RIP MacBook

I gave it a shot. Back in 2015 I picked up some cheap pieces to revive a 2007-era MacBook. Cheap 60GB SSD, cheap battery, maxed the RAM to 3GB. It ran Lion and would sync music to my then-girlfriend’s iPhone 5C, and ran her Nintendo emulator. Success. Recently, I got 

enough usable software running to keep it out of the eWaste bin, but then the battery gave up. Then, I nudged it and knocked the magsafe connector loose, and it instantly lost power. Hooking it back up to the AC adapter, I got the dreaded blinking questionmark. Tried burning a Lion install disc or a Linux installer (one of Matt Gadient’s excellent builds), but the spindle of no-name optical blanks I had left over from who knows when, all burned coasters. Meh. Finally burned Fedora-Xfce-Live-x86_64-31-1.9-mac-mattgadient.com.iso on quality media and it worked ... And I learned the SSD is no longer recognized by the system. I have a 120GB SATA SSD I took out of the NAS box when I upgraded it, so I could probably revive it again, but I’m starting to ask myself ... Why? It’d need a new battery to be safely usable. And it’s still a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo with 3GB RAM and a slow I/O system, and a 1280x800 glossy screen and crappy keyboard. And it’s stuck running Lion. I could repurpose it as a Linux workstation, but I could just as easily drop a couple hundred bucks on a PINEBOOK Pro and have something slick and new and modern... End of an era. That machine and I went through a lot together. (Happens when you have a computer for 14 years, spanning a global recession, an engagement, and a global pandemic.)