 2012 13 Inch Unibody Macbook Pro lying around (this is the same macbook i mentioned in my Mac and Cheese Mini post)

it was running catalina, and i just never used it since it was, old. Buuut all of that changed when i found out that these type of macbooks are actually.. really easy to repair and upgrade. which is surprising considering what apple has become today. (ironic coming from me) and so i thought,,

“Hey, could I just install an SSD and more RAM on here and use this as my main laptop for browsing the web?”

i did just that

opencore legacy patcher

opencore legacy patcher allows you to install newer versions of macOS that your macbook doesn’t support. it also unlocks cool features like universal control, sidecar,,, yk what i meam it’s pretty cool

after ordering a 1tb ssd (a little extreme now that i think about it but oh well) and two 8gb ram sticks, i installed them into the macbook and used opencore to install macOS sonoma,, it was pretty straight forward fortunately

• i put the macOS installer along with the opencore bootloader onto a usb stick with my mac mini
• plugged the usb stick into the macbook
• booted from it
• installed macOS
• then i set it up!

so, yeah, not that hard.

now we get to the fun part

how is it actually using this thing?

one short answer:
it’s really nice

Now now you may be yelling at me saying “Why couldn’t you just get an Apple Silicon laptop??? Better cooling, performance, screen, basically everything??” and that is because i don’t really need one if i already have this

macs nowadays aren’t as easy to repair, and this macbook does me just fine if i want to just do basic stuff like talk on discord. now, yes, it’s obviously not as fast, and not as clear (since this model isn’t the retina model), but i can forgive its flaws

it boots up just fine. it loads google just fine. it loads messages just fine. basically everything loads just fine, maybe like a few hundred miliseconds or a few seconds slower, but i don’t really mind.

i’m uh planning on using this as my personal laptop for a few years until i get sick of it and maybe get a newer laptop

(for some reason this is so much better than my other HP laptop????)

some things i do like

there’s some things i’m a big fan of

the sleep light indicator

when you put the macbook to sleep, there’s a little light that turns on

really convenient to know that it’s sleeping and also just turned on in the first place

the battery indicator

again. very very convenient

i really like this feature personally since i don’t have to open it up, get blinded by the screen, just to look for the battery icon at the top. all i gotta do is look to the side, press a button, and i see how much battery is left. very very nice

the variety of ports

man i remember when macbooks from 2016-2020 ONLY had usb-c ports..

usb-c is a good port, don’t get me wrong. it can be used for almost anything, but having to use a dongle just to use an sd card is not great. good thing this has that!

the ports on here include:

• magsafe 1
• ethernet port
• firewire port
• thunderbolt 2 port
• two usb-a ports
• an sd card slot
• headphone jack

yeah i can use this for anything. while it doesn’t have usb-c ports it’s not like i’ll be using the ports in general. BUT it’s still pretty nice

it even has an optical drive so i can watch movies! (it’s broken. i’ll replace it though!)

some things i don’t really like

there are also some things i don’t really like about it but also don’t really mind it if i just ignore it,,

the display

macbooks without a retina screen if i recall uses a TN panel. terrible viewing angles, colors, yk. i don’t really care that much but it gets a little annoying sometimes having to adjust the lid so i can see what’s on screen.

i’ve been looking to see if there’s an IPS panel for this thing but there probably isn’t. i’ll just have to stick with this

resolution

of course the resolution’s gonna be low, but idk i also find this kinda inconvenient

i only care about the resolution once in a while tho, i kinda forget about it after a while

conclusion

overall, this is a really nice laptop despite its age.

it has some things i’m not a fan of, but i can learn to get used to it overtime

i don’t really have anything else to say

ok bye

P.S. this line was written from the macbook! it’s getting pretty hot but um i’ll replace the thermal paste soon,, BUT it’s actually pretty nice to use despite vscode being a electron app (i think) so yeah that’s nice