The Mid-2010 MacBook Family Reunion
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A lot of times, your first impression of something tends to stick with you for a long time, to influence the purchases you make in the future.

For instance, when I was little, our family had this piece of crap HP laptop. I don't remember the model, but it sucked horrendously. It was probably I wanna say from 2004 or so, and it was the first laptop that our family had, though we also had a 2003 HP desktop upstairs, and a Medion Desktop from 2000 downstairs.

That laptop was old and bulky, I remember it had Vista installed (must have "up"graded? Don't remember). Like anyone with a piece of plastic they spent $1000 on, we treated this laptop pretty well, but it still decided to commit hingeicide anyways (the act of self destructing hinges), and just as a little extra, it completely died. Yeah, my Grandma said that it overheated because we left it on the carpet floor too much. But hey, what do you want, I'm a 7 year old with a laptop, it's gonna be sitting on the floor with me! Well, it wasn't my laptop, but you get what I mean.

This experience somehow imprinted into my mind that "all laptops are bad and must break for no reason". Well, in the modern reality, that's not all to far off from the truth, but back then, you know that it broke because you bought an HP, idiot!

Later, after that piece of crap Medion PC also died, my Grandma bought a Cicero in 2005, and that was the computer that our family used, until my Mom and Dad would come home one day with something that would change the way we saw laptops forever.

After months of saving, they had made the purchase, and on the kitchen table, where it would sit for the next 12 years, was the incredible, and glorious..

17-Inch Macbook Pro

Looking at this thing, it would crush the HP laptop any day, metaphorically and physically.

This MacBook Pro A1286 came with a crystal clear 17-inch display, a Core i5 540M processor, the 256MB Nvidia GeForce GT330M GPU, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 500GB HDD, and the solid, sturdy, and beautiful Aluminum Unibody case.

All of that in 2010 was not the price of your average refurbished HP laptop. That thing set us back a whopping $3000 CAD (~2300 USD).

It started as a family laptop, although I wasn't allowed to use it that much, because some kid + $3000 laptop could not go well. Eventually over the years, it gravitated over to basically being my Dad's laptop, and he loved that laptop. It had gone around on a couple trips, but it mostly stayed right there, at the kitchen table, and he sat at the kitchen table about every day. Since the day they bought that laptop, it stayed in pretty much daily usage for 12 years! I like to say they got their money's worth (or my Dad did, cause my mom ended up buying her own, cheaper Acer laptop)

Every day for 12 years it powered through the most average internet surfing ever. Yeah, when they first bought it, they really didn't use it up to what it could have done. In it's day, that thing would have been like a portable workstation, but now, it still does what it's been doing for 12 years without a sweat, general internet browsing, and with the internet getting all more bloated every day, some of that graphics hardware really gets put to use!...

What my Dad really liked about it was simply the screen size. He always liked to have a front-row view of everything, and years ago when he was considering a new laptop, the thing that kept him away was that Apple no longer manufactured 17 inch models, because sales were low for them being hard to travel with, and for the price. Apple of course embraced travelling with your MacBook with the MacBook Air, which is gay.

My Dad tried his best to keep it in immaculate condition, and it's held up extremely well. Those Unibody MacBooks are sturdy, but scratches and dents gravitate towards them. There are about 3 small scratches on the top of that laptop (bottom doesn't count, okay!) There's also one small drop of paint residue on the case as well from when we painted the house, we used the laptop as a music player (oh yeah, the iTunes library is still on there. I probably played "Yellow Submarine" by The Beatles 9999 times, enough for my Mom to get tired of it.

Over the years, it's held up with minimal service done to it. It's hard drive has almost failed twice. It was one of those Apple HGST drives, and it began to slow down and make grinding noises in 2014. He got it replaced at the Apple Store, where they installed another Apple HGST drive that began to fail in 2019. After that, I replaced it with a Samsung SSD, and threw in 8GB of RAM, which is the best upgrade you can do to one of these MacBooks. The MacBook had started to become bogged down over the years, due to software and websites becoming more and more bloated. This little upgrade made that MacBook feel like new again, and it just flies through internet browsing and other tasks.

One event that eventually led my Dad to buy a new laptop, was a tragic one. My Dad often put the laptop on the table in front of our couch, and one day, when he was closing up for the night, after 12 years of near perfect care, he didn't realize how close it was to the edge of the table, and when he got up, it got bumped and fell, perfectly vertically, 2 feet onto a carpeted floor, and the hinge was never the same. It was genuinely sad.

After this, my Dad bought a new laptop, finally retiring after 12 years of daily usage, memories growing up, and the evolution of OSx from 10.6 to 10.13.

But it is not done yet, after 12 years of hard work, it can finally be reunited with the full fleet of Mid 2010 MacBooks.

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Now you may be thinking, why, and how did you get all of these Mid-2010 MacBooks?

Well, through all the years that my Dad used his MacBook, I never really got to use it, and truly experience it on my own.

It started with the acquisition of my 15-inch Mid-2010 MacBook Pro, which funnily enough, started with my Dad.

Now, most people my age probably wouldn't be thrilled to help your Dad's friend move, but I always am. Helping other people move stuff is a great opportunity to get free stuff that would otherwise be thrown away. (And you know I love free stuff!)

After a full day of packing, disassembling, moving, driving, unpacking and reassembling, we all sat down at a kitchen table in the backyard to eat take out food. So we were talking a little, and it was brought up "hey what do ya like, like what u interested in?", I told him some about my interest in computer junk, and he said "hey, I have something to show you", and went inside. He came back out with a 15-inch Mid 2010 MacBook.

This MacBook Pro A1286 came with a crystal clear 15-inch display, a Core i5 520M processor, the 256MB Nvidia GeForce GT330M GPU, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 320GB HDD, and the beautiful Aluminum Unibody case in decent shape, originally coming in at $2300 CAD (~1800 USD).

He told me that he bought it in 2010, but in 2013 it developed an issue where it would shut down in the middle of booting. I thought it sounded like a motherboard issue, and he said "yeah, I brought it to be repaired and they said they'd have to replace the board, which was way too expensive, might as well just buy a new laptop".

A laptop with a known motherboard issue should have been worthless to me, but I took it anyways cause I'm a hoarder. Knowing the issue, when I got home, I started messing around with it anyways.

I noticed that booting from the HDD, it would crash, but from a 10.13 installer flash drive, it had no issue. So, I replaced the HDD with an SSD and installed 10.13. There was no issue. This confused me, was the HDD just corrupted? Did the repair shop just not want to fix it?

That was until, I opened VLC to play a video, then it crashed. I played a Youtube video in HD, then it crashed.
After that, with one quick Google search, I learned that specifically the Mid 2010 MacBook Pro model had an issue with the circuit responsible for switching between the Intel Integrated GPU, and Nvidia GT330 Dedicated GPU. From my very limited knowledge on hardware, what I understand is that Apple had used faulty components that would eventually fail after several years. This particular model tool 3 years to fail, which is a shame, for a $2300 laptop that still had/has so much life left in it.

You can just replace the failed components, but at my current surface mount soldering experience level, I might as well try smashing the board with a hammer. So I took the easy route. You can manually set which GPU you want to use with a little system tray program called GFXcardstatus. You can choose to use Dynamic Switching (default), or only Integrated, or only Dedicated.

I also installed a software patch that re-enables usage of the Dedicated GPU to an extent. (From what I understand) The Dedicated GPU has 3 power states, and it was found that it would always crash at state 3 due to pulling too much power through the components. The patch limits the GPU to only state 2, which of course means that it is not as powerful as it could be, but at least you can use it without crashing all the time.

To top it all off, I went on eBay and bought the A-TECH 8GB RAM upgrade, and since then I've used this laptop every day. A free laptop, 2 patches, 2 hardware upgrades and just like that, you have a perfectly functional laptop.

And yeah, it's my main laptop. Well, I'm typing this page on here right now! Every day, this thing goes with me to school, and every night, plays videos and reads websites. I have a full set of software on here, gigabytes of downloads, files, hundreds of bookmarks, a 2TB external HDD to go with it, and even a Logitech M510 wireless mouse, because I can't stand trackpads. Can any other 12 year old laptop hold up that well?

Even with so little use originally, the original battery from Aug 2010, still holds a charge running for around 3 hours, still at 75% health (~6900mAh) at only 304 cycles when I got it. Currently has 405 cycles as of 06/09/22.

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One MacBook that I kinda had a soft spot for was the 13-inch White plastic MacBook. My school used to use them. Well, they still have them, but one time when I was in the library I overheard "hey can I borrow this cart?", "you know those are the dinosaur laptops, right?".

Oh come on. "Dinosaur laptops"? A lot of people just don't give the laptops a chance. Most just pass them off as "well, it's a 12 year old laptop", and a lot are just tossed in e-waste anyways (also, e-"waste" is not a real thing, computers are not waste, they could be used or donated to people who need them. many capable, expensive or historic machines are trashed every day so recyclers can feel good about themselves for sending our junk to China to be shredded and burned or something).

Those laptops are school laptops, they're beaten to hell, are on orignal HDDs and 2GB of ram, and they're still running OS 10.6! Yes, in 2020, the last time we used them, they were still running these into the ground with 10.6 on them. Uh, you guys, these can run 10.13!

To prove them wrong, I went and bought a White 2010 MacBook. Well, not really, I just bought it cause I wanted it. I bought this one on eBay for $20. Yep, $20. Actually a decent deal for one of these. If you want a good deal, you gotta buy like this. The refurbished 2010 MacBooks are pretty expensive, cause well, they're good laptops! This $20 MacBook had clearly been abused and neglected, and would probably end up being sold for parts. It looked so sad sitting there, but it was working, and a good price, so I bought it, and I wanted to know that this sad machine would finally end up in a good, caring home.



And eventually, a laptop shaped box arrived at the door. Inside was a filth covered, crunchy MacBook... and it came with a charger, which wasn't mentioned in the listing, a bonus!

This White MacBook A1342 came with an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 CPU, a decent looking 13-inch LCD panel, 250GB HDD, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, 256MB Nvidia GeForce 320M GPU, and a clean looking unibody polycarbonate plastic case. Not "Pro", but still not bad, and still coming in at $1300 (~1000 USD).

There's a nasty candle burn mark on the back of the display, and it had discoloured the panel a bit. This is weirdly common to find laptops with burnt screens from candle lovers. The plastic all around the ports had cracked through, there were weird scratches all over it, and dents on every corner. That thing had a rough life. I plugged in the charger, and nothing. The seller said that "it had to be on an angle to charge" I thought that was weird for MagSafe, so I examined it, then dislodged a bunch of gravel(??) from the charging port. Now it works. What in the world?



I started it up and it worked fine. It already had 8GB of RAM installed, which was a nice bonus. The battery was completely dead, and could no longer hold any charge, so I ordered a cheap Amazon replacement. I know, cheap Amazon batteries are bad, and it'll probably be the death of me, but I didn't want to spend too much, and it has worked fine so far.

I shut the thing down, and got out my arsenal of cleaning supplies. Paper towels, alcohol and soap spray bottles, and a Magic Eraser. The previous owner had left a keyboard cover on it. I thought this was unusual, since seller usually remove crap like this, so I peeled it off and it was just plain brown underneath.

Yeah. I guess the seller was just too lazy to clean any of this. So I busted out the cleaning supplies and after an hour or so, I had it looking pretty nice.

Apart from ordering a new battery, I also decided, hey, why not make it look nice with a case! Yes, a MacBook case, probably one of the only line of laptops to have cases. You can get them for almost any MacBook model, and sure enough this model had a case available. It was hard to decide between blue and orange, but I went with orange since it just looked so cool. It kinda gives old iMac G3 vibes now.

The case looks awesome, it conceals the burn mark, and helps hold together the broken area near the charging port. Now that I had everything, including a newly cleaned MacBook, I installed a 256GB Samsung SSD, appreciated the pre-installed 8GB of RAM, installed the new battery, and to top it all off, clipped the new case on.

And it's beautiful. As much as I hate keyboard covers, I couldn't resist throwing on the orange keyboard cover as well. It currently has Windows 7 installed on it. Okay, don't kill me, but I was in need of a decent Windows laptop, and this one gets the job done just fine. There is a lot of software that only runs on Windows, so it's nice to have it around, and I have the 15 and 17 inch MacBooks anyways.

I use this laptop quite a bit as well, just for running Windows software, the occasional little game, and I leave it out to play music and videos sometimes. You get about 4 hours out of the replacement battery which I suppose is okay.

The reason I like these MacBooks so much, is because they can be acquired for extremely good prices, sometimes even free (well not the 17-inch, those are still expensive) and for about $40, you can buy upgrades for RAM and SSD, and with that, you have a extremely good laptop for basic usage. This ain't no 2007 HP with Lubuntu, you aren't waiting around for anything.

So finally, each of them all with their own story, a representative of each Mid-2010 MacBook size, are all reunited to live together in peace, knowing that they will be taken good care of for years to come.

- dvd3000