To kick off...

[croissantking]

I keep a mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro (non-retina) around, it's made up with bits from a few different machines. The hi-res antiglare screen is notably taken from my old early 2011 machine that I had from new. My aunt still has the bottom half of that machine, hope to get it back one day!

I'm pretty fond of this model and find it very capable for its age. I mostly use it to boot into Windows to program chips on my T48. It's handy to have USB-A ports and not have to keep hunting for adapters.

 

[Byrd]

I'm using an 11" MBA right now running OpenCore Sequoia 15.7.7. It remains one of my favourite portables of all time. Story was I picked up three dead 11" MBA during Y2020, one worked, two dead. They were cheap - got them all for $200 AUD even back then. One of the dead ones had a small section of liquid damage near the vents with a crusty/damaged capacitor. Expunged this part off the really dead one, to find this was the golden i7 model with 8GB RAM working and ever reliable since. It lacked an SSD, so got the cheap adapter and put in a WD Blue nVME 500GB drive. I used this happily during a COVID outreach program I was involved in, sitting in a park and loved it.

Moving to 2026, installing Sequoia came up with a SMART failure error for the WD SSD; thought it was an OpenCore thing and tried the drive in a PC to report the same issue. Really odd but keeps up with my "anything touched that's Western Digital dies on me", from all of my computing history. Scrounged an Apple branded 128GB SSD and it's back in business. Once SSD prices drop I'll find another good replacement SSD and keep going.