Repasting a MacBook

I wouldn’t trade a modern Macbook for an old one by any stretch, but man, you could really have some fun with those older models.

I gave my modded 17" 2009 "cafeteria tray" Macbook Pro to my father, and after using it for many more years, he brought it in for… something. I had replaced the internal optical drive with an SSD and reformatted it as a “Fusion Drive” (a kind of smart multi-drive partition that would put commonly-accessed things on an SSD and large rarely-used storage on an HD, identified as a single drive), apparently every Genius Bar employee crammed around the table because they had never seen any Apple computer like it :D

Fusion was so terrible and unreliable in my experience. they were still selling fusion iMacs till 2020, and it honestly seemed faster to just disable the fusion and let it be HDD only. I saw so many failures and data loss with that.

It is wild to me how much money Apple used to spend on ANYTYHING but a fast internal hard drive. The SSD-only days have at least got us out of the slooooww 5k rpm drive nightmare that was every consumer Apple device for decades.