Today's fun project: High Sierra on 2008 MacBook Pro!

[plugsnpixels]

Today's fun project: Installing the latest macOS on an early 2008 17" MacBook Pro!

Officially the MBP topped out at OS X El Capitan (2 OS's ago, not counting the upcoming macOS Mojave). With a simple software hack, you can trick the High Sierra installer to install and run on this and other ancient hardware.

I used the macOS High Sierra Patcher from http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/ to make a bootable USB drive using a 2013 MacBook Air (though I guess I could have done it with the old MBP as well).

After backing up the existing installation "just in case", less than an hour later I had a "modern spec" 2008 computer! Which, BTW, was given to me for free. I had already replaced the old spinning hard drive with an (also) older 120 gig solid state drive; now a larger SSD might be justified depending on what I will use this for (it currently has 100 gigs free, even after installing some useful apps).

The OS hack (as expected) broke the wireless, but a newer wifi card can be installed. And the current 2/2 GB RAM setup can be upgraded to 4/2.

But even in its current state, the computer feels surprisingly fast.

[plugsnpixels]

PS: I upgraded in place over an El Capitan install, and kept the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) formatting. APFS was an option, and the post-hack treatment would have been able to address that, but I chose not to push my luck...

[kers]

I brought my macpro 2008 to High Sierra with that patch and it worked for may things , but OpenCL failed.
It had to do with new instructions in OpenCL.
my old hardware could not work with it.

I brought it to Sierra 10.12 and it worked much better, only photoshop cs6 collapsed after an action that lasted longer than 5 minutes...
there is always something wrong it seems...

cheers PK

[plugsnpixels]

Thanks Pieter, do you mean the Mac Pro tower?

I haven't stress-tested my MacBook Pro but for general web use it seemed fine. I did put Pixelmator on it but haven't done much with it. I don't expect to load Adobe due to the current small hard drive.

Some people put Linux on the old Macs (I did this myself with a black MacBook) but it's a pain. Linux installs on old PCs very easily though.