Just picked up a MacBook Pro from Goodwill thrift store for $14.91 -- and it works

[Ichinisan]

Included the MagSafe charger and the battery even has a full charge. It was showing the circle-slash logo on the boot screen, so I connected a network cable and forced reboot while holding Command + Option + R to do an Internet restore. It restored a fresh install of OSX Lion 10.7.5

It's a late 2011 13-inch model with 4GB RAM and a 500GB storage drive. I'll probably upgrade the RAM and add an SSD so it can handle newer versions of macOS.

I don't know much about using a Mac, so maybe you all can give suggestions based on what you would do with it.

 

[TheStu]

Wow, what a lucky find. Check out everymac.com to confirm the maximum RAM that it can accept. There's the Apple number, and (sometimes) the actual number.

 

[Ichinisan]

Well macOS “Mojave” was just released today. First release that doesn’t support this machine since the Intel HD 3000 graphics don’t run Metal. Gotta have HD 4000 for that

Oh well, I think El Capitan is supported for another year, so maybe I’ll get some use out of this machine.

 

[Oyeve]

Wow. Nice find. My building has a great electronic closet in the basement where tenants can toss their old gear and I come across some MBs and Power Mac G5s all the time. I grab em clean em and give em away or make PC chassis out of them.

 

[Ichinisan]

Making a patched Mojave installer was almost painless. It's running Mojave now.

I temporarily moved 16GB of RAM into it to test and it works a LOT better compared to the performance with just 4GB RAM. I'm gonna go with 16GB RAM + SSD when I can afford to buy some upgrades.

 

[Plar]

You are lucky that works. I recommend not storing important information on laptop. You can lose everything at once. And you don't know when it will come.

 

[Ichinisan]

You are lucky that works. I recommend not storing important information on laptop. You can lose everything at once. And you don't know when it will come.

iCloud 2TB plan with backups should do the trick.

 

[Shmee]

SSD is a must for a laptop, and nice and cheap now. Good find. You can also do bootcamp if you want, just need a windows license. If not, something like lubuntu will also work, if you are not into OSX.

 

[sleefer]

Great find! I love those thrift stores!

 

[SKORPI0]

Nice. Found a 2011 Mac Mini (with keyboard, bluetooth mouse, cables) for $5 at the Flea Market late Sept.. Had to do a on-line recovery to get passed the password.
Desktop was a mess with icons all over. It's still under the original owners account. Works very well for it's age, maybe install a modified Mojave.