Episode: 3374
Title: HPR3374: Why I love the MacBook Mid 2010
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3374/hpr3374.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 22:19:58

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3374 for Thursday,
the 8th of July 2021.
Today's show is entitled, Why I Love the MacBook Mid 2010.
It is hosted by Swift 110 and is about 24 minutes long
and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, I talk about the upgrades I made to the machine
and how it's benefited me since I got it.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello, this is Swift 110.
And this evening, I decided to talk about my MacBook.
I got this MacBook sometime in the fall of 2020
and I've grown rather fond of it since then.
This MacBook is from 2010, was given to me for free
and I'm very grateful to have it.
Thank you for giving me this wonderful machine.
Why do I like this machine so much?
What excites me about it? Well, I mentioned it's a MacBook from the year 2010
and I know I know you may be in your mind thinking, oh my god, this thing is 11 years old.
It's a dog on dinosaur. It can't be very useful.
But let me assure you that it is. It's very, very useful.
You see, I was able to make some very good upgrades to this particular machine
that brought it from the Stone Age to the age of technology
to the modern day era.
The Stone Age to the modern day era, I think, would be a better way to put that.
You see, this particular machine
initially came with either two or four gigs of RAM.
I can't find out thanks to every Mac.com
that this particular machine can take up to 16 gigs of RAM.
Now think about that for a minute.
I went from four gigs of RAM to 16 gigs of RAM.
It's pretty dog or nice, right?
Now, when you think in terms of my X201,
I actually have two of them. But the X201 machine made by Lenovo
is one of the ThinkPads X series obviously.
That particular laptop can take a maximum of eight gigs of RAM.
And it came out a year after this particular MacBook did.
Now you may be asking yourself, hold up, something doesn't sound right.
You mean you are able to upgrade an older Apple product
more than a slightly newer Lenovo product?
Doesn't that seem backwards?
Well, yeah, it could be a little confusing.
You would think that I'd be able to upgrade the X201
to 16 and maybe the MacBook Day.
After all, Apple has the reputation, especially now,
of making their products more disposable than other.
That's the reputation they've gained.
Now, I've happened to know, I've happened to have owned
multiple Apple products over the years.
The iPad 3 that I had since April of 2012,
I kept that device for about nine years
before it finally died completely.
The reason they died was it fell pretty bad, messed up the software,
it will take a lot of money to diagnose the issue
and bring it back to normal, which I'm not investing hundreds of dollars
into a device that is nine years old.
It doesn't make sense, especially when
that wouldn't necessarily guarantee that I solved the problem
and I have a device that's fully functional.
It would still be in iPad 3, it would still have the limitations of the iPad 3
and the limited use in 2021 of an iPad 3.
Something to think about.
But I probably will be able to rebuild my
iPod classic with a 160-gay car drive.
I might be able to rebuild that device.
We'll see what I do with that later, perhaps.
But my point, at that grasp, of course,
the device that is the start of the show for this evening is this MacBook 2010.
Went up to 16 gigs of RAM, DDR3, thank God.
Because if it was DDR2, my God, that would have been some garbage.
As I have expensive DDR2 RAM is, DDR3 is fine, DDR4 would have been fine.
But DDR4 wasn't around when this came out, so DDR3 would have been here.
So basically having this much RAM and this older machine
is really, really nice. Now let's talk about the CPU,
the so-called part of the brains of the bunch,
part of it. Because it resides on the motherboard,
which is the actual as-you-guess-mother-board.
You know, the headed operation as a term goes.
The CPU, which is a component on the motherboard,
in this case, soldered to it, not modular,
like some of the thingpads.
So it's kind of funny how the RAM is upgradable,
but not the CPU, whereas with my X201,
I can upgrade the CPU from an i5 to an i7.
Get the point. I can supercharge the CPU, but not the RAM.
All right, I digress again.
This MacBook Pro, not MacBook Pro. It's MacBook. So please, let's
not confuse this MacBook with a MacBook Pro.
The MacBook is white, made of polycarbonate plastic,
whereas the MacBook Pro has that aluminum build.
Okay, there's differences between the two,
and I don't feel like getting into that right now.
So, okay, we talk about the CPU. This has a Core 2 Duo CPU.
All right, I can dig it.
It was 16GB RAM.
Something else that I upgraded in this particular machine
was the hard drive.
Ooh, I went from a traditional spinning disk
to a solid state drive. Now, when you add a solid state drive to
any machine, it gives it an extra charge as the term goes.
It makes it faster because there are no moving parts in an SSD.
It's less friction, therefore less heat,
one less component in this machine.
That's going to really contribute to the heat.
Something else about an SSD is that they're lighter in weight
than a hard drive, is they're way faster.
So it's pretty much going to just turbocharge the machine.
The other upgrade I did was more on a software side of things,
and that I went from LKAPY10
that was on here before, up, up, up, up, and away to Catalina.
Thanks to DOSDube.
There was a picture available for this particular operating system.
I was able to install it.
It took forever because my internet at the time was extremely slow,
but I got it. My godly gosh, I got it.
It was worth the effort because after many hours
and wondering if the thing was going to work at the end of it all,
I had a fully running MacBook running Catalina
fully upgrading to the best of its ability,
if done all that I could do.
And so I really appreciated upgrading this particular machine.
Now, since I've gotten this machine, I've gotten more acquainted to using macOS.
I've gotten more acquainted to it.
You know, you know me, I come from the back there
using Linux 90-something percent of the time.
You know, so using macOS X is some learning to do.
I have to get used to doing things just a little different.
Now, the good thing about this still being a unique system is that
there are similarities to Linux.
For example, there's a terminal and terminal.
I can run certain commands so I can do Linux.
I can even install some very familiar programs
that I normally have in Linux.
But you know what I use this machine for,
most importantly, at this point.
I use it for Zoom.
Yes, you heard me right, I use it for Zoom.
And I love it.
Absolutely love it.
The experience is just what I want.
Now, I'd be lying if I said that I'd be able to do
those crazy special effects and whatnot, no.
But I'm on Zoom a lot.
Virtually every day, I'm on Zoom.
That's how I communicate with family and friends.
And I really appreciate it.
It's proven to be quite the lifeline with this whole foolishness
that's been going on around us for over a year now.
This machine because of running Zoom on it has helped me to cope
with living in a time of a pandemic.
I'm grateful for it.
Getting it for free makes it even sweeter
because I only spent money on RAM.
I spent money on a new SSD.
Did I pay for the OS? No.
I spent on a RAM.
And I paid for the SSD.
That's it.
Unless you want to be tacky and
say that I needed to buy a adapter, display port HDMI,
so I could plug it to my TV.
But you get the picture.
It's a very nice device.
Despite its age.
Right now, I'm actually looking at the screen.
I have steam up.
And I've actually played some games on here.
50. Not bad, right?
Now I understand it's not the fastest CPU in the world.
It does have some extra help by having the SSD
and having all that RAM in there.
So now the CPU is a bottleneck here.
But you know what? It does everything I need to do, just fine.
I actually like this machine so much. I've gotten
comfortable using Mac OS X to the point where
I'm considering getting another machine made by Apple.
Very likely, well, I can guarantee it'll be a used device
that I don't intend on paying more than a few hundred dollars for.
But I have confidence it would be a very nice device.
And the year that I get it will be a very good year.
But you know, when it comes to 2020,
already I can say it was a very good year.
Why? Because that's when I got this laptop.
So I'm grateful. It definitely is, it's definitely, definitely being used
all the time. I use this machine a lot
and loving it. I'm actually looking into upgrading
the Wi-Fi card that's present in it. And that's something else I like about this
machine. The Wi-Fi card on my network,
the Wi-Fi is twice as fast on this Mac
book. Then it is on my T420. But that's because the T420 has a Wi-Fi card
in it that is garbage. And much like certain
certain characters in the show and living color from the early 90s,
hated it. Yeah, that's right, hated it.
So I'm going to process of upgrading that. But that will be the subject of yet
another audio recording that I will be making on here.
Well, that about does it. I have rambled long enough
about why I love this machine so much.
And it's ironic that I'm speaking so highly
of this machine because it's made by Apple. And if you know anything about me,
if you know anything about my blog,
you know, there's times that I have written article post about it.
Sad but true. You know, I haven't always had nice things to say about
the Apple company. And frankly, I still have some issues with the company.
It's self. But I can't deny it.
But I can't deny it.
They make some good stuff. When they put their heads to it,
they get it done. And I got a respect for it. I got to respect that.
You know, so I spoke about my blog. The link
is going to be made available.
But you can go to Swift 110
at wordpress.com. Let it get. Don't take my word for it. Let me go ahead and look it up.
Yeah. So Swift 110.wordpress.com.
Swift like the bird or like you run fast.
You are Swift. There's a bird called the Swift SWFT.
And the number after that is 110. You have a dot wordpress.com.
Put that in. Tap that under button.
And you have articles written by me. Lots and lots of stuff that I've written
since August of 2011. Yeah. It's been almost 10 years. I've been at this blogging thing.
And I'm so glad I did. I don't blog so much
anymore these days in text form. I'm active on telegram quite a bit.
I'm active on IRC. And so I think what I used to
probably write in my blog post is now written
on either IRC telegram or both. So if you want to reach
speaking of telegram. If you want to reach my telegram group
it's called for the nerds. So check us out for the nerds
on telegram. And when you stop by let me know that you came from this
audio post on Hacker Public Radio. That'd be kind of cool. I'm curious to see
how many people this can bring to our little community there.
The goal there is I guess you can say is somewhere where
individuals who left technology can come together share ideas
and just relax. It's a safe space as you will where there's no profanity.
We're not discussing politics. The goal is to keep it positive.
There's a mutual interest there. We talk about science and technology
primarily. And there's other banter that goes on. That's cool.
But all in all very nice. So please come see us.
If you want to come see me on IRC. Well for now I have a presence on
free note for the nerds with two two of those
pound signs and then for the nerds on free note.
But you're better off going to a server known as LaBera.
There's been this controversy to whole free note issue and
I'm kind of done with it. Let's call the whole thing off at this point
because I don't have time for drama. I have built a positive community over the past
seven going away eight years and I'm not willing to
have some fighting among other folks and politics
messed that up. So LaBera is going to be where it's at.
I do also have a discord. So feel free to hit me up and
if you want to connect any of those means and
any comments you may have feel free to share them.
All right well that's about all I have for this evening.
I hope you all have a fantastic night. Stay healthy, safe,
all in all I wish you the best. Until next time it's been Swift 110.
Take it easy.
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