My $80 Macbook

Hot rodded with a 240GB SSD and 4GB of RAM, it’s a screamer.

James Ellis@jamesellisnyc

Posted Fri 10 Jun 2022

I really liked the white Macbook, and I had been curious about running Linux on these older machines. So I bought one on ebay for $80. A 2008 model. (That’s 14 years ago.)

This Macbook originally shipped with Snow Leopard, which is snappy on this 32-bit rig. I did play with it some. I was able to get IceCat working. But I was most interested in running Linux. I chose to install Pop! OS from System76. Wifi drivers required a bit of fiddling, but otherwise the install was smooth and I’ve been impressed how Pop! performs.

It’s a fussy old machine. It runs slow. It gets hot fast. The screen looks bad when you catch it at a good angle. It looks awful off-axis. But still, it works surprisingly well. Here it is running the PA Destination Homepage:

🔊Sound

Why bother? Why tinker? There’s no reason really. I’ve always had good computers around. My work has mainly taken place inside computers, usually inside a creative studio space. The machines were always changing so fast, always unlocking new capabilities. It was best not to get too attached. I got good selling machines on craigslist and ebay. I enjoyed letting them go. But now that I’ve been a computer person for so long, there is something nice about keeping certain older machines around. I like seeing our website still work. It’s just nice. Worth the $80.