Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside, a MacBook 5,1

This post serves a few different purposes, like Day 239 of my Project 365, but once in a while I like to get something up there for the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge, and since this week’s theme was inside, I thought this would make a great shot. I don’t spend all of my days inside one of these, but at least some part of each week is spent messing around on the inside of one of these machines. This one is the first generation aluminum MacBook 5,1 (before the MBP version). This is the entire mother board here, RAM at the top and most of the guts on the flip side of the circuit board. The MacBook5,1 as it is known was one of the first unibody frames, and made a great laptop for several years, and in the very center of this mother board you can see the words “Apple ©2008.” Things move fast in the world of laptops and tablets, and this machine is now almost a relic of its day, now designated as a “streaming machine” for videos.

I was trying to think back at how many laptops and desktop computers I have had over the past 20 years (including an actual IBM 5150 from the 1980’s), but there is just no way in the world to know. My first computers weren’t Gateway or Dell, but were hand built IBM machines where I picked out each RAM chip, video card, modem, the CPU chip and so on, each separately. Wow those were the days

You can get a lot of life out of old machines for secondary purposes, and sites like iFixit with their step by step teardown of almost every single Mac ever made is a great place for do easy repairs, even iFixit on this old MacBook5,1. More and more these once great laptops are being replaced by better and better tablets, like the iPad, and Nexus 7, I already wonder how we ever lugged around such a massive device.