Revivng and Triple-Booting a mid-2015 MacBook Pro 15.4"

After having uBreakiFix (Asurian) swap out the spicy pillow OEM battery for ~$100, I dropped another $60 or so into this mostly pristine 15.4" MacBook Pro (bought new just as they were finally discontinuing them in 2018) to bump the SSD from the stock 256GB to a cool 1TB using a Western Digital Blue SN580 drive and a Sintech NGFF M.2 nVME SSD Adapter. With some room to play, I decided to triple boot the thing:

• macOS Monterey, the last version officially supported by Apple. (Debating using OCLP to bump it to Sequoia...) This occupies the bulk of the storage, with 617 GB allocated.
• macOS High Sierra, the OS it shipped with. This lives on a relatively tiny 128 GB partition and really only exists for legacy software. (Might make sense to bump this to Mojave, which will still run 32-bit software?)
• Linux (255 GB partition). I’m going to try Ubuntu Budgie LTS (24.04.1).

I setup Monterey first using Apple’s over-the-Internet restore functionality. I then built a High Sierra installer from an install image I’d archived (using createinstallmedia) and installed it to the 128GB partition. Next I used BalenaEtcher to install the Budgie 24.04 LTS ISO to the same USB drive to install Linux. (Note: Had to download an earlier BalenaEtcher (v1.5.5 from 2019-02-28) to work on High Sierra (despite the website saying it would work on 10.10 and later), and had to download Firefox ESR to get GitHub's "Assets" sections to expand to do that!) I did get a warning about the ISO image not having a partition table and that it may not be bootable, but it worked fine.

I didn’t do anything special, just deleted the DOS partition I’d setup as a placeholder and created a pretty standard set of Linux partitions (500 MB /boot, 100 GB /, 155 GB /home). Now, booting up holding down the Option key I can boot into High Sierra, Monterey, or “esi boot” [fix], which loads up the Linux install. Holding down the Control key when selecting a boot option makes that option the default for subsequent boots; this is booting Monterey.

Now, this thing is a 10 year old design, but the specs are still pretty decent:

MacBook Pro (15-inch Retina Mid 2015) (MacBookPro11,4)

• Intel Core i7-4770HQ (Haswell), 1 Processor, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 2.20 GHz base frequency (3.4 GHz max), 47 W TDP
  
• Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200
• 16.00 GB RAM, 1600 MT/s DDR3
• GeekBench 6 single core 1048, multi-core 3772.
• GeekBench 5 single core 779, multicore 3195 (vs. 627 and 6421 respectively, for the 3.06 GHz 12-core Xeon Mac Pro 2012... Competitive!)
  

 As this YouTuber comments in What is the CHEAPEST usable MacBook? “The GOAT ... This thing was absolutely legendary, the last of the traditional MacBook Pros, and a lot of people continued to use these ... It’s not really the powerhouse that it once was, but it’s still plenty usable. Now, when you compare it to the M1 MacBook Air, you can absolutely see the difference in the snappiness of the operating system, but given the $200 price point of this machine, I can forgive that extra second or two in opening applications. For basic tasks, which is really all you can expect from a $200 machine, it gets the job done. And I have to say that this generation of MacBook Pro has held up incredibly well. The design has aged beautifully, it came out almost 13 years ago and it still looks like a modern machine. We have a crisp, bright, 15" retina display, which makes viewing your content fantastic, and we’ve got Apple's iconic chiclet keyboard, no need to mess with success, it works great.” He continues: “I have multiple friends that bought it new 10 years ago and are still using it.” (Speaking about the 13" MacBook Pro with the dual core i5, of the same vintage, and the 15" quad-core i7 is much better spec’d.) Also: “Computers just last longer now. Most basic tasks haven’t become more arduous for a computer to run in the last 10 years. So the result of that shift is that computers just last a lot longer than they used to, and a 10 year old MacBook Air can still do most of the same things that this thing was for when it was brand new.”

With a fresh battery and 1 TB of storage, it more than gets the jobs I need to get done, done, and it makes for a great portable machine I can use on the balcony with my MOFT Z stand, at my Bateman Labs Poång Lap Desk Workstation, etc.

For charging, I picked up this Magnetic 90 Degree USB C to Magnetic 2 T-Tip Adapter, Type-C to Safe 2 T-Head PD 100W Power Fast Charging Converter for 2013-2015 MacBook Pro Air which seems to work fine. Charging the battery (@ 42% SOC) and running GeekBench, the LED Display USB C 240W Fast Charging Cable reported up to about 65W of power consumption, hooked up to a UGREEN CD226 100W USB PD brick (100W available to a single USB C device, as I’m using it here):

USB C to MagSafe 2 adapter charging the laptop

So, yeah, this machine is going to live in my “around the house computer tote,” which bundles the laptop, the MOFT Z stand, the Q60 Max keyboard, a small mouse pad, a USB C charging cable, the MagSafe 2 adapter, a Logitech Bluetooth mouse, an Anker USB C 100W charger... Just one thing to grab and take out to the balcony, or over to the Poång chair, or ... and then pack back up when I’m done.