Tech: When Apple says Dead -You Better Believe It

Lars Poulsen - 2024-04-20

The Set-Up

My sister-in-law asked if I would be interested in a 16-year old MacBook Pro that she was letting go of. I figured that I could probably find a use for it in my network lab, if only as one more end-node in a stress-test scenario. And besides, I already had a MacBook Pro of the same year, so it should be a duplicate, which is always nice when it works out. Maybe it would come with the original CDs, which I had lost for the other one.

When I picked it up, I learned that it had just one small flaw: "The battery is dead and is bulging and those are not available any more, but you can just take it out and run it from the power cord. And I did a factory reset on it, so you don't have to worry about protecting my data."

The Temptations

Well, iFixit had the replacement battery for $60, and it was a perfect fit. I let MacOS X do it's "Hello" sequence, and it looked beautiful. On the other hand, my old MacBook Pro 2008 was a 15 inch (built from 2008 to 2011), while this one was a 17 inch model, which was built in very limited quantities for barely a year, so it was not a duplicate. But the large screen was gorgeous.

The First Issues Appear

After I completed the setup and ran the "software update" procedure, which only had a couple of programs for which Apple had pushed out security updates before they lost support, I discovered the very, very bad problem: The Safari browser was unable to connect to any websites with HTTPS protocol, apparently because the 16 year old system did not have proper security certificates to trust any of the security certificate roots, and the only places it might get such updates would be on webservers that required HTTPS security to connect to. Also, it could not play any video: The updates had installed a video player which required a newer version of QuickTime, which had NOT been installed.

I thought that maybe I could get around this by using another system to download a non-apple browser that might come with better certificates pre-loaded, but this was thwarted in another way: The browsers available for download today required a MacOS X version more recent than the most recent version that would run on that machine. The short production lifespan of that hardware seemed to be a factor in this. I know that right around that time, MacOS X stopped allowing the Rosetta Stone emulation/translation software layer to be installed, and in retrospect I wonder if MacOS X switched from 32-bit to 64-bit mode at this point. Whatever the technical reason, every program I downloaded displayed the No-Entry roadsign (the circle with a diagonal line) instead of its true icon. (Of course, that download had to happen on a different computer and then be transferred via a USB thumbdrive.)

Maybe Try A Different OS?

At this point, I figured that I should try to divide the hard drive with an eye to dual- or tripple-booting: MacOS (if I could ever find a working version), Windows and Linux. So I divided the hard drive into 3 partitions and downloaded a Windows 10 installation ISO file, and since the machine was maxed out at 4 GB, I picked a 32-bit version. The next surprise was that even though modern Windows supports UEFI bootloaders, it would not load into a partition defined by the GPT partition table defined by MacOS, so in order to get Windows onto the machine, I had to erase the partition table, thereby eliminating any chance of ever resurrecting MacOS on the machine. But with that, Windows managed to get installed, and subsequently I divided the hard drive into 3 partitions again. Windows, Linux, Data.

Can You Do Windows AND Linux?

After Windows, I started installing Fedora in the next partition, but ran into a new problem: The Linux installer seemed to know that it was running on Apple hardware, and expected to find Apple's version of an EFI partition, and rejected the NTFS formatted EFI partition that Windows had set up. And after that, Windows would not boot any more. Apparently, I would need to find a way to wipe the hard drive and start over with another install; maybe try to install Linux *before* Windows?

At this point, I was about ready to take the computer to the E-waste collection point across the street, but I held back, because I had just bought a new battery for it.

The take-aways:

Apple changes model names and hardware designs independently of each other. A 2008 MacBook Pro can be many different hardware designs.
Apple sucks at supporting older systems. How hard would it be to allow a new OS to run on older hardware, especially when the selection of possible models is limited to their own? Both Windows and Linux manage to load and run on all sorts of machines from many manufacturers and designed over decades.
Microsoft is pretty good about supporting older systems. Linux is even better (although I have been disappointed that I can no longer get a 32-bit build of Fedora).

These blog pages are found at http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/pages/

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