so over the past few years i’ve had somewhat of an on and off interest in Macs due to this sort of exclusivity they’ve always had in my mind. i grew up using Windows and Linux which as i’m sure you’re all aware can run on a very vast number of machines, unlike macOS which is made to run on specific, usually very expensive, almost purpose-built machines (quite literally purpose-built now that Apple Silicon is a thing). as a result of their differences to the average computer, i’ve always wondered what it’s like to use one. and so every now and then i’ve been known to have a look on eBay at their prices when i’m looking at things i want to get. i remember in late 2023 for example, looking around for 2012 Mac Minis, specifically because they’re the last fully upgradable ones you can get.
well, a little closer to today a friend of mine was setting up a macOS VM on their home server and that gave me the thought “fuck it, let’s go hackintoshing again”. so after plenty of time messing about with OpenCore and an old ThinkPad with like a Haswell i3, 8gb of ram and a probably 5200rpm mechanical HDD, i had macOS 12 installed. i messed about a little bit but honestly gave up quite quickly on it due to the unsurprising slowness of the OS given the machine it had been installed on. weirdly enough though at first animations were really smooth on it. next i tried installing it on my main machine. this allowed me to install the latest version of macOS (15 at the time of this post) as it has an AMD GPU, as opposed to the now unsupported Intel integrated graphics the laptop had. this gave me a better experience. a considerably better experience. an experience so much better that i was considering getting a MacBook as a new laptop because either way i wanted a new one. my current laptop, a Lenovo Flex 2-15, while it has a touchscreen that i learned i really love, has a really bad keyboard and trackpad that results in me making frequent mistakes just trying to navigate the OS or type something simple and a battery that lasts about 30 minutes. (what is it with me and laptops that last 30 minutes on battery, my last one done the same thing too. it’s battery was so fucked that some Windows hardware info tools would report it as at like 300% once fully charged.)
as you should know by now if you’ve been here for any amount of time, “new” to me means “some decade-old thing, sometimes even older, that lost mainstream support ages ago that i’m willing to give mainstream support back to thanks to the use of some free and open-source tool i found on the internet”. so after some research, off to eBay i went! thanks to the information i found online, most notably these two videos from the YouTube creator “What’s on Your Screen?” (whose content i have now begun to watch religiously) i had a look for a mid 2015 MacBook Pro for reasons very obvious to anyone interested in Intel Macs and now very obvious to me. the 2.5 and 2.7GHz models could be configured with dedicated AMD graphics which should mean that future macOS releases will continue to run smooth whether officially supported or not, their trackpads are solid state, meaning they don’t move at all when you press down on them which allows for them to generally feel and work a lot nicer while being a lot less prone to damage, and their keyboards aren’t affected by the decrease in quality MacBook keyboards had starting in 2016 up till the release of the M1 Macs.
and turns out that now seemed to be a pretty good time to go looking for one of these things too. not long into my search i found one being sold with everything it originally came with, including the box, and with a replacement iFixit battery that had ~40 cycles on it for around £100. the only other example i could find at the time of one similar to that was around £360, so obviously there was a couple of catches to this. first, the left speaker was advertised as sounding distorted. no problem for me, i don’t really use the speakers on my laptops anyway. second, the machine took several hours of charging according to the seller to power on. again not an issue, just sounds like the battery needed some time after being left alone for a while. third, in the seller’s words charging can be a bit temperamental. that’s something i’m willing to put up with. fourth, while charging the seller noticed a faint crackling sound near the charging port. that’s fucking weird. the laptop’s mine now.
upon receiving it, i reset the NVRAM and booted the system into Internet Recovery mode to reinstall the latest version of macOS the machine officially supports (which is 12). once that was done i installed the OpenCore Legacy Patcher and had a look through the 3 currently supported macOS versions (13, 14 and 15 at the time of this post) to see which ones would run best on the machine. what i found was that 13 and 14 run great while 15 is a little slow at times. looking back at it though i assume it would have ran as fine as 13 and 14 did if i just gave it some more time. 14 needed some time and a reboot too before it ran as well as it does now. i also tried Windows and Linux as i did want to dualboot with Linux at first and as for Windows i just felt like it really, part to see what it’s like and part for the age-old joke of running Windows on a Mac. Windows installed on the machine considerably quicker than on any of my PCs and worked just fine honestly, apart from the machine running weirdly hot. Linux however was a bit funny for me. i tried Debian and Mint, both with Cinnamon and KDE. Cinnamon had issues with fractional scaling which made the machine’s graphics lag up at random points. i kinda expected it considering the fact that the fractional scaling toggle in Cinnamon does say its an experimental feature. as for KDE two thirds of the screen would just be white for some reason when i first booted. i later found out adding the kernel parameter “intel_iommu=igfx_off” fixed this issue and allowed me to load into it a little more correctly. once in fractional scaling worked fine but in some software (most notably the terminal) there would be tiny little lines of white pixels at the bottom of their windows. i was unable to find a fix for this and due to that i just decided to keep only macOS 14 on the machine for now.
after a week or two of using it, my thoughts on it are that the keyboard is great for a laptop keyboard, i can achieve a fairly good typing speed and accuracy on it and when i make mistakes it actually feels like the mistake was made because of human error as opposed to the keyboard being bad, the trackpad is quite honestly the nicest one i’ve ever used and macOS for the most part is a very nice looking and working operating system, especially for use on a laptop. i don’t appreciate the amount of password entries that pop up to do things like change settings or open already installed software that hasn’t been verified by Apple, nor do i appreciate the idea that basic features Windows and Linux have had for years are paywalled on Mac through third party software (please excuse the slight rant but the idea that an entire subscription service that just lets you download paid quality of life software or basic productivity apps to your machine because getting all the ones you want is too expensive actually exists is mad to me but it is 2025 so…) but apart from that I do like the OS. and either way that last point is starting to become a bit less of an issue now as Apple makes efforts to build these features into the OS natively and a lot of alternative utilities are appearing that are free and open source (Rectangle, DockDoor and Stats are great pieces of software for example).