Uses for old MBP or other Mac?

Ubele

Ubele

macrumors 6502a
My early 2008 MBP had been getting slow for Aperture and Photoshop Elements, so I finally pulled the trigger on a 2012 quad-core i7 Mac mini from the Apple Refurbished Store. Gazelle will give me $430 for my old MBP, and I probably could get a bit more if I sell it on Craigslist. I notice that a lot of people on this forum hang onto their older Macs, and I'm curious as to what you do with them, other than having a backup handy in case your main Mac needs repairs. I'm debating between hanging onto mine or selling it while it still has value (or before the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT GPU goes bad, which already happened once, while it was still under AppleCare). I'm leaning toward selling, but if someone says, "It would make a great <fill in the blank>!" (and no, not a great doorstop), I might hang onto it.
 
A ton of people connect them to TV's and use them in a media server system. Computers work great for that.
 
johnnnw said:
A ton of people connect them to TV's and use them in a media server system. Computers work great for that.
Click to expand...

Thanks. Yes, I considered that. I got an Apple TV last year, and I'm not sure what my old MBP could do that my new Mac mini streaming to my Apple TV won't be able to do, but I'll look into it.
 
Install a Linux-based OS (Ubuntu if you're not experienced) or Chrome OS and use it as a fast, handy portable (or just mess around with different OSs for fun).
Use it as your private file server for yourself or to share media or whatever with friends and family.
Use it as a spare hard drive in your house, simply download all your stuff to it and keep it hooked up to the LAN to pull things from it, etc. There's many ways to get creative with this, although most of the ones I have are just little things that seem fun to me (RAMdisk, remote apps, etc)
 
I would sell it. Other than to use it as streaming content to tv and browsing machine, theres not much really.
 
i would keep it. it can be a casual family laptop surfing the net, emails, microsoft word/excel..and to stream movies. lots of use.
 
I roll my retired equipment down to my kids. If they're all set, I give to family members or my kid's schools.

Edit: I've given a number of cell phones to battered women's shelters. Haven't tried a computer yet, but I'm sure they'd be happy to have them too.
 
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