I Bought a $100 Laptop – Mid 2014 MacBook Pro
Two days ago, I was at home and ordered food online. I went to pre-approve the delivery on the apartment's app, and saw an ad selling an old MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014, 16 GB RAM, 120 GB SSD) for only ₹12,000 (~$130) from another resident. I inquired immediately and went there to take a look at it.
The laptop seemed in good condition, I used it for a bit, checked random stuff, and then was ready to buy. I was ready to pay the listed price, but then just asked if they could lower the price to ₹9,000 (~$100) and they agreed immediately. I, then, paid the price and took this 12-year-old laptop home, with its original charger.
When I asked, their main reason for selling was that they weren't able to install newer apps – the laptop was still running macOS Big Sur, the last official update from Apple. For me, before my current MacBook Air M2, I had never used any Apple product, so I was just curious about this decade-old laptop.
By the way, this is how the laptop looks. I absolutely love the backlit Apple logo here.
After getting the laptop, I researched a bit about it and used the OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) and upgraded to macOS Ventura 13.7.8 and it's running fine so far. I tried installing the Codex app and a few other apps on it and they all work as expected, no lag or slowness at all. Obviously, it's not as powerful as my M2 Air, but it's more than worth the price I paid.
I haven't spent much time on it yet, but it seems like a good machine. It's heavy, but I can keep it open on my desk and use it for scraping or some long-running tasks, so I don't have to keep my main laptop running (Codex /goal, I'm looking at you).
I even tried installing Omarchy Linux on an external SSD connected to the laptop, and it works fine as expected. Here's a picture of it booted into the Omarchy OS.
The speakers aren't great, but that's not an issue because that's not what I got it for.
For now, I will keep exploring things I can do with this second laptop.
Let's see how it goes.
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