Gadgetory

hey guys Austin you may have caught a video where I tried to game on this $200 MacBook and it actually kind of worked but today we're with part two where I'm going to give it a few choice upgrades so this is a 2009 white MacBook outfitted with a blisteringly fast Core 2 Duo processor 4 gigabytes of RAM and currently nvidia geforce 9400m graphics that might not sound impressive but this guy's actually still fully supported on the latest version of Mac OS High Sierra which got me thinking can we actually make this a usable MacBook for 2018 thankfully this is back when Apple made mac books that you could kind of work on so the first thing we see is our 250 gig hard drive which that guy's definitely get out of here there's also the optical drive which we're going to be replacing the battery it still technically works in this machine but it's pretty old so we're gonna replace that get the memory this is uh not that bad looking to work on now depending on what you're doing normally you actually don't have to remove the battery but because we just need to swap it out anyway is just gonna make it a little bit easier to get some of the other components you with that out of the way now I'm going to remove the hard drive so even though the true particular card drive in here actually does work just fine we've got something just a little faster mind so next step is to remove the optical drive now well it is kind of nice to have it here I actually want to go with raid SSDs because you know we do practical things on the channel there we go cable out we have one optical drive that has been freed from our MacBook now now we're ready to start rebuilding the $200 MacBook so the main reason to remove the optical drive is to use an O WC data doubler the idea here is that instead of being able to waste all that space on DVD drive which honestly I'm never going to use we can actually put an additional SSD inside the idea here is that we should just be able to drop it right into place if I can flip it the correct orientation it should just sit like that and give us our SSD one of the main things that makes an older computer like this feel slow is the mechanical hard drive but we can fix that with a pair of 500 gigabyte WD blue SSDs now one of these by itself would probably be pretty quick however two of these in raid it's gonna be a little goofy so we think with that we have our first SSD installed all I need to do is put this bracket back in place and we can move on to the next one perfect so now we have one terabyte of SSD storage and our lowly $200 MacBook the next step is to upgrade the memory so this laptop originally shipped with two gigs of RAM and at some point someone upgraded it to four however it does technically support eight gigs of RAM I'm gonna say there's something cool about the idea of taking a MacBook that for most people is kind of considered old and obsolete and actually giving it some love it's kind of weird to think that in the future new computers really are not this upgradable it's pretty much like you get what you get and that's all that there is to it now we have the fun part this is a replacement battery so this original battery is totally fine but the issue is because it's so old and it has so many cycles well it does keep a charge it's going to last 20 or 30 minutes and a lot of MacBooks at this age the battery is just completely flat but the good thing is you can still order replacements off of Amazon now generally speaking I don't recommend getting third-party batteries for laptops however in this case you're not gonna have any luck trying to get one straight from Apple so this should actually work just fine alright it is moment of truth time to plug this guy in in case the battery is actually dead out of the box she was charging Hey so it should give us yeah the disk error because there's no OS installed but that looks like we actually might have a working MacBook now comes the fun of replacing the keyboard now there's nothing wrong with the keyboard that's on this right now coverts the older white style whereas what we ordered here is a set of MacBook Pro keys which should look a little cooler there are a couple of ways of doing the keyboard swap but what we did was we just removed a bunch of the keys and swapped them out with the black ones if you really want to go crazy with it you actually can't replace the entire keyboard all in one piece however that requires you to basically take apart the entire computer if you guys caught our first video one of the biggest problems with this guy is that not only is the back panel a little bit scratched up but there's also a crack in the actual screen assembly so what we could actually swap out the entire shell that's also a lot of work and instead we can just cover it up so this is a semi-transparent shell so first of all it's gonna look a lot nicer than these scratched up bottoms we have here but in addition to the keyboard cover which we don't meet because we have a legit keyboard now we also have a bottom shelf for it well maybe this isn't the best looking back book in the world it's a lot better than it was before but my real question is what exactly can you do on this MacBook in 2018 after using the MacBook for a week or so I've got to say it's actually surprisingly usable through normal stuff like listening to Spotify writing things up with Google Docs and juggling a few tabs it feels downright snappy I'll totally admit using two SSDs is complete overkill so I wanted to run the both in raid however the way that high CR actually handles raid right now is a little bit buggy so I ended up just installing the OS to a single drive but it still makes a huge difference it's so much faster jumping up to eight gigs of ram also makes a big difference Mac OS especially the more recent versions really do appreciate at least eight gigs one of my big worries going into this was that the Core 2 Duo just wouldn't be able to hold up and while yes a processor from 2009 and a laptop doesn't sound too impressive we actually run it through Geekbench it's not bad it's right up there with modern-day kind of lower end parts such as Celeron and Pentium now don't get me wrong throw more than a few different tasks at it at once and it will definitely start to slow down but as long as you treat it with the respect that a 2009 MacBook deserves you can definitely get work done on this guy and a big part of that is because it is running a fully up-to-date version of Mac OS hi Sierra sure who knows if it'll ever receive another major mac OS update and some app just don't like the Core 2 Duo but for the most part it's just like using a modern MacBook you're pretty much getting all the features including iMessage and even Siri what's especially impressive is that even some high-end apps like Final Cut work and I'm being serious you can load up some 1080p video 4k is a little bit too much for the MacBook to handle and even the most recent version of Final Cut 10.4 is actually able to handle it pretty well now you will need some patience when it comes to the render side of things but again this is a 2000 I Mac book that I bought off of ebay for $200 and I'm editing actual HD video inside Final Cut so yeah while our keyboard soif really isn't for anything besides show it does still hold up today so now I doesn't have a lot more travel but it just feels a little bit more natural than the newer butterfly switches and current Mac books I've also been pleasantly surprised with the trackpad somehow almost 10 years later this is still better than most Windows laptops so you're getting everything you'd like including that solid tracking you're getting plenty of multi-touch gestures like three fingers to swipe between spaces and more importantly it just feels natural something that so many trackpads do not get especially when you're paying $200 porn-wise while I do miss USB 3.0 mini DisplayPort is nice if you on go out to an external monitor up to 2560 by 1600 and resolution and MagSafe is still one of my favorite ways of charging a laptop ever even with that fresh battery though you shouldn't expect 20 18 levels of battery life so I'm averaging about three or four hours with moderate usage you can get a little bit more if you turn the screen brightness down but it's just kind of okay so should you go out and load a 2009 MacBook with a terabyte of SSD storage probably not but unlike a lot of our builds this actually makes sense picking up a used MacBook and investing in some upgrades like the battery memory as well as an SSD really will get you an experience that is going to be better than a lot of budget laptops honestly I would rather use this so what do you guys think about our super awesome ultimate 2009 macbook this is actually taking a turn I didn't expect but it's actually kind of cool anyway let me don't you guys think and I will catch you on the next one