The $65 MacBook, Love at First Sight, Regret at First Boot
The Dream? Or The Nightmare?
For months I’d wanted to buy an old MacBook, for the sake of nostalgia, you know? I didn’t want something as old as 2008 but not as new as 2015 either. That’s when, during one of my many deep dives into Facebook Marketplace, I saw it—or rather, it winked at me.
It was a 17” MacBook Pro Early 2011 running High Sierra with a quad-core i7, 8GB RAM, and a 500GB HDD—for just $65! I couldn’t believe it. A dream come true… or so I thought.
The Deal
I messaged the seller, who replied quickly (I was at work that day). She gave me her address—a bit far—so I asked if we could meet halfway. She said no but very kindly offered a discount if I came to her place. Note: The original price was $85.
After crunching numbers, I had more than enough for the trip and purchase, but I was determined to get it cheaper. We agreed I’d come by at 6 PM, exchanged numbers and names, and that was that.
At 6 PM sharp, I arrived at her place. An older but VERY kind lady greeted me. I have to admit… it scared me.
The Jeffrey Dahmer Scenario
Her house was empty—well, the living room—spacious with a giant cabinet full of unidentifiable items and a massive wooden table with two chairs in the center. The perfect kidnapping setup, amplified by her extremely relaxed demeanor. Alarm bells were ringing. I even texted my location to a friend “just in case” haha.
She politely asked me to sit, taking the seat across from me. Her voice… so quiet I could barely hear her—almost soft-spoken. She wore strange clothes, like meditation attire? Combined with her ultra-chill attitude, it was surreal.
Disappointment
Anyway, I started checking the Mac. First red flag: It wouldn’t turn on! The seller casually mentioned it only worked when plugged in—dead battery. She’d “forgotten” to mention it in the post. Understandable for an older, non-tech-savvy lady… but she could’ve told me earlier tho…
This almost made me back out, but I felt obligated. It was a steal, and aside from the battery, it looked pristine—like new. Gorgeous.
I ran basic tests: opened programs, played YouTube videos, checked the camera, keyboard, trackpad—all seemed fine. This was my first Mac in nearly 10 years, so I just did a basic inspection.
Note: The system was painfully slow, but I blamed High Sierra running on an HDD and moved on. NOTE THIS FOR LATER
Deal Or Steal?
I mentioned the battery issue and offered $60. She gave me a smug look, leaned in, and said, “$65?” Deal. As I kept testing, she shared that she was a teacher selling it because Moodle didn’t work on this OS version. She’d only owned it for 3 months (!) and bought it on Facebook with the same battery issue. What an asshole, right?
She said she only used it for videos/movies now and that it worked “fine.” I believed her.
While inspecting further, she said I reminded her of her niece, complimented my hair (which I thought looked like shit), and asked how I wasn’t dying of heat in my hoodie (it was 40°C). Aww, so sweet haha.
Finished testing—I liked it! Paid the $65, packed up, and left happy, mostly because of her kindness.
Further Testing
At home, I plugged it in and noticed a weird noise on startup—a chirping sound. Thought it was the HDD but later realized it was the SuperDrive (is that normal?).
Confirmed: Doesn’t work unplugged. Tried everything—SMC reset, NVRAM reset—nothing. System diagnostics showed the battery was indeed dead.
But… 279 cycles?! How?! How does a battery die so young?
I decided if I was keeping it as a paperweight, it should at least work unplugged. But was it really the battery? Or the logic board? Troubleshooting showed the system correctly detected battery states—it even said “Replace Now.” Maybe a shitty third-party battery?
Almost bought a cheap Chinese replacement but chickened out—what if it was worse?
A Glimpse Of Hope
But hey, it works! The slowness was unbearable though—time to crack it open and swap the HDD for an SSD.
No Shit.
Wait… the HDD looks new. Is it even Apple OEM? Hmm… nope. The battery, optical drive, and RAM don’t have Apple logos either. Someone’s been inside this thing before. Kill me…
The SSD is small (spare from my main PC), but with a fresh High Sierra install, this should be a beast—trapped in time, but a beast!
But wait—how do I download the High Sierra image? The App Store only gives me the stub installer. Useless. So I played Yume Nikki instead.
The Minecraft Experience (Awful)
I shelved the issue for a few days. On the 11th, I tried installing Minecraft for fun—PrismMC still supports High Sierra (weirdly). Installed Minecraft 1.0,
It ran laggy, very. FPS was fine, but it felt awful. Keyboard/mouse would randomly disconnect. Unplayable even on lowest settings. For Minecraft 1.0?! This scared me… Surely the HDD wasn’t the culprit? I clung to hope that an SSD reinstall would fix it.
The High Sierra Installation
Finally got a proper High Sierra image (thanks GibMacOS!).
Success! Now to make a bootable USB.
Reinstall went smoothly… until the power went out. HAHAHAHA.
Disappointment, Electric Boogaloo
Next day… Still slow as hell. Even with an SSD. Why?! CPU? RAM? Then I checked CPU frequencies:
800MHz?! No wonder! Research revealed these Macs use the battery as a voltage buffer for the MagSafe. Many report this issue with dead batteries. Relief! Just needed a new battery… The beast will be unleashed!
Burning Money
Ordered a $50 battery (ouch) to finally fix this.
…Or not. Tried reading music CDs—none worked. Drive spins but ejects after seconds. Dirty? Broken? It’s aftermarket, so maybe? I’ll clean it this week. A vintage PC without a working optical drive is tragic. Finding an original SuperDrive will suck (and potentially cost $$$). I’ve sunk enough into this…
But I might have to. If the drive is dead, I’ll need a replacement—or at least a USB one for now.
Boot Camp (The Worst Part Of The History)
Originally, I wanted to install Windows 7 via Boot Camp (well-supported on High Sierra/Lion). But Apple blocked ISO booting on Macs with optical drives. WTF? Found a fix: modify Boot Camp’s info.plist.
Disabled SIP, followed a Reddit guide (archived on Wayback Machine—original was deleted). Added missing keys to info.plist. Boot Camp installer finished… but nothing happened. No USB boot. Forced boot to BOOTCAMP partition—got “No bootable device found.” Progress? …Right?
Bye Bye! High Sierra
Modified the MBR with gdisk. Rebooted to a blinking underscore cursor. Better? Worse? No clue. Then tried booting back to macOS… Forbidden icon. I BRICKED MY INSTALLATION. Fuck.
MacOS Recovery failed (“Connection Error”). Later learned you can patch it via Terminal (doing that now to revive High Sierra). Tried online recovery:
High Sierra/Lion online recovery just boots their respective recoveries. Useless. Currently patching the installer—updates soon.
IT’S ALIVE, IT’S ALIVE… IT’S ALIVE!!!
Am I lucky? Let’s see what happens.
The Battery… Part #1
The battery arrived home—the shipment was quick, way too quick, I’d say. And it even came with the required screwdrivers. Too good to be true! Too good to be… true.
While disassembling the Mac, I noticed that the original battery had no screws. What the fuck? Who was the asshole who “took care” of this before? To be this careless—stealing or losing the screws… Well, let’s move on.
Well, that was easy. I didn’t even have to use the tri-wing screwdriver…
I wasn’t so sure it would boot up, to be honest. I was really scared… But:
IT’S ALIVE, AGAIN!!! I just hope it doesn’t run at 800MHz anymore.
I can’t believe it—it’s alive! It has a little bit of charge, tho, but it’s alive!!! I just plugged it in… Let’s see something…
OH MY… OH… MY… OH MY IT’S TIME… IT’S TIME…
Last time, it worked on 1.0, and the performance was shit, but now… I’ll try with the latest version.
FUCK YEAH, A 2011 COMPUTER RUNNING VANILLA MINECRAFT 1.21.7 AT THAT FRAMERATE??? THIS IS EPIC
After that, I left the battery charging to calibrate it. At 6:40 PM… it… it took so long. At 12 midnight, it was still at 84%. What could be happening? Is that normal? I don’t know, so I went to sleep. I left the Mac charging to use it tomorrow until it reached 0% to keep calibrating it as normal.
The Battery… Part #2 (Aftermath)
7 AM. I woke up and unplugged the Mac to use it. Bad news—it was discharging… way too fast.
Am I cooked? I don’t know… I’m scared. It keeps discharging way too fast—fuck!
By the way, I tried to get Astro.js working to see if I could at least program a bit on this thing to let the battery drain faster and continue the calibration process. Nope!
High Sierra is long gone… Weird because old versions of Windows 10 still hold up very well even nowadays…
So, I left that issue aside and kept using this thing to discharge it. It was discharging alright—still a bit fast, but alright. Then I decided to open Minecraft again, this time unplugged because I left the charger at home for obvious reasons… and guess what.
The Battery… Part #3 (death)
WHAT IS THIS???
It dropped from 68% all the way down to 7%, and then to 2%!!! What the fuck??? Is this battery faulty or something??? What should I do now??? Oh my… Do I have to return it to the seller? It’s new! Why is it failing like that? Could it be a calibration issue? I don’t know… I’m scared.
I messaged the seller, and he said he could offer a free replacement today (wow), so I said YES PLEASE. He replied that it’s on its way (WOW again), and yeah… That’s me, waiting for the battery while at work. Fuck!
I still have hope that it’s just a calibration issue and not a faulty battery. I dunno. When the new battery arrives, I won’t even open it—I’m letting this shit drain all the way down to 0% to keep the calibration process going. It’s been almost 3 hours, and it doesn’t go further down than 2% and 154mAh of charge left. That makes me calm down… It might be a calibration issue! And now, if both batteries work, I’ll have two batteries. LMAO…
Here’s your revised chapter with grammar and typo fixes while keeping the informal tone and slang intact:
The Battery… Part #3 (death)
WHAT IS THIS???
It dropped from 68% all the way down to 7%, and then to 2%!!! What the fuck??? Is this battery faulty or something??? What should I do now??? Oh my… Do I have to return it to the seller? It’s new! Why is it failing like that? Could it be a calibration issue? I don’t know… I’m scared.
I messaged the seller, and he said he could offer a free replacement today (wow), so I said YES PLEASE. He replied that it’s on its way (WOW again), and yeah… That’s me, waiting for the battery while at work. Fuck!
I still have hope that it’s just a calibration issue and not a faulty battery. I dunno. When the new battery arrives, I won’t even open it—I’m letting this shit drain all the way down to 0% to keep the calibration process going. It’s been almost 3 hours, and it doesn’t go further down than 2% and 154mAh of charge left. That makes me calm down… It might be a calibration issue! And now, if both batteries work, I’ll have two batteries. LMAO…
The Battery… Part #4 (A Little Bit Of Hope)
The battery arrived home while I was at work (quick af), so I got back after 2 hours or so and I started Workinonit.
It was surprising to see that the battery WAS THE SAME as the “faulty” one. Fuck me… This ain’t smelling good, right? Fuck!
Well, I left that behind and, with hope, I started charging the Mac as usual. In the meantime, I gave Sodium Minecraft a try. Last time, I tried normal vanilla Minecraft, but I said, “why not?” These were the results:
Well, not bad for a 2011 computer running at that resolution. I was amazed, LOL.
This is weird. It was initially charging at 30W, even 60W—normal charging speed—but around 60%, it started charging at less than 15W… This made me raise an eyebrow, ngl… But maybe that’s normal? I don’t know.
Next day, same stuff. Everything seems okay except that the battery is discharging way too quickly with no tasks running. Could it be a bottleneck from the “modern” system running on old hardware? Who knows… Let’s see what happens the rest of the day. I have high hopes.
So I started using it like normal, this time promising myself I wouldn’t do any crazy shit like opening Minecraft again or something to avoid stressing the battery. So I played Yume Nikki instead.
Everything seemed okay—the battery was discharging at a “normal” rate, as expected. But when it started getting lower, I began to freak out…
Last time, the battery flopped at 68%, so I was terrified of reaching that percentage… I reached and passed it, and nothing happened… I couldn’t believe it. Did the new battery fix the issue? Wow! So I kept using the computer to drain the battery normally.
I’m… I’m fucked. The same thing happened, now at 56%!!! On the new battery, fuck! What could it be? A calibration issue? Or what? Damn… This really pissed me off… Also, the full charge capacity diminished like before, as expected… Fuck! Well, at least it didn’t flop to 2% after 7% like last time, but still, it makes me sick… What should I do now?
I’m keeping the computer on with some music to drain the battery, but it’s discharging way too slow—still at 7% after an hour and a half… That’s hope, a lot of hope. Maybe it is a calibration issue? Let’s see. I’ll do the same process as yesterday but for real this time—I’ll let it drain and die for hours, then plug it back in and let it charge fully like the calibration process says… Wish me luck.
Next day, I left it dead for 5 hours, then plugged it back in. It took a while, as usual. I left it charging overnight, and today I started using it as normal. I was shocked—it didn’t flop at 56% like yesterday, but at 48%! That’s something. That is definitely a calibration issue. It dropped to 7% like usual, and it’s been almost an hour and a half since then. I’ll let it die again and continue the process. Maybe tomorrow it’ll flop at 34% or so, and keep improving until it gets back in sync with the system percentage.
I’m Losing It
Well, next day—same shit. But this time… it flopped at 48% again. And the battery health keeps dropping. I don’t know what to do. I’m at 4 cycles now. I think calibration won’t fix the issue… it might be the MacBook itself. Who knows… I’m losing hope.
If anyone out there knows about this stuff and is willing to give me a hand, I’d appreciate it so much.
I’ll do two more calibration cycles, and if that doesn’t fix the issue… that Mac might turn out to be the worst decision I’ve made in years.
That’s it for now.
