68kMLA Classic Interface
This is a version of the 68kMLA forums for viewing on your favorite old mac. Visitors on modern platforms may prefer the main site.
| Click here to select a new forum. | |
| Well, I guess I've now entered my Macintel hacking era. | |
| Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-08-20 09:14:58 It had to happen some time i suppose... Those few that might remember me from a long way back either here elsewhere might remember me as somebody who really enjoyed stretching the envelope when it came to keeping older machines as daily drivers. My last truely daily driven vintage Mac was a dual core 2.0GHz G5 that I ran right up until about 2021, by which time I had finally conceded that an update was probably a good idea, and I treated myself to a brand new fully-optioned 13" 2019 MBP. This machine also became the replacement for my trusty Powerbook G3 which had been my daily portable since high school the early 2000's. Anyway, fast forward a few years and I had not used the MBP much for quite a while, tending to just use my phone instead. My wife used it most of the time, and neglected and abused it as it were... leaving it plugged in on charge 24/7, and all other forms of maltreatment, until finally the other week, she plugged it into a dodgy charge cord (which i had insisted she just throw out) and it seems to have cooked something so it will no longer charge or even run bypassed off a good charger. Now given it cost me a small fortune, the idea that she would just sell it for parts and go buy another was met with a very cold response, and I told her i was keeping it and would eventually pay to have it fixed, but it wasnt going to be any time soon, so after a week of using her work Lenovo at home, she went and bought herself a used 2019 Macbook Air. She is placated for now with that, and I figured seeing as though i cant be bothered spending the money yet, I might look at getting something temporary to see me through to so i dont have to use the wife's machine. I ended up finding a 2016 Air cheap as chips with a dead battery so bought it (still waiting for the battery to arrive), but then a day or so later noticed a fellow selling a bunch of MBP 9 ,2's cheap, refurbished and running Ubuntu (or i could have MacOS if i really wanted), so i thought, why not? Ive always had a soft spot for the 9 ,2 because theyre too me, basically the Intel equivilent of a Pismo... fairly powerful, easily upgradable, built like a tank, full of connectivity, and fairly easily able to be coerced into running unsupported OS's. And well, for a hundred bucks each Australian it is small change. It already has 8Gb or RAM and a 500Gb mechanical hard drive, so it runs great on Ubuntu, but I'd really like to get 16Gb in it, a terrabyte SSD,and see what it can do with Sonoma just for giggles. Honestly, for what its worth though, it runs that slick on Ubuntu in its current configuration, Im considering maybe just leaving it as is and buing a second one to mess with. 🤔 In any case I think I'll end up palming my Air off on my neice, as if I'm being honest, the older Pro blows the lid off it anyway for performance, before I even turn a screwdriver. | |
| Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-08-21 04:57:07 The 'Book in question...  | |
| Posted by: Hopfenholz on 2026-09-08 12:55:52 These were really well built machines and still run great with Linux. The only thing missing is a retina screen | |
Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-09-09 05:29:16These were really well built machines and still run great with Linux. The only thing missing is a retina screenHonestly theyre a really sturdy, high quality, very versatile and expandable machine... arguably the last one to be designed as a long term investment in productivity rather than a throwaway item that has non-upgradability inbuilt as a business model. I kinda consider the 9,2 to be the Intel-era counterpart of the Pismo... a good, reliable, reasonably robust specced desktop replacement that could do just about anything, and keep doing it reliably for a very long time. This machime even with a mechanical hard drive runs really well on Ubuntu. The only issue i had initially was the fan controller not doing its thing under Linux but i eventually worked out how to sort that with a bit of Terminal skullduggery. In any case, i couldnt help myself, and decided to ring the fellow i bought it off and get him to put another aside for me (he had 10 of them for sale) with OSX on it, and went and collected it a few days later. This one has 12Gb of RAM and a 250Gb SSD, and Ive now got it running Monterey flawlessly with OCLP 2.4.1... i stuck with Monterey in the end as i really dont like the changes in the Ventura UI, and in this configuration it is incredibly slick and fluid. It will play 4k videos in fulls creen out of a browser without any discernible hesitation or frame dropping, and i decided to pressure test it for throttling and temps running that same video with spotify also streaming in the background, with multiple browser tabs open and the machine sitting on my bed with the rear air vent resteicted and also something covering the space over the vent below the keyboard, and the jottest it got to was about 94 degrees celcius without changing thermal paste or anything. No throttling noted and no instability. Its still a perfectly usable machine as it sits right now... i could honestly not fix my MBP 15,4 for a fair while and get by just fine with this and the Ubuntu one, bith using open source solutions and patching, and probably will. Performancewise overall, it absolutely bodies the low spec 4Gb, 128Gb MBA 7,2. Unfortunately i blew the subwoofer driver up in the OSX one which i suspected was already on its way out as it didnt sound as nice as the Ubuntu one, so ive got a new set of speakers ordered and on the way, and ill probably top the RAM off at 16Gb as well just for good measure and to make the most of dual channel addressing. Incidentally, not being able to stay off Marketplace, i happened to come accross the compariticely rare i7 version of the 9,2 in good nick for an excellent price up the coast, with an almost new 500gb SSD already installed. Needless to say, it is also on its way to me as we speak as is 16Gb of RAM to go with it. That one I may experiment with Ventura and or Sonoma and see how it runs before i decide what OS to settle with on it. As I said, I dont like the direcrion the UI took after Monterey, but i also realise that there are concessions that may need to be made if i want to be able to use these with MacOS with reasonably full functionality for another 5 years. Anyway, heres the two i5's all up and running perfectly as of half an hour ago.  | |
| Posted by: nil on 2026-09-09 07:21:15 sequoia runs amazingly on old mbp's. just install macs fan control and: accessibility>reduce motion + reduce transparency>On Appearance>Allow wallpaper tinting in windows>Off Displays>Brightness>Set as low as possible(higher brightness taxes the gpu more for no reason) Screensaver>Macintosh + Show as wallpaper>on (just don't use the high res photos)  | |
Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-09-10 01:15:13sequoia runs amazingly on old mbp's. I think I will give it a red hot crack when the i7 gets here and see how it goes. 🙂 I normally have all that fluff turned off anyway because my eyesight sucks and I hate unneccessary animations. I went to buy SATA->USB enclosure at my local computer one-man computer shop today and upon remembering that he refurbishes and recycles computers, asked if he happened to have a single used stick of 8Gb RAM to top up the machine. Well, as it turns out, he had a matched pair of Kingston sticks in a machine he had just began to dismantle for recycling, and I got the pair for 50 bucks, so those are now in this machine as I type, and the new Crucial set i have on the way can go straight into the i7 when it gets here, and then the leftover 8Gb one can go into the Linux one. So everything has come up Milhouse so far! | |
Posted by: nil on 2026-09-10 01:47:10 | |
| Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-09-15 23:39:25 Well, the i7 arrived and ater a bit of struggling with OpenCore initially, it is now running Sonoma absolutely flawlessly. first i had issues with the dreaded endless "dirty root" loop trying a clean install using 2.5.0, so i flattenedthe USB insaller and made it again with 2.4.1.... unfortunately this wasnt smooth sailing either, with random shutdowns throughout the install process at similar, but not identical points, meaning i was unable to complete the installation. i have a theory that maybe the i7's temp spiked too high at a certain point and triggered a thermal shutdown. Anyway, i decided to try a different tack and did the forbidden,,, installed Monterey, patched it, then ran the SOnoma installer straight out of and over the top of Monterey. This time the install completed and booted into Sonoma, onlly requiring the graphics etc post-install patches to be reapplied, which worked without issue. It's now running 16Gb of RAM along with the 500Gb SSD and it boots and runs as fast and fluidly as the i5 with Monterey, in some instances i feel it is even faster. With MFC trigger point set at 30 degrees off the CPU PECI sensor and max temp set at 85 degrees, the fan has a very effective curve that idles the fan at about 2900rpm and keeps temps low under light load and keeps them only just above 90 degrees at the peak spikes with no throttling occuring. under light running with spotify in the background the temp hovers around 60 degrees give or take with the current fan settings.  It runs 4k video off Youtube in Firefox with Spotify playing in the background as well and at least 10 browser tabs open with no lag or stuttering. everything is perfectly smooth and fluid other than the usual slightly laggy system prefs pane which is just inherently awful in Sonoma. though its still not as unbearable as i was led to beleive it would be, it just isnt instantaneous like everything else is.   The condition of this one is tidy though a bit more worn externally than the other two.   Unfortunately this morning however the subwoofer driver blew out its dryrotted surround, but id ordered a set of speakers for the Monterey i5 that also blew a speaker so i redirected that set to the i7 (havent been enthused enough to change the left hand speaker yet however, as the right hand side was a pit of a pain, if not too dificult, just fiddly. Here is the buggered speaker below. I noticed the genuine battery (which has a cycle count near 400 and has dropped a few mAh and is a bit shortish on endurance also has a cracked screw mount, so ive decided to order a brand new one. I will also have to get another set of speakers for the i5 seeing as i ended up using the ones i got for it. For what its worth, the aftermarket speakers dont sound bad at all if anybody was wondering  | |
| Posted by: nil on 2026-09-16 09:00:16 my theory with the shutdowns is that usb power is spiking and disconnecting/disabling the external storage(possibly, as you said, due to thermals). i've had most success with partitioning internal drives to have an installer partition at the end of the disk. install from that partition onto the first main partition. once setup, delete the installer partition. the dryrot speakers are interesting. i didn't know why my 2014 sounded so bad. cheers | |
Posted by: Schmoburger on 2026-09-16 21:00:35my theory with the shutdowns is that usb power is spiking and disconnecting/disabling the external storage(possibly, as you said, due to thermals). i've had most success with partitioning internal drives to have an installer partition at the end of the disk. install from that partition onto the first main partition. once setup, delete the installer partition. The speaker rot seems like it might be something that most of this era machine are going to start suffering from soonish. for what it is worth, it seems to be specifically the subwoofer that is affected by the issue in the i7, with the right hand driver (and presumably also the left hand one as it sounds ok) being uncompromised. The i5 with a blown speaker sounds a bit worse but I havent taken it apart to visually inspect the left and right drivers on it yet to see if they are ok or not. I am considering just cutting the subwoofer wiring and seeing if it sounds fine with the sub isolated, and if so, might just splice the sub from a replacement set into the harness to save me a whole lot of messing around to get to the left and right if theyre totally fine anyway. Speaker rot is something id already encountered long ago on the slotload iMac Harmon Kardon drivers, and I beleive I also had the issue with a QS at one point too, but I didnt entirely expect it from an inTel era MacBook. Though granted, it was about 10 or more years ago that i started having iMac speakers disintegrate, so i guess a 2012 machine is getting to that age too now. The i5 was fine until i added a bit of preamp gain using an aftermarket EQ app and that was just enough to tip it over the edge with a fairly bass-heavy trance track. The i7 on the other hand, it just blew the sub out playing a flat EQ setting in spotify with no artificial amplification in a not very bassy song at all (Remy Zero, Save Me... maybe more recognizable as the theme song from Smallville). | |
| 1 |