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2008 unibody macbook - any life left?

B

benrd

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 11, 2008
81
0
Hey all looking for some advice!
I have an old unibody MacBook (2008) gathering dust and recently picked up a 250gb ssd so wondering if worth popping into my old MacBook, getting a new battery and chucking some ram in... Will this give it a lease of life?
I want to mostly run iTunes, backup iPhone and iPad, light photo shop use and web browsing

Ready people talking of this model being a bit of a tank but that was 3 years ago!

Greatfull for any thoughts!
 
First, this thread is in the wrong forum - that belongs in the MacBook forum, not the PowerPC forum.

Second, sure it can still be useful! I use a mid-2007 iMac and a late-2007 MacBook Pro as my main Macs.
 
benrd said:
Hey all looking for some advice!
I have an old unibody MacBook (2008) gathering dust and recently picked up a 250gb ssd so wondering if worth popping into my old MacBook, getting a new battery and chucking some ram in... Will this give it a lease of life?
I want to mostly run iTunes, backup iPhone and iPad, light photo shop use and web browsing
Click to expand...

This isn't a PowerPC Mac (mods, can this be moved?), but yeah, my wife has the late 2008 Unibody MacBook, 2.0GHz, and I recently upgraded it from 2 GB to 5 GB (salvaging a 4 GB DIMM we already had from a mostly-retired 2009 Mini; fortunately they use the same RAM modules) and it has a LOT of life left, runs Yosemite just fine (now). My wife had largely stopped using it a few months ago because it was "too slow", and when I added the RAM she almost thought I bought her a new computer. :)

So I'd say if you only have the stock 2 GB that they shipped with, it might be rather slow. But with 4 GB at least, or preferably even more (these take up to 8 GB), it's still very useful for most non-intensive applications. I'm not sure I'd invest a LOT of money into this, but if you had the parts lying around or could get them on the cheap, it might be worth a try...
 
Thanks guys, sorry it's in the wrong forum - am posting from phone and clicked wrong forum!

So if I can get some extra ram, is there anything else to get it going again? The ssd was only £59 so grabbed it but not sure what to pop it in yet!
 
It's a perfectly capable machine. I had one before the 2011 MBP.

SSD will help responsiveness, especially if you are looking to run OS X 10.9 or 10.10. I installed one in my Mac mini and it's still going strong.
 
Heh... People are using machines from 2003 and even 2001 as their daily machines! A 2008 machine... lol! :p

Any Core 2 Duo Mac is still fully functional and supported today (not officially, but in terms of what it can run) because recent Macs that are supported have Core 2 Duo (My Mid-2009 MBP for example). So you can run Yosemite on any C2D Mac. There might be an exception to this though... I've heard Lion cannot run on some of these Macs because of the unsupported GPU... I don't know anything about that.
 
The Core Duo's top out at 10.6 as they're not 64-bit. The very early Core 2 Duos top out at 10.7 due to the graphics card (Intel GMA or AMD X1600).

MBPs and iMacs from late 2007 will run the current OS X, as will anything with a C2D and an nVidia chipset.
 
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