Sure most people focus on beige Macs and classic OS stuff for Marchintosh and I’ve been up to my own Globalralk shenanigans, but this project found me rather than vice-versa when it came up on eBay cheap. Intel Macs are still Macs, after all, and this is a Millennium Macs project…
So this MacBook A1181 was for sale on eBay for very little money and was marked as not booting. It was in such incredible condition for a 17 year old machine, and included the box and most of the accessories, I felt like it was too good an opportunity to miss, and snapped it up.
The description was accurate, it indeed doesn’t boot, in fact it doesn’t even chime. It powers on, the white LED on the front is on solid white and the fans and hard drive both spin up, but it goes no further. It does respond to a 5-second power button hold to shut it off so the SMC is likely alive. It also shows an orange light on the charger and charges the battery - further evidence the SMC is alive snd managing the power okay.
I have thus-far confirmed the RAM, charger snd battery are all in good shape by testing them in my black MacBook A1181. Further testing will involve testing the screen to see if it us actually functional, and, unless a Marchintosh miracle occurs, probably swapping the logic board for a spare 2.4GHz one I have spare.
Of note: I thought it had water ingress or mould or something horrid when I looked at the RAM, as it has a large amount of white residue on it along the edge connectors, but apparently this is normal for the original RAM on this model, being a white grease applied to aid insertion of the RAM into the recessed, lever actuated slots at the factory! So this thing was genuinely untouched inside!
So this MacBook A1181 was for sale on eBay for very little money and was marked as not booting. It was in such incredible condition for a 17 year old machine, and included the box and most of the accessories, I felt like it was too good an opportunity to miss, and snapped it up.
The description was accurate, it indeed doesn’t boot, in fact it doesn’t even chime. It powers on, the white LED on the front is on solid white and the fans and hard drive both spin up, but it goes no further. It does respond to a 5-second power button hold to shut it off so the SMC is likely alive. It also shows an orange light on the charger and charges the battery - further evidence the SMC is alive snd managing the power okay.
I have thus-far confirmed the RAM, charger snd battery are all in good shape by testing them in my black MacBook A1181. Further testing will involve testing the screen to see if it us actually functional, and, unless a Marchintosh miracle occurs, probably swapping the logic board for a spare 2.4GHz one I have spare.
Of note: I thought it had water ingress or mould or something horrid when I looked at the RAM, as it has a large amount of white residue on it along the edge connectors, but apparently this is normal for the original RAM on this model, being a white grease applied to aid insertion of the RAM into the recessed, lever actuated slots at the factory! So this thing was genuinely untouched inside!
