I recently bought the same exact model laptop that was the first I ever had as my own… a black MacBook Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz mid 2007. Somehow in current year it has a 3rd party battery that is black as well with 0 cycles.
My mother bought it brand new in 2007 and by 2012? some update had rendered it unbootable to tiger. She said if you can fix it you can have it… so 11 year old me did research and decided that buying a snow leopard dvd from Apple (we actually found the tiger dvds months later I was so upset🤣) and a new HDD would fix it. And looking back, new HDD was probably overkill but it sure did fix it.
I daily drove that thing for years, upgraded it to an SSD? Definitely maxed the RAM to 4GBs for free by a guy that did a keyboard replacement to the Santa Rosa version when I spilled something on it. Looking at how easy that repair was and what I paid for it to be done ($200, was I think my birthday present at 13) I see why he did that for free.
I regrettably sold it to a friend in like 2015? Then I ended up buying 2006 white MacBooks later because this specific model and color are so rare but they are almost the same and even now they go for like nothing.
Good old GMA 950 “GPU” which didn’t even have hardware TnL so you had to run a program that would fake having that done by cpu to run Max Payne 2 terribly. Vividly remember playing unreal (1998), messing with winebottler and ancient wine before it was cool/worked, watching YouTube on tiger safari in 720p (GMA 950 can’t handle 1080p without framedrop) even though the thing had a slightly better then 720p 16:10 ratio display (1280x800). Sixtyforce emu and OOT barely ran but was so impressive to me, you don’t understand a GMA 950 unless you have used one. It can barely run half life 2 with lots of tweaking… OpenGL 1.4 (keep in mind 2 years difference of the mid 2007 MacBook was the late 2005 iBook G4 which I also now own, with open gl 2.1 on leopard or later and that’s such a huge difference I can’t even do it justice). Open GL 1.4 is literally from 2002. I couldn’t even run the original glide plug-in for pj64 1.6 because the wrapper required Open GL 2 I believe back in the day.
But yea, these are excellent machines, at this point the GMA 950 is nostalgic not limiting in my mind. This is how my love of late 90s games came to be (because I literally had no GPU with hardware TnL). Also this is how I fell in love with macs. I remember watching the last season of lost on some sketchy website on that model of Mac. I found out how to download music. Use emulators. Boot camp windows XP. Use wine before it was cool and was super broken. Watched wolf of wall street when it first came out…
Sry for the rant I guess, I don’t even have it with me yet but for all of the above this was an eBay bargain for me at $120. I’m literally dead serious going to daily drive this like it’s 2019 back when I had an even older early intel MacBook. Between chromium legacy, probable boot camp to win 7 32 bit, and the immaculate support these things have on Linux I expect 0 issues.
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