Can you buy a working MacBook for just $22??

so I was looking around on eBay for some projects and I found this four-part MacBook that was listed for just 22 and I was like yeah of course I'm gonna buy this thing for 22. so I don't really know very much about this machine it was listed as a mid-2010 15 inch that needs a battery and storage and I thought okay for 20 bucks those are some pretty cheap parts and this could probably be a pretty decent little machine for less than 50 bucks all in all right so condition here honestly looks pretty good we do have a pretty noticeable scratch on the lid but doesn't look terrible overall let's open it up and check out the inside now straight away here this is why I bought this computer having an anti-glare display for 20 bucks I couldn't say no and honestly this thing looks like it's in really good shape we've got four gigs of RAM installed here and sure enough no hard drive so of course I've got got a 256 gigabyte micro center SSD I love these things they're super cheap this one I think I managed to grab with one of those free SSD coupons that pop up from time to time so this is literally zero dollars that are now going into this machine I don't have the mounting screws so I might have to find some of those but theoretically that is most of the work that this machine needs [Applause] all right well it's booting took a second there when I plugged it in and it didn't turn on I was a little nervous all right we're booted into the Catalina installer here so let's go ahead and format our new drive and install Mac OS so we're now installing a patched version of Mac OS Catalina and we're only going to need a few parts to get this 22 dollar MacBook back up to spec first we're going to need a replacement battery we're also going to need some mounting screws for the hard drive and we need case screws because those are all missing so while I go and find those things let's get a quick word from today's video sponsor today's video is sponsored by see who and their new Doro C300 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let's now turn our attention to our list of parts starting with a battery and if you want to get a nice genuine OEM used battery it's gonna be about 25 to 30 dollars and that's not necessarily a problem but with the machine this cheap I want to go even cheaper so I found this this battery for just thirteen dollars including shipping now this battery's not going to be in very good health it's probably going to say service recommended but that doesn't mean that it won't be fine for a build this cheap and then aside from the battery I found some hard drive screws and case screws for literally a dollar each and I didn't even end up using these because I just scavenged some from all of the many machines I have so once all of the parts arrived I correctly mounted our hard drive and installed our new battery foreign [Music] set up I want to download some benchmarking tools so we could get an idea of how usable this thing is however a lot of applications are starting to lose support for Mac OS Catalina and when I opened cinebench it crashed so hard it colonel panicked to the computer so I decided that we are going to try something new we're going to put Mac OS Ventura on this 20 Macbook so I grabbed the open core Legacy Patcher which allows you to very easily download and create a bootable installer for Mac OS Ventura and after 40 minutes waiting for this thing to install we have Mac OS Ventura running on a 13 year old MacBook Pro and here it is our 22 MacBook is now running Mac OS Ventura and I'm honestly shocked at how well this came out given the price point we're talking about here first of all this machine is in amazing cosmetic condition this is something that is always a gamble when you buy used because the pictures don't always show it but I'm very pleased with how nice this machine looks and to be honest a lot of what makes this machine look so nice is that anti-glare display that really is a nice thing to have here so if you don't know the anti-glare display was a 100 upgrade that Apple started offering in 2009 for the 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pros and in addition to having a matte finish which significantly cuts down on Reflections you also get these silver bezels which I think are rather fetching and the screen is a higher resolution normal 15 inch MacBook Pros of this time period are 1440x900 this guy is 1680 by 1050 and it is a much much better resolution not only is it more sharp but things are spaced out better the screen looks really really good the colors even look really really good I mean look at it side by side with the 15 inch MacBook Air you wouldn't think that these displays are 13 years apart but they are and sure you can definitely see the difference in quality when you turn the lights off the black levels and the contrast of course are not going to be as good on this display but it's pretty crazy that you can make that comparison and this machine which costs less than fifty dollars doesn't even look that bad there are brand new Windows laptops shipping right now that cost 10 times what this thing costs that have worse displays so the display is clearly the Highlight but how is this machine to use well we're running a first generation core i7 it's a dual core chip by but it's hyper threaded so it's not quite as anemic as using a Core 2 Duo machine but it's not that far off I ran cinebench R23 and that gave us a score of 800 so that's almost exactly one tenth the performance of the M2 Chip in that test uh yeah so so this is not a fast machine I don't think anyone was expecting it to be but just in case there was anyone out there who was harboring some confusion you are not going to be impressed by the performance of this machine but it does at least offer you access to some of the Apple ecosystem at an outrageously minimum price speaking of which how much did I actually spend to get this machine fully working well 22 bucks was the laptop I paid 15 for shipping and then I paid 13 for a battery that's exactly 50 bucks 50 all in fully working MacBook Pro and it is perfectly capable of browsing the internet sending a couple emails and looking at YouTube videos that's one quarter the price of upgrading the ram in a new Macbook Air and you're getting an entire computer so do I recommend doing something like this absolutely and here's how [Music] so let's talk about how you can replicate this experiment how do you find these super cheap but functional MacBooks well the way that I found this one was actually very simple just go on eBay type in MacBook nothing else you want it to be as vague as possible because we're just going to use filters so from here we're going to select buy it now then we're going to sort by Price lowest first and automatically eBay is going to streamline the search results to show you the best listings so it's gonna find stuff like this which seemingly is a working early 2011 MacBook Pro for 60 bucks not a bad deal by any means but if we click see more results it's going to really remove the filters and now we're seeing absolutely everything I mean look at these destroyed MacBook Palm rest with missing keys I don't know what's going on here we've got empty boxes these are the eBay search results Pages where I often find some of the best stuff it's not well worded it's not well photographed but it can sometimes be a really a good deal so we're going to scroll down and we're going to look for thumbnails that are kind of like this now I personally I would not buy a 2006 MacBook to use it's not really going to do very much but it does illustrate the thumbnail here we have a screen on and it's searching for a hard drive this is a really easy way to tell that a the screen is working and not cracked be the logic board posts it has RAM installed and it's able to look for an operating system so those are like four major functionality tests just by looking at this photo that this machine has passed here's another great example 18 with seven dollars for shipping we can already see that we have a good display it's booted to a flashing folder and the device looks to be in pretty good condition now this as we can see from the bottom having that battery hatch this is actually a Macbook from 2008 so definitely an old machine but you're talking like twenty five dollars to have this thing at your door which needs a hard drive a battery and probably a ram upgrade and then you're good to go or at least you're probably good to go there is still the chance that you could find some other functional issue with a machine like this but the nice thing about buying MacBooks this cheap is the parts to repair them are also cheap so let's say you spend 25 and you get a 2010 15-inch MacBook Pro like mine and you need to replace the logic board add a quick search here this one is sixty dollars granted that's three times more than I paid for the machine but that's not hugely expensive to repair literally the most expensive component in the machine here's another pretty decent option 2009 MacBook Pro for 35 dollars and the condition here from these photos honestly doesn't look that bad either you can also look for stuff like this this is about 50 bucks with shipping and this one is actually complete you can see we have a 256 gigabyte SSD and four gigs of RAM installed here the description from the seller says there are two unresponsive keys and that means you have a number of options you could buy an entire top case and switch everything over or you could buy just a keyboard they're literally like thirteen dollars to replace those and they just unscrew from the top case it's a bit of work but you could get that machine fixed up for 13 bucks and you can do the same exact method at a slightly higher budget for example this is a 15 inch mid 2012 also with that wonderful anti-glare display and this one isn't even listed for parts it just says booted to internet recovery and the SSD was erased no further testing 130 bucks that is not a bad deal and this one already has eight gigs of RAM so just slap an SSD in there maybe a battery if needed and you're good to go so hopefully these examples illustrate that you can absolutely get a working usable MacBook for less than a hundred dollars significantly less that is a truly remarkable thing and obviously these are older machines a lot of the examples I showed you had Core 2 Duos so you don't have a massive of expectation that the performance is going to be very good but if you need a spare machine or you want to Tinker around or you want to do jailbreaking of old iOS devices and you need a Mac that has an old version of os 10 you can absolutely find these machines for very little money so I hope you found this video helpful and entertaining let me know in the comments below what you think of this project would you do something like this yourself and with that thank you guys so much for watching I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 97,651

Keywords: Apple, MacBook, DIY, MacBook repair, Apple repair, Cheap Apple, Cheap MacBook, Cheap Mac, College Mac, College, Repair guide, MacBook repair guide

Id: 50oeFc64Vws

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023