MacBook Adventure

While browsing around Craigslist a few days ago I found an ad for a 2011 Macbook Pro 15” for $250. Most of these ads are scams/bots, but I always attempt to contact the seller via a spam email account on the rare chance that I may actually get something for a steal. While looking at the pictures, I could tell the machine was physically in great shape.

Response from the seller

The seller, a guy who lived two and a half hours from me, said that it was “booting to a green apple logo but still works occasionally”. A few quick google searches indicated that this was likely caused by a faulty discrete video card.

The Problem

I thought it should be easy enough tell the machine to choose not to use the discrete GPU, but even at boot the GPU is checked so it’ll often hang. The Radeon 6770M in these MacBooks fails so often Apple had to issue a recall on the product. Strangely, it seems the integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics chip is just as capable as the Radeon (provided the machine has atleast 8gb of ram, the integrated gpu gets 512mb of memory). Additionally, when booting Windows/Linux the EFI Vars would force the OS to only use the Radeon 6770M card, which kills battery life.

Overall, the discrete GPU sucks and the integrated GPU works fine. The only downside is the inability to use an external monitor (but that can still be done with USB, etc etc).

The Solution

A bit deeper into stack overflow questions and mac forums lead me to realize that the existence of the card could be completely hidden via modifying the EFI vars and removing some kexts. There’s a tutorial here.

After modifying the EFI Vars, the macbook booted into safe mode! I then proceeded to delete the AMD kexts… and it booted normally!

The After

So, I ended up with a heavily upgraded 15” Macbook Pro for $250! The original owner had capped the RAM to 16GB, payed for the upgraded HDD (750gb), and had kept it in a case!Sure, its a bit old but I get the benefit of:

• non-soldered RAM and Hard Drive
• a laptop that I can easily open and replace the battery, cd/dvd drive, etc
• a ton of ports

I’m very happy with the current state of the machine, especially for the price!

Huge thanks to Brandon for riding 3 hours and being a cool dude