The Mac Came Back

Three years ago (this month) I wrote a blog-post about a foray into Macs, and I don't mean British for a raincoat. As a quick recap, I had a client who's daughter was going to school at Baylor University, a school that's known for it's medical programs and was/is a "Mac Shop". Therefore, she wanted to have a MacBook just to make things easier. Well; earlier this year, she graduated, and while I was doing some work for them, I asked about the computer and whether she was upgrading now that she's gainfully employed. Some time later, the dad told me that she had indeed upgraded since, a few months ago, she had spilled a soft drink into the computer and it had promptly died! ..... and that I could have it if I liked. 

So, of course I liked; you know me.... I enthusiastically welcomed the rather bedraggled looking MacBook back home. And it absolutely looked like the proverbial thing that "the cat dragged in", with NO signs of life emminating from it when power was hooked up.

Let's began by looking at the specs. It's a "run-of-the-mill" 2009 White polycarbonate MacBook, which back then cost about $1000 in base trim. This particular machine had been upgraded to it's RAM max of 4Gb vs. the 2Gb standard so was worth more. In 2011 when I originally bought it, they were going in the $500 range. I picked it up for somewhat less than that with 6 months of Apple Care left to go. In those pre-"Core" days, it was a very nice machine. Today, given that it's equipped with the "Penryn" (45nm) generation Core 2 Duo, it's still a very useable computer, especially with 4Gb (or more) of RAM. The main chink in the armor though is the slow 160Gb/5400rpm hard drive. More on that later. 

So, what we have here was what used to be a pretty nice little laptop, but had been rendered useless from soda. Now, when you have a liquid spill, typically, everything doesn't die. If it's water or a few other things, sometimes, the entire machine can be rescued if power is removed and the liquid is flushed away and dried quickly. NONE of those things happened. It was a worse case scenario. Soda (acid AND sugar), NOT flushed away quickly. So the upshot is that the motherboard and in all likelihood any electronics in the base of the machine are irretrievable. However, it wasn't a lost cause. In all probability, the entire screen assembly was/is still good, maybe the drives, and possibly the RAM. The question was: how much work did I want to invest into this little laptop?

Two weeks of pondering and eBay watching netted me this. At $83 with free shipping, plus my conveniently timed "eBay Bucks" certificate brought this solution in at less than $70 spent. To make a long story shorter; it arrived yesterday afternoon, and an hour later, I had a working MacBook. The important thing about this was that the base was complete/working, only missing a few screws. So the old screen went right in, the RAM and hard drive transferred right over, the machine booted right up. End of story.... kind of....

During those two weeks of looking and contemplation, I decided that if I was going to resurrect this machine, I was going "whole hog". And in my world, that means SSD. As I've trumpeted many times before; nothing makes a machine feel fast as quickly as putting an operating system on an SSD! To that end, I bought a used Intel 160Gb SSD for $90, which brought total outlay to just under $160. I'll need to watch Craigslist and find somebody selling an OS X Snow Leopard, or Mountain Lion (maybe even Mavericks) load and get it finished for something like $175 invested. If that seems like a lot of money, it is, especially when compared to similarly spec'd Dell E6400s that I often pick up for between $100 and $125. But, equipped with an SSD, I'll be able to sell this machine for more than double what I put into it. That's the upside of Macs; they may be more expensive, but they have a higher resale value as well. In this case, somewhere between $300 and $400...... that's IF I sell it at all!

WHAT!!! Have I turned to the dark side!?! No, not yet, although I am carrying an iPhone these days (long story). Some time ago, my daughter's ThinkPad X61 died. I replaced it with a Z61t, but she rarely uses it since it's slower AND she's been using an iPad as well. ......Yes, we've succumbed to what my brother-in-law calls, the "gateway drug" of iOS. In fact, we have 4, count 'em, 4 iPads in our house these days! No, I don't use one. AND No, I'm not writing about this now! Back to the sad little girl without a laptop. Anyway; she's always been the different child, the happy bouncy one, the artistic one, .....the lefty. I've always thought that she'd be a Mac person when she got older. She's older now, so it might be time to move her over to a Mac. 

Why not me? Actually, I'm probably a perfect candidate to be a Mac guy. A little different than most people. Kind of a hardware snob. .....and I might..... at some point. There's been a number of times that I've come close to picking up one of the black MacBooks from the same generation as the one I just fixed. And if the 2011, black MacBook Air would have come to fruition, I'd of probably been done for, but neither happened. I do think though, that when the time comes to retire my trusty ThinkPad X301, it'll come down to the X1 Carbon, or an MBA (black or no black).