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Ideas for an "old" 2012 Macbook Air

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pika2000

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Original poster
Jun 22, 2007
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I have a 2012 Macbook Air, core i7, 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM. Hardware wise, it's still fine. The only issue it's having is its battery as it is shutting down even when the battery indicator showed 30-40% left. Obviously it is out of warranty. I am planning to take it to a service center since the battery cycle is far from the promised 1000. Even if I did replace the battery, it won't give me the nice battery life of today's laptops as this is pre-haswell, but that's my plan for now if I'm not buying whatever Apple has to offer next week.

In the meantime, I want to also explore the kind of things that one can do with an old laptop. I thought about selling it, but since it has a dent, I don't think I can sell it for much. Let's face it, people judge books by the cover. Even though the internals are fine, I'm sure buyers will balk at the one dent on the bottom and negotiate much lower prices.

So I am exploring ways to repurpose this laptop. Any thoughts/ideas outside of selling/donating? Any creative ideas outside the usual (eg. HTPC)?
 
You could simply replace the battery and keep using it... It is amazing hardware...

Here is how to do it.

 
You could turn it into a small hard drive server; i have iTunes and three USB 2 HD's hooked up to mine.
 
MY 2012 I5 macbook air is still my main machine. The new ones are not significantly more powerful so I see no reason to purchase a new one.

The battery life is still about 7 to 8 hours and the new ones are better in that respect only if you need the 9th through the 10th hours. I never do. The battery has been replaced once, easy to do.

In the real world I would not expect to see any improvement if I spent the big money on a new one. Mine is still a great machine.
 
I was thinking the same thing, basically an iTunes server. I use a Mini for this, it just runs iTunes 24/7 with home sharing enabled. That makes my large library available on my two Apple TV's and my MBA. The library is on a fast 3TB USB 3.0 drive through, instead of USB 2.0. A second 3TB is used for backup with a CCC script that runs nightly, and I rotate the backup with a third 3TB drive.

I also have file sharing enabled, so I can share files between my Macs and PC. It's hooked up to a 24" screen and my home stereo which has speakers in several rooms.

I didn't suggest it before since you said you weren't interested in "the usual (eg. HTPC)" however. :)
 
Boyd01 said:
I was thinking the same thing, basically an iTunes server. I use a Mini for this, it just runs iTunes 24/7 with home sharing enabled. That makes my large library available on my two Apple TV's and my MBA. The library is on a fast 3TB USB 3.0 drive through, instead of USB 2.0. A second 3TB is used for backup with a CCC script that runs nightly, and I rotate the backup with a third 3TB drive.

I also have file sharing enabled, so I can share files between my Macs and PC. It's hooked up to a 24" screen and my home stereo which has speakers in several rooms.

I didn't suggest it before since you said you weren't interested in "the usual (eg. HTPC)" however. :)
Click to expand...
Cool. What I meant by HTPC was a simple HTPC setup. But I am interested in creative and more elaborate setup.
When you said iTunes server, do you use any special setup? Or just library sharing from standard iTunes? I sync some of my iDevices with iTunes, will this be possible using this setup?

Cheers.
[doublepost=1477199735][/doublepost]
gertruded said:
MY 2012 I5 macbook air is still my main machine. The new ones are not significantly more powerful so I see no reason to purchase a new one.

The battery life is still about 7 to 8 hours and the new ones are better in that respect only if you need the 9th through the 10th hours. I never do. The battery has been replaced once, easy to do.

In the real world I would not expect to see any improvement if I spent the big money on a new one. Mine is still a great machine.
Click to expand...
True, processing power wise, it's been incremental aside from the GPU. The last significant improvement was Haswell, by the means of battery life.
I do have to disagree on the battery life of 7 to 8 hours on Ivybridge. That's very optimistic, or maybe moderate to light usage. From my experience, 4+ to 5 hours is more realistic (wifi browsing, youtube playing, typing, Ms Office, etc). By no means this is "bad," since many Windows laptop that I have used with a similar workload are having a hard time to even reach 4 hours, but it won't provide the comfortable battery life of Haswell and newer.
 
pika2000 said:
When you said iTunes server, do you use any special setup? Or just library sharing from standard iTunes? I sync some of my iDevices with iTunes, will this be possible using this setup?
Click to expand...

"iTunes server" may sound complicated, but it's really quite simplistic. My machine just runs iTunes with home sharing enabled 24/7. I also have the standard apple file sharing enabled. So it can do everything your would normally do with iTunes, sure you can plug your iDevices into it and sync. I originally went to this setup when it became obvious my iTunes Library would grow beyond the point of fitting on my 512gb MBA SSD. So now it's on the server and I can access it over wifi at home on my MBA, two Apple TV's and iPhone with home sharing. This is a bit old, but still pretty accurate: http://www.techradar.com/how-to/software/applications/how-to-set-up-an-itunes-home-server-1305683

Having file sharing enabled allows me to easily add movies and music to the Library from my MBA, just drag them to the "automatically add to iTunes" folder (standard feature in iTunes). And it has the added benefit of letting me share any kind of files between different computers (it's just a network disk).

You could get fancier and run other services on it if you like, but I don't really feel the need. MacOS server is now just a $20 app: http://www.apple.com/macos/server/
 
I converted an old (unsupported) MacBook Air 13 to Windows 7 laptop. I couldn't use Windows 10 because of the lack of drivers for the trackpad. I'll run it until the SSD drive fails.
 
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