Ingenious modders are keeping old Macs alive long after Apple has given up

A community works to extend the life of a Mac well beyond Apple's intentions

- BRENDAN NYSTEDT

Thanks to Apple's move to its own chips, the Mac has been on a roll recently, after a frustrating spell of bad keyboards, poor ports, and overheating with pre-M1 Macs. But not all of those old Macs are bad-many of them are actually still cherished by their owners. For example, the Intel-equipped 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air were tremendously popular and held down the fort on the affordable end of the MacBook lineup for many years.

These laptops may not be considered "modern" by the new standards set by Apple, but they are still supported with the latest version of macOS. They were somewhat upgradeable, easy to fix, and had tons of spare parts available. Within the secondhand community, even Macs with soldered-down components are looked at as having value, and ingenious tinkerers are repairing, upgrading, and adding software support to old machines long after Apple has moved on to something new.

YouTuber Collin Mistr, known as dosdude1, demonstrates his skilled approach to upgrading and modifying older Macs on his channel (fave.co/3MTChzd). The videos are far from polished but show off how modifications and soldered-on upgrades can give old Macs new life. "The first machine I ever got was some water-damaged MacBook off of eBay for really cheap. One day I just decided to learn how to fix those. Then I got good with surface mount soldering and over time got different equipment for [ball grid array chips]," Mistr said. Whether it's upgrading soldered RAM or CPU beyond factory specifications, Mistr does it all with a combination of tweaked custom firmware and chip swaps.