Being here in Canada, I wouldn’t necessarily call this a bargain, but I managed to find a fully working, late 2011 A1278 MacBook Pro 13-inch i7/2.8 (with working MagSafe adapter, 2x4GB RAM, 250GB SSD, and OEM battery with some life left), in decent cosmetic shape (no worn keys, no palm-rest corrosion, etc.), for basically $15 or so “Freedom Dollars” (i.e., USD) more than just buying the cheapest, working logic board of exactly the same CPU specs.
Other units (the whole MBP, not the logic board) I’ve run across locally, many in lesser shape or being sold as parts/not working, continue to be offered and sold for up to 3x what I just paid. And finding a working logic board locally? Heck, the last time I saw one come up on my local CL or Kijiji, it was still the year 2018.
(I’d be boasting specifics were it not for that positively brutal exchange rate between our, y’know, real dollars and them yanqui fridum bucks.)
All of this is to replace the dying logic board in my old reliable — my daily-driver-since-new, my research and scholarship-writing rig, my DJing rig, my film-scanning/archiving rig, my day job work rig ’til 2017 — best known as my early 2011 i5/2.3 MBP, whose second SATA bus began last month to error out on writes to the second hard drive. This is especially troubling when that’s where your /Users lives!
What I’ll probably do once it gets here is to inspect, disassemble, clean out, and re-paste the i7/2.8 — to determine whether to just clean and use it with the SSD/HDD combo pulled from the i5/2.3, or to migrate that logic board over to the i5/2.3 chassis and use this second MBP as a long-term parts donor for the one I know best. (There’s virtually no difference in logic board connection locations between early and late 2011s.)
Despite its comically small display resolution (or it sporting @Amethyst1 ’s Achilles heel, that much-loathed HD Graphics 3000 iGPU), I still like its compactness and sturdiness for taking it about in ways I feel anxious doing with my 17-inch A1261 and A1139 laptops. (I haven’t budgeted for a 2011 17-inch A1297, as these are still crazy-expensive around here and even worse south of the border when including that exchange rate — despite their terminally-bad dGPU and being well beyond what I can swing; it remains to be seen whether a 17-inch unibody case feels sturdier to move around than its pre-unibody predecessors.)
And with my i5/2.3 having had a bad RAM slot since forever, it’ll be nice to get a small speed bump with this i7/2.8 and to also have a way to max out the RAM.
Whilst waiting for the above to arrive from a state right over the water from my province (still), I managed to find a stick of 4GB PC2-5300 667MHz SO-DIMM RAM (you know, that spendy stick one needs to bump up their A1260 or A1261 MacBook Pro to the maximum 6GB RAM limit) on the electrical flea market bay for €26 — which, when exchanged to loonies, came to just under CAD$38.
A similar listing from, I think, the same seller offering the same “open box/used” in TCDR* bucks has had it around TCDR$33 (which comes to maybe $45 in maple bills** for me here. So yah, $7 less is something to be happy about.
For almost two years, I’d been eyeing prices wherever I could find that SO-DIMM being sold. Most other retailers have had new “in box” (whatever that ends up meaning) for up to CAD$65, and I hadn’t been able to find anywhere for less than CAD$48. Only in the last short while have I begun to run across listings which dipped below that, so this leaves me pretty happy to soon have the A1261 running at its best — notwithstanding the third-party aftermarket battery problems I continue to tangle with (I’ll share a pic of the latest battery sometime, which is sure to leave some folks stunned).
* TCDR: “Them Colors Don’t Run”
** some folks have made a claim that newly-printed polymer currency used in Canada smells of maple syrup. I handle new currency so infrequently that I can’t say I remember that!
