💾 Archived View for gem.kirigiri.me › pccollection › unnamed › mbp132012.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:20:49. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Computer Collection: Mid-2012 13" MacBook Pro

About

This was my second Mac, purchased for a horrific price of £500 in 2018. Quite frankly, I don't think I deserved it back then, but oh well, here we are.

Its venerable Ivy Bridge Core i5 served me well, and it even saw an SSD upgrade with a 120GB WD Green drive. I loved this thing, but it's always... smelled. The foam on the bottom cover that supports the RAM sockets is apparently the cause and it has become VERY stinky. I suppose I could call it 'Stinky', but that would be doing this MacBook a disservice.

It originally shipped with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. The specs below was its final operational configuration prior to upgrading. The last version of macOS it saw was Catalina.

Specs

CPU: Intel Core i5-3210M (2C/4T, 2.5GHz/3.1GHz, 35W TDP)

RAM: 8GB DDR3 1600MHz SODIMM (2x4GB)

GPU: Intel HD Graphics 4000 1.5GB (shared system memory)

SSD: WD Green 120GB SATA 2.5" (note: deceased as of 2021-22)

ODD: Apple SuperDrive CD/DVD-R (RW?)

Display: 1280x800, 16:10, very bright

Trivia

This was purchased from Hoxton Macs, who I will never buy from again.
Once called Krypton, but the name has since fallen out of my favour, and since it isn't used anymore I feel like I don't need to name it.
It was shipped to me with what I presume to be its original hard drive, which was failing so badly that macOS was basically grinding to a halt. DriveDx displayed some harrowing SMART data that day. I received a 750GB replacement in the post for free.
The WD Green drive that was in this machine went on to be repurposed as the boot drive for a HP ProLiant DL360e Gen8 server, which was once my extremely overkill NAS. It was eventually taken out of service permanently as I had to get rid of the server, but sometime later I discovered files that I could just not read, and the SSD would require replugging to get it back to life. To ensure nobody could get at the data still on the drive, I peeled the NAND packages off the PCB.
It took me two hours to refresh the thermal paste on the CPU and PCH, due to needing to remove the logic board to get at the heatsink, which faces up towards the keyboard.