We recently looked at how a fifteen year old laptop was holding up on our Lenovo X220 video. Let’s go one year older and see how my sixteen year old MacBook Pro is holding up in space year 2026.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, let’s see if there’s any life left in a laptop that’s old enough to vote.
This is the 15 inch model that was my daily driver computer for years, back when the Xbox 360 was handling all of my gaming needs.
It has an upgraded trim, which in 2010 terms means a 2.67 GHz Intel Core i7-620M processor. It’s a 35 Watt part, made on the 32nm process, with only two cores and four threads. It can turbo up to 3.33 GHz.
If memory serves, it came with 4Gb of memory, but it’s currently sporting 8Gb of 1066 MHz DDR3 memory, the maximum supported amount.
It shipped with a 2.5″ HDD, as was the style at the time, probably a 500GB model that’s since been replaced with this 1TB hard drive. The other now obsolete spinning media en vogue in 2010 was their SuperDrive optical drive, an 8x DVD and CD-RW writer, which at some point I replaced with a caddy that holds another 2.5″ drive, namely a 256GB SSD that this boots from.
It comes with the jauntily named Airport Extreme Wireless 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 card, and for boring old physical connections there’s Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800, two USB 2 ports, headphone and mic ports that also support optical connections, Mini DisplayPort, and a full size SD card slot. Of course it also has the rightly lauded Magsafe power connection.
We have the standard issue 1440×900 LED-backlit 15.4″ widescreen TFT active-matrix “glossy” display here. This was the era of utter trash 1366 x 768 displays, so this display was leagues ahead of the average laptop screen at the time, and it’s still looking pretty good today. A higher resolution, glossy screen was available, but this one’s reasonably bright, with decent viewing angles and just about high enough resolution to remain usefully sharp, although of course good modern retina-class displays will easily outshine this.
It has stereo Speakers with subwoofers, and Apple have had the good sense to have them fire at your face, not your desk, so for the time they were pretty decent. Of course, they long been bettered in the last sixteen years.
The webcam and mic you can judge for yourself, as you are watching and hearing them right now. I’m not mad that these sixteen year old examples aren’t great, but I am mad that there’s an awful lot of currently manufactured laptops that aren’t much better than this.
The keyboard is from the era where Apple were building a reputation for good laptop keyboards, before destroying it with those low profile scissor switches. It’s solid, but not a patch on the Lenovo X220’s.
Similar story with this trackpad, really. There’s a depressing number of modern laptops that have worse than this sixteen year old example, which is a decent size, comfortable, and accurate.
Apple claimed 9 hours of life from the 75 Watt-hr battery back in the day, although the 5 hours reviewers of the time found seems a more reasonable estimate. This is the original one, hence it’s very old and I believe the technical term is gubbed. it’s getting about an hour of YouTube playback on a charge. For the age, can’t expect any better.
On the one hand it’s obvious why Apple laptops have a reputation for good hardware quality. This aluminium unibody has held up well over the last 16 years, certainly degrading at a slower rate than my body.
On the other hand, I believe every laptop Apple ever shipped with a discrete graphics chip has had some sort of endemic design flaw, and this is no exception. This has an NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 512MB of VRAM running alongside the integrated Intel HD Graphics, which MacOS could switch between as required. The 330M circuitry had an unsuitable capacitor specified that inevitably fails, resulting in it crashing under load.
Disabling the discrete graphics and running on the integrated graphics alone meant it could hobble along, but that’s hardly ideal. Fixing this required some board level work that I was quite proud of myself for completing, but given the risk of screwing it up completely, I only did this well after it had been replaced with an i7 3770K based Windows and Hackintosh system.
2017’s Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra is the last officially supported version of the OS. Later versions can be hacked on through the OpenCore legacy patcher, albeit with some graphical issues caused by the lack of Metal support on this graphics setup. That aside, if you have the memory and SSD to run them, I think it handles at least up to MacOS 12 Monterey better than most internet commentary suggests, but I wanted to keep this on an older version for one reason.
I used to use Apple’s Aperture software for managing and editing photos, and I’ve still not found any one program that can do both as well as Aperture did. There are obviously much more powerful standalone editing apps, even at the time, let alone now, but I’ve not found anything that I like at all on the management side. I’ve just gone back to straight folder structures. Apple’s Photo app was not a suitable replacement.
Apple discontinued Aperture in 2015, and it soon stopped launching when they stripped 32-bit app support from the OS. So, I’ve kept this machine around on an old version in case I needed to revisit or reprocess those photos, but I think after a decade of never having had to do that even once, it’s time to release this machine from its unsupported purgatory. Recent versions of apps that really ought to run okay on this hardware are gated off by the OS requirements, even something as simple as Simplenote, so it’s getting troublesome to use day to day.
So, what else to use if not a hacked on more modern version of MacOS? I still have it dual booting Windows, hobbled massively by being on the hard drive. It was a bit of pain to set up, if memory serves. Apple’s Boot camp setup utility supports XP through 8.1, but not 10 and 11. I did manage to upgrade from an 8.1 install to 10, but I’ve never been able to get graphics drivers working properly on a clean install of 10, and 11 will almost certainly be worse. And, more crucially, it’s a bit boring.
While I’m not ruling out making this even more of a museum piece and putting Windows XP on it, I’m going to try ZorinOS on it for something actively supported. But first, let’s see how it performs in some of the older games that struggled on the Lenovo under ZorinOS. I expect similar problems with Linux gaming given the age of graphics hardware, I can’t imagine Proton will support it.
Windows should give us the best chance of getting something playable, although as according to TechpowerUp the GT 330M graphics have about a tenth of the performance of a GTX1050 I’m not expecting much. It was never marketed as a gaming laptop, to be fair, but let’s see if it can handle games better than the Lenovo’s integrated graphics could. Incidentally, downloading these games took ages, albeit nothing like as long as Steam’s pessimistically predicting here. It was just battering that poor old mechanical hard drive into submission. SSDs really were a hell of an improvement.
As a sanity check, here’s the original Max Payne, here at 1440×900, High Settings, where it’s getting 136 average fps in gameplay.
Also on the easier to run end, Half-Life 2 at 1440×900, High Settings, is pretty dependably sitting at 60 fps.
Midnight Club II at 720p is also pretty happily giving 60 fps, so let’s jump forward a few years.
The original 2007 release of Bioshock at 720p medium settings is getting 60 average fps, with 1% lows of 28 fps and 0.1% lows of 23 fps
2008’s Burnout Paradise at 720p Medium settings gives us a very playable 55 average fps, with 1% lows of 26, and 0.1% lows of 18 fps.
A 2010 contemporary, Fallout: New Vegas at 720p medium settings is reasonably playable at 35 average fps, with slightly disappointing 1% lows of 15 and 0.1 % lows of 7. Also disappointing are these ungrateful Goodsprings natives, I swear, you accidentally graze a dog with a bullet and they lose all sense of perspectives. Chill out.
2011 brought us Batman Arkham City, and at 720p Medium settings it gives us 38 average fps, with some stutters resulting in 1% lows of 5 and 0.1% lows of 1 fps. It’s not hitching badly enough to be unplayable, but we’re starting to get into less than ideal territory already.
One year later, where Far Cry 3 at 720p low settings struggled up to 24 average fps, with 1% lows of 8 and 0.1% lows of 4 fps, so not a great way to play this title.
And lastly, in 2013 we have Bioshock infinite, here at 720p Very low settings where along with being much less pretty than it could be, we’re only getting an average of 35 fps, with 1% lows of 12 and 0.1% lows of 4 fps, maybe playable in a push if there’s no other way available to you.
I think that’s as far as it can be stretched, and as the 330M’s support for DirectX 11 is patchy and DirectX 12 non-existent, we’ll be hitting those limits soon enough. While, to be honest, the MacBook Pro has coped with games of the era better than I expected it would, I still think I was correct in relying on the Xbox 360 for this era of gaming.
The observant among you will have noticed some rather extravagant temperatures during some of those games. To a degree, that’s just how Apple’s lackadaisical thermal management goes, but let’s see if we can do anything about it. A prime95 nine minute torture test soon has this CPU heating up to an average of 94°C, with a max of 105°C so let’s change the thermal paste and give the innards a clean out, and after that the same test gives a two degree improvement on both of those, but more importantly it’s holding a good seven to eight hundred extra MHz on the clock speeds so well worth doing.
I think I’ll keep Windows 10 around, mainly as it’s currently the only install I have of that, but let’s blow the old MacOS away and see if Zorin OS is able to keep this somewhat relevant in 2026, as it did for the Lenovo X220.
There’s not all that much in the way of raw performance difference between the slightly newer and faster i5 and older i7, so the main difference should really be the dedicated graphics.
The latest version of Zorin OS, 18, seems to install fine, as long as you remember to select grub2 mode to boot it. After a bit of checking to make sure it’s installing to the right disk, it just gets on with it, although I feel like it should be giving me the promo screens here, rather than staring in to the black void.
However, once it’s installed, I spent a frustrating day trying to get this working without randomly crashing. As it happens, the most recent Linux kernels don’t support the old NVidia drivers needed for the discrete graphics to work. I expect it’ll work fine with them disabled and relying on integrated graphics alone, but that’s hardly ideal. There’s newer open source drivers for this NVidia chip that are supposed to work with newer Linux kernels, but damned if I could get that running on Zorin.
The latest version that works is ZorinOS 15.3, albeit only after a bit of tweaking to set up a PCIe bridge in grub which is enough of a sentence to warn off any sane person from trying this.
My thinking was that even though this is an older version, it should have kernel and therefore critical security support for another couple of years, even if the interface is a little outdated and the overall experience is nowhere near as polished as version 18
But disappointingly it there’s too many rough edges to be happy with. While it’s doing the very basics, like word processing in LibreOffice and browsing the web in Firefox, if feels a bit more limited than MacOS or Windows.
For example, it drops a lot of frames when watching YouTube on an external monitor, although on the laptop screen it does eventually settle down to passable performance with 1080p streams.
And this version of Zorin OS doesn’t feel quite finished. The software store complains that it doesn’t have permissions to install software. The display settings cannot mirror video to external displays. Steam installs but can’t launch. Maybe all this is fixable or workaroundable, but only if you are signing up for IT support practise.
Disappointing, as I’d been hoping that even with some caveats, this might be the sort of machine you can pick up cheap on eBay, quickly slap Linux on and have a credible machine for the basics of computing for someone that needs something well built for undemanding tasks.
After also trying and failing to get CachyOS and Debian working on it I was about to reluctantly admit defeat, but my Ventoy installer happened to have Linux Mint XFCE 22.3 on it, so I thought I’d give that a go. To my understanding it’s the same kernel as Zorin OS 18 so there’s no reason to expect it to do better, so it was a nice surprise when it did.
It’s not perfect, there’s been a few random hangs but very intermittently, and while it’s recognising the NVidia GPU it’s the aforementioned lower performance open source drivers it’s using, but for the most part this is working as I’d hoped.
So it’s handling the absolute basic table stakes well enough, with LibreOffice running well, and Firefox dealing with heavy-ish webpages with little complaint. Of course, always use an ad-blocker.
It’s handling 1080p streams of Youtube much better than the old version of Zorin, and Audacity is working completely fine so it’s still viable for podcast production.
I need to figure out quite why photo processing app Darktable is so eager to make highlights purple, but otherwise is viable, if slow. Likewise, the venerable GNU Image Manipulation Program works fine.
As you might expect, it’s more miss than hit on the games side. Steam installs without a hitch, and although I figured 3D games would be a stretch too far, 2D stuff like Rimworld ought to work. First oddity was that it won’t seem to load any cloud saves, but it appeared to start up a new game fine. Well, until this happened. For the uninitiated this is not how it should look.
I was surprised Bioshock even launched, but as its performance is measured in seconds per frame it might as well not have bothered. My understanding was the 330M didn’t have Vulcan support so how Proton is managing to do anything is beyond me. For the uninitiated this is not how it should look.
The Linux native version of Half Life 2 runs at a playable framerate, but the eagle eyed amongst you might notice some very slight issues with the textures here. For the uninitiated this is not how it should look.
However, barring some oddities with my capture device aspect ratio, FTL works absolutely fine, and the Street Fighter Collection is also working perfectly happily, so gaming’s not completely off the table, but I think I was right to keep the Windows install around for that sort of thing.
Overall Linux Mint seems to provide a much better experience, and this is completely out of the box, with no command line tinkering required, and of the installs I’ve tried is easily the only one I’d recommend. it’s not perfect, but it’s the only currently supported option that mostly works.
So, should you consider buying one of these for the £50 or thereabouts they seem to sell for on eBay? No, I don’t think so, unless you’re happy with Mint being seemingly the only viable alternative OS to just staying on old versions of MacOS and Windows. Even then, it’s unlikely you can guarantee it will be a model with the GPU fix in place, so there’s still hardware crashes to contend with if you can work around the software ones.
While it was a well-constructed laptop and despite its age it’s still capable of the basics, I think keeping it current in 2026 is more trouble than it’s worth. It’s almost completely obsolete at this point, and I can only imagine it’s going to be more of a pain to keep on life support going forward, so it’s hard to advise any money be spent on one at all in 2026.
If you must have a Mac, we live in a world where you have a solid chance of getting a high spec 2019 MacBook Pro for £300 or so, and can certainly get a still supported and faster, quieter 2020 M1 MacBook Air for that price, which is a better long term value proposition. Still, it’s easier to say “spend six times more for a better machine” than it is to magic up six times your budget
If I did need a laptop and had £50 to spend, while I’d need to do a bit more trawling around to be sure, with a bit of luck and patience you should be able to get a 2015 13″ Macbook Pro. This will lose the problematic discrete graphics but gets you a newer model with a better screen. Still borderline antique tech, but I think a better option than the technically more modern netbooks, chromebooks and low build quality laptops that are available at that price point.
I’ve left Mint on the machine for now, however I think there’s a good chance I’ll go back to having this as a time capsule with an older MacOS version. Perhaps if there’s any demand, we can look at running the various newer, unsupported MacOS versions on it and see at what point it actually became unworkable.
Until then, If you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.