TFY unwisely agree to Do Something about 70-year-old in-law's laptop, which is 9 years old and running Word 2008 atop a version of macOS unsupported since 2018 …
You have a spare M1 Probook to upgrade him to. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, he's forgotten his login password, never had an AppleID, and his old machine doesn't recognize APFS filesystems for that old-time floppy-style SSD shuffle.
And the cable to the only SSD they have is flaky.
(Now back home, screaming quietly in Mac.)
@cstross OCLP will fix that, if you can be bothered.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/09/opencore_legacy_patcher/
The Now Official Mrs Proven's old MacBook is a 2009 model and it's supported by OCLP. In principle I could get it onto macOS >10 easily. Big Sur is the last one to support pre-Metal GPUs. It's doable.
But it's in the basement in Prague and we can't find it. So I hackintoshed macOS 11 onto my old ex-SUSE Dell, restored the Time Machine backup onto that, then copied the files onto a USB HDD and switched the SSD for one with ChromeOS Flex on it. That does all she needs and it's simpler and quicker than macOS.
(This latter made some folks on Reddit very angry with me.)
Yeah, 8GB or RAM and 250GB SSD is actually kinda nice, but Celeron M performance is just too sluggish.
Heck, it was too sluggish when it was new. I think Celeron M laptops weren't able to handle Netflix or YouTube even back in the day.
Even so, I'd personally have uses for it (don't need much CPU or GPU to remote into my work computer, or act as an extra display).
Charlie Stross
Liam Proven
Isaac Ji Kuo