I decided early on, long before the challenge rules were set in stone, that I would do my own thing for this years challenge.
How it came to be old Apple hardware, however wasn't planned. I bought a 12" Powerbook G4 quite a while ago, because I've always thought those machines are really neat looking.
And since I then already had that, an it's over 20 years old and cute in every possible way, I figured I would just use that for the OCC,
and also take the opportunity to spice things up a bit by going mobile.
I did some tests with it to test the concept, which worked fine. At least for a bit. The Powerbook had always been a little flakey.
You see, the RAM configuration in Apple laptops of that era is slightly strange. They have an amount of base RAM soldered to the motherboard, and then a single slot for RAM expansion.
It is fairly common for the onboard RAM to go bad on Powerbooks and iBooks of that era. This causes instability, kernel panics and all sorts of fun stuff.
I solved this in my Powerbook by desoldering and lifting the power supply pins of the memory chips to disable the onboard RAM completely.
This solved all instability issues for a while. Sadly though, it appears that something else is now borked in the machine, because no matter what I try with different RAM modules and
other fixes, nothing helps. I guess it's just dying at this point. Having been tossed round for 20 years, running hot, having had all sorts of thermal cycles and what not.
So with my OCC plans shattered, I damage-controlled and picked up not one, but two Macbooks from the 2007-2008 era. The first one was really cheap. Too cheap, really.
It's a 15" Macbook Pro from 2007. I picked this one because it's one of the last ones to retain the same aluminium design language of the older models, before they went unibody.
This turned out to be kind of a lemon however. It was in much worse condition than I thought, and what was described. And worse than that, It had a firmware lock put on it!
This meant that I couldn't even install an OS on it. This is where I panicked even more and quickly snatched up the 13" 2008 I ended up using the challenge.
But! As it turns out after I had calmed down a bit and did some more research, the firmware lock security is not the greatest, and it was only a matter of altering the hardware config to
once again be able to reset the parameter RAM and disable the lock. In other words, I could disable the lock by removing one RAM stick and reset the parameters. Silly, I know.
But the MBP still wasn't great, and frankly I'm kind of sick of talking about it even. All I'll say is that it's been delegated to desk-duty, and is connected to an external Cinema Display and peripherals.
The 13" Macbook then.. It's one of those "unibody" white plastic things. I've never been too fond of them to be honest, but it was also very cheap, and cleaned up surprisingly well! What's more, the original battery
is still fine, and gives the computer about four hours of runtime. Pretty dang impressive considering its age!
It has 2.5GB RAM, and a 192GB SSD I shoved into it. It'll be interesting to see how I'll like it over the week. I suspect I'll grow to like it more than I am right now, because it's honestly kind of nice to use.
The keyboard is pretty nice, trackpad is fine, and it's a decent size. The display brightness could've been better, though. But you know... Old laptops and such. It's a thing.
Instead of approaching this week as a true challenge, I instead figured I would make it more of a fun activity and experience. I've used a 486 with MS-DOS for a week, so a 2008 Macbook is basically cheat-mode.
And since I am hosting this forum locally, I thought I would blog about it on here, rather than setting up ANOTHER site just for the week.
Day 1
My plan to go mobile is off to a great start. The weather is very gloomy, and the forecasts says it's supposed to rain the entire day. So I'll have to make do with spending the first day indoors.
As it's a DIY-type OCC, I have not yet decided if I'm going to stick solely to the 13" Macbook, or also use the desktop-duty Macbook Pro for when I'm at home. They are nearly identical in specs, and
run the same software setup. I even set that system up by restoring from a Time Machine backup i had previously done on the Macbook. It's really more of an ergonomics thing.
Time will tell, I guess.
The morning... well, up until lunch I mostly spent watching videos on invidious, to catch up on some subscriptions. Also some chatting on IRC, web browsing, and did some laundry. Exciting!
I have a strong feeling this gloomy and rainy day is going to turn out to be on the less productive side of things.
I find myself doing today's computing on the couch.. I should probably consider something more ergonomic before I kill my back.
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It has an Apple Airport base station connected to it that outputs audio from my computer. It's nuts to think that adapter is 19 years old at this point.
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