Back in Time

[Rolando]

Spent the weekend playing/working with my old 2011 MacBookPro

I had purchased a NewerTech battery from our sponsors about 5 years ago, and it kept it alive until the M1 became available.

Moving some stuff, I took a look at it, the bottom was opened up at the seam.

Opened it up, the battery was SWOLLEN.

Turns out I still had the original battery in storage as well, in the OWC box. No visible swelling on that one, so I switched them out and dropped the Newertech off at Batteries+ for recycling (BestBuy no longer does this).

I had left it with the SSD partitioned, one for the Original 10.7 Lion, and one for the latest, which was a dog slow Catalina.

Booted into Lion, but could not boot into Catalina.
Ended up booting into an external High Sierra, will either restore into HS or try Catalina again.

[GGD]

The 2011's topped out at High Sierra officially, if you were running Catalina on it you must have been using DosDude1's patcher.

[special]

13? or the 15" plagued with the GPU problems?

[SrBigStuff]

Wait. 2011 is considered really old?

[RAMd®d]

Wait. 2011 is considered really old?  .



Your computer is one year old.

In computer years it's already dead. .


There may have been another line to that, but I'm really old.

[Rolando]

13? or the 15" plagued with the GPU problems?

15", no GPU issues. Non Retina

[special]

If this is really 2011, the vast majority of those have the GPU issue.

As far as I understand, it's not a matter of IF, it's a matter of WHEN the GPU issue occurs.

Good luck though. I really hope the WHEN never happens for you.

[Bill in NC]

If this is really 2011, the vast majority of those have the GPU issue.

As far as I understand, it's not a matter of IF, it's a matter of WHEN the GPU issue occurs.

Good luck though. I really hope the WHEN never happens for you.

Not the 13" mid-2011 with integrated video.

I keep a few for playing PowerPC games.

[special]

correct, 13" with integrated (Intel?) GPU are OK.
15" with both integrated GPU and discrete GPU (AMD?) are prone to this problem.

There is a FPGA hack to bypass the discrete GPU and force the system to work using only the integrated GPU. DOSDUDE sells the firmware, $20 for a license. I refreshed mine, it still worked for a few years until the ribbon cable inside the hinge started to act up and now I get some weird lines on the screen.