I bought a huge PILE of 32 MacBooks for cheap. Can I fix them [Part 1]

The Project: Reviving a Massive Pile of MacBook Parts

As I stood amidst a sea of broken and battered MacBooks, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and trepidation. The goal was to take this massive pile of parts and turn them into functional computers, all while maximizing the number of working MacBooks possible. With the help of Channel Sponsor iFixit, we were about to embark on an ambitious project that would push the limits of repairability and reuse.

The First Steps: Assembling the Logic Boards

Our journey began with the 13-inch MacBook Pros, where we needed to scavenge enough parts to put three logic boards back together. This meant collecting the necessary components, including the display, top case, and screws. After a thorough search, we managed to gather all the required parts, allowing us to assemble not one, but three working MacBooks. The process was meticulous, with each part carefully fitted into its designated slot.

The MacBook Pro Display

One of the first displays we came across belonged to a 13-inch aluminum unibody MacBook from 2008. This model was internally almost identical to the 2009 13-inch MacBook Pro, making it an ideal candidate for repair. The display itself was in great condition, with only minor scratches and scuffs. We carefully removed it from its housing, taking care not to damage any of the surrounding components.

The Top Case: A Key Component

The top case is a crucial component that holds everything together, quite literally. In our case, we had to find a new top case for a MacBook Pro with damaged logic board, which we sourced from another housing. We also needed screws to assemble the MacBooks, and fortunately, we were able to scavenge enough parts to cover all the necessary screws.

Fixing the Damaged MacBook

As I worked on fixing the damaged MacBook, I realized that I had made a rookie mistake by checking if the logic board was working before verifying that it had missing keys. This oversight led me to swap out another top case with a dead MacBook, which fortunately still had its trackpad intact. After reassembling the MacBooks, we were able to boot them up and get them working.

The Final Count: 14 Working MacBooks

After days of tireless work, our project yielded an impressive result: 14 working MacBooks. This included six 15-inch 2010 MacBook Pros, four 2009 and 2010 13-inch MacBook Pros, and four 13-inch aluminum unibody MacBooks from 2008. Each Mac had RAM, hard drives, and would boot up, but only two batteries were able to charge.

The Plans for the Future

With our initial goal of reviving as many MacBooks as possible achieved, we now plan to give these machines a complete makeover. With the help of iFixit's tools, guides, and spare parts, we aim to upgrade the MacBooks with solid-state drives, add batteries, and make them truly usable. Our next step will be to take on five more MacBooks, adding to our collection of working machines.

The Takeaway: A Message for Would-Be Projectors

For those considering taking on a project like this, I highly recommend it. Not only can you acquire these MacBooks at an affordable price, but iFixit provides the necessary tools, guides, and parts to get your giant pile of MacBooks working too. The sense of accomplishment that comes from reviving a broken machine is unparalleled, and the experience will leave you eager for more. So, what are you most excited about in the comments below?

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou join me in front of a rather large box and this box is full of macbooks about which i know very little but what makes this video slightly different from the other macbook unboxing and repair videos that i have done on this channel is that this isn't the only box i bought 32 macbooks and we're gonna fix them today's video is sponsored by nordvpn nordvpn is an easy to use and extremely fast vpn that what's up it's me techluke look you're watching a video about repairing a giant pile of macbooks which means you're probably aware of nordvpn's 5200 plus servers in 60 countries and their support for pretty much every major platform like windows mac os ios android linux and more but did you know that nordvpn uses diskless servers so it doesn't have to store any data or configuration info on site or that they have an automatic kill switch that disconnects a device from the web when the vpn connection is dropped yeah that's useful information for you and i us techies okay anyway nordvpn lets you access tv movies and other content from anywhere with just a simple click protect your gaming with ddos prevention and escape geo restrictions right now you can get an exclusive nordvpn offer by heading over to the link in the description below it's risk free and is covered by nord's 30-day money-back guarantee so check it out today and now back to the video oh my gosh okay i may have bitten off slightly more than i can chew with this project but i mean i couldn't say no because i paid 700 for both of these boxes that are just absolutely filled to the brim with macbooks we only really need to get about seven of them working for this to be worthwhile because usually a macbook in any sort of working condition is worth at least 100 bucks so this should be pretty interesting but first we got to figure out which box to open first so leave a comment down below let me know which one i should pick uh i'm gonna pick this one so thank you if you commented that because that's definitely how it works i will say this box does look slightly worse for wear so it has seen better days oh you know what this has been packaged pretty well um i'm not seeing a whole lot of complete units in here i mean first off the bat hanging by a thread this oh god this is like fully not even attached this is like a first gen macbook air no battery no screen no drive i'm missing a key pretty massive dent have i just bought a box of like scrap metal oh no okay this oh looks like we got a 15 inch here okay base only actually somewhat good condition i see a logic board in it all right next up looks like we've got another 15 inch oh i really don't like that these are put in logic board to logic board that's slightly concerning next to it we have what looks like a 2009 you can tell that difference because in 2009 the logic boards were shiny in 2010 they were mad a little quick tip something that you learn when you buy massive bulk orders of old macbooks 13 inch core i5 late 2011 all right nope just kidding there's no logic board okay and then this is in a bag what is this oh this is a screen for that old macbook air that doesn't really have a battery or anything this looks like another 13-inch unibody oh this one's very complete i mean it doesn't have a screen but battery hard drive we got ram even this one similar situation core 2 duo sorry just kidding there's nothing that's a shell all right some bottom cases hey look this is the bottom case for that first gen macbook air we're slowly rebuilding that computer piece by piece apparently the majority of the first box was like this various incomplete units that were missing pretty key components but that's okay because in this project which by the way is sponsored by ifixit what we are looking for is to have as many parts available to us as possible so that we can use the protect tool kit and the repair guides on ifixit's website to get as many of them working as possible and then finally for this box we have three more top cases let's see if any of these okay we do have a logic board here we have a logic board here hey and we have a logic board this one even has some ram so hopefully hopefully one or two of these logic boards we can get working but let's go on to box number two oh these macbooks are much more complete oh i'm i think we did this in the right order because all of these macbooks have displays that's crazy i paid 700 for all of this i mean even the other box i think has a decent amount of stuff in it but these look pretty good so it says on top here i mean it doesn't say it's not working this is a 2009 keyboard and screen are good or not i'm not seeing any cracks or anything here we have another 15-inch 2010 ooh yes look at that we have the anti-glare display i love those okay next up we have another mid 2009 fully intact looks like it's got everything no cracks keyboard looks good this one oh not looking the best from that angle uh oh um okay i can't say that i've ever had that particular thing happened to me the aluminum has actually detached from the oh no okay so that display is definitely no good and in fact on the display it says broken you don't say here's another 15 inch uh oh no motherboard no hard drive no battery this one is just a shell and i can definitely tell by the weight all right we got another 13 inch here what does this one say not turning on in giant letters now the 13 inch also not turning on here's another 15 inch what do we got going on uh oh that is a mega swollen battery i'm just going to go ahead and get this battery out because one thing you don't want to have happen if you do have a swollen battery fortunately this one didn't have the bottom case screwed on but you can totally bend this or or even crack a track pad if you leave a swelling battery installed in a macbook fortunately i was able to use the wide tip screwdriver bit from the protect tool kit to get this battery out and i found that it did not in fact crack the trackpad which is good news because this could really cause serious damage ooh throwing it back retro style with an old 2006 macbook pro it says half a gig of ram 80 gigabyte hard drive wi-fi not working no battery all right we're on the home stretch here just a few more macbooks to go this is already overwhelming 2010 this one says screen issue keyboard issue so that doesn't bode well for us but it is intact physically and it looks like it's in pretty decent condition no cracked display what do we got here this one is as it says on the top 2010 no hard drive no cd drive no battery this one is 2009 panel and screen only no motherboard no hard drive no battery this one is massive because this is a 17 inch oh man absolutely caved in on the palm rest there and finally we've got two 13-inch ones these feel pretty heavy these feel complete this one's a 2009 says not turning on this one is a 2009 says no display let's go ahead and pile all this up and we can get an idea of what we're working with here after that unboxing it became clear that this was going to take a lot more than solid-state drives and operating systems so i sat down to try to figure out the most efficient route to get as many of these working as possible but i think what we really need to do now is test the complete units that's i think a good starting point so let's set that up a this one is posting we have a flashing folder light bong screen light power display that's good i was a little nervous that going into this we were just gonna have like zero working macbooks because i mean there's no guarantees who knows this could just be someone throwing out a bunch of random broken parts it works it boots this is so exciting sorry you're dead oh it's blinking oh yay it worked this is huge but so far that's three that work so i'm happy with that let's move on to the 15-inch macbook pros i'm getting fans i'm hearing optical drive i think this predictably being a 2011 has a failed gpu next looks like we're booted into lion here and this is not a wiped hard drive trackpad does not seem to work okay so it's just completely unresponsive and yeah i'm not really sure what the issue is there whether that's an input thing or whether this logic board is just screwed that is definitely odd it looks like it came on then went off and then on again let's try to do a p-ram reset it's actually booting now after i did two p-ram resets did a p-ram reset actually fix something for the first time ever it booted we have a 2.53 gigahertz core i5 we have four gigs of ddr3 ram we have a 500 gigabyte hard drive it says last modified may 16 2016. i don't know maybe this thing just hasn't been turned on in a while and that's why it was having some issues oh yes this is the one with the anti-glare display please work please work yay right so this one is boot looping it boots up we see the mouse and then it shuts off and starts over again all right the final complete unit this one is saying no cd drive no battery okay one of the fans is shot it's making a very terrible sound okay it's posting i'm gonna kill it definitely gonna have to replace one or both of the fans but hopefully this one will work so i'm gonna add that to the good pile so after the initial round of testing we have five macbooks that worked or at least pass the initial wave of testing and would boot or post so remember at the start of the video i said we wanted to try to get seven of these macbooks working well we're most of the way there and i haven't even touched the giant pile of incomplete units in fact that is my next task so please enjoy this montage of me at least attempting to boot up some of those non-complete units okay so here we are i'm sure you guys are curious to know what the result of the first round of in-depth testing was and here's essentially where we're at down here is my pile of computers that i just couldn't get anything out of then if we move up onto the table here these three stacks all of these posted or fully booted and have hard drives in them they all have ram as well i think so we've got two 15-inch 2010s we've got three macbook pros and an original macbook air and then these two 15 and two 13-inch macbook pros that also don't have bottom cases but all of them booted up so that's already pretty good considering that we haven't even done any repair work so that brings us over to this pile and these four macbooks are just top cases and logic boards and they all like spun up the fans but wouldn't boot or display anything so i don't think we're going to be able to do much with those we'll see though then these needed further investigation these three 15-inch macbooks booted but it didn't actually load into the os and then finally we have these three which warrant further investigation as well these are incomplete units that are missing bottom cases or displays but they partially booted or completely booted and just need some more attention and then finally there's the 17-inch over there and this miscellaneous pile of parts that i don't think is going to be particularly useful and so that is the current state of these 32 macbooks all right so it's a new day we've got ourselves a new task and that is to take the pile of macbooks that were a little bit iffy the ones that needed further investigation and further investigate them these four here i don't think we're gonna be able to get working because they wouldn't post or boot the fan would spin but nothing else so that's something i've seen fairly often however i think i might be able to get some of these six macbooks working so we're gonna try to do that let's get to investigating and see what we can find out so we're now making some progress i have tested these four and they they just don't work the 313 inches just won't boot up the 2011 has graphics card failure over there uh this one however i was able to get working it was hanging on boot so we did p-ram reset we did smc reset swapped the ram around and look at that now it's booted up looks like it's got lion on it this one as well uh it wasn't booting the fan was just going crazy so i moved the ram from the top to bottom slot and now it seems to be booting up so that one i think we can get working but i don't know it's it's definitely rough so we might not have a shell for that logic board to go into and then we just have these four left to test okay i've got a theory so this is one of the macbooks that i was going to come back and test it's a 2011 and the the gpu is shot uh sadly the two newest machines that were both 2011 15 inches are both suffering from that issue it's not exactly surprising and frankly even if i can like heat shock the gpu it's not really a permanent fix and the goal with these is to fix them so with that in mind i'm i'm not going to pursue repairing this logic board however we do have this other 2010 macbook pro that works but it has a bad fan it doesn't have an ssd the arrow keys are coming off and the side is caved in so i'm going to try to put a 2010 logic board in this 2011 casing because it's in good condition and i am noticing a difference actually in the antenna here there's a different wi-fi card so hopefully that will still work but we're gonna find out i guess oh dear i've encountered an obstacle and it's a really dumb one so i've now got the 2010 logic board in the 2011 case and absolutely everything is in the same place except for this connector this is the camera and on the old logic board the connection was here whereas on this one it's there just slightly out of reach why did they move it they didn't move anything else oh my gosh this is so dumb so what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna cheat plug it in like that and then this just won't be seated right why do they this is so pointless that was such a stupid change from one year to the next so there you have it if you ever wondered yes it is possible to downgrade a 2011 macbook pro to a 2010 macbook pro not that you would want to do that when you can also upgrade it to a 2012 which seems objectively more useful but anyway you can do that all it takes is an ifixit protec toolkit and their repair guides online and a little bit of ingenuity and honestly the fact that i bought these in a bulk lot of 32 really saves you because uh well we had a working logic board with a bad fan missing components and a beat up case but because where there are so many of these things we have all the spare parts that we need to get this thing working you know what else is really handy this 2009 macbook pro does boot up however it's missing the cd drive and the case is really severely damaged the display is fairly mangled yeah it's a little bit rough around the edges but if you'll recall from earlier we have another shell for this with no motherboard no hard drive no battery but conditions pretty good this is just an empty shell that is perfectly compatible with this working logic board we're in business this is the final stretch for this video i've addressed all of the 15-inch macbooks i've addressed most of the complete 13-inch ones and now all that we have left to do is assemble the working parts that remain for the 13-inch macbooks and get them all put together so we have three logic boards here which means we need to scavenge enough parts to put three of them back together so here is a display for macbook pro here's the top case for it so we're gonna put those together then this display is for a macbook a couple of these are actually not macbook pros they're 13-inch aluminum macbooks very similar but they have slightly different internals so that's going to go with that and then we have another pairing of the same thing it's a macbook with the display the only thing that we need now are the screws to put them together so the macbook that has unfortunately suffered some serious damage that is going to contribute screws i've pulled screws from two of the other housings and we should have enough although i do need to find a clutch cover for this and i've found one so let's get to scavenging and let's fix these things up i've done something really dumb and that was i checked to see that this macbook logic board was working before i checked to see that it's missing half its keys that was really stupid so what i've done now is i took the other top case with the dead macbook logic board in it that does have all of its keys and we have to now put the trackpad back in it because i took this trackpad out for that macbook it's fine this is this is the last thing that needs to be fixed today this computer is now working we're almost done oh man i got one more by the way that i couldn't fit on the table uh so 14 is the number of complete working macbooks that i was able to get out of the initial batch without spending a dollar on parts now yes obviously it was not able to get all 32 of these macbooks working but that's because they weren't all complete so the goal with this project wasn't to get 32 working macbooks it was to use the massive amount of parts to fix as many of them as possible and so that has left us with this we have six 15-inch 2010 macbook pros we have four 2009 and 2010 13-inch macbook pros and then we have four 13-inch aluminum unibody macbooks from 2008 which are internally almost identical to the 2009 13-inch macbook pro so all in all that makes 14. so all of these macbooks are more or less complete they all have ram they all have hard drives and they will all boot but none of them really have batteries only two batteries i was actually able to get a charge out of and then this one is also missing a bottom case so i have to order one of those but apart from that these are complete working macbooks and that is pretty insane in fact if i were in this purely for trying to make as much money with as little energy as possible each of these macbooks would probably fetch on average a hundred dollars the 15 inch a little more the 13 inch a little less average it at 100 and i would basically double my money because i've got 14 working ones but that's not the goal of this project the goal of this project is to maximize the number of working macbooks and to not just have them work but actually be usable so batteries solid state drives and that has given me a plan with the help of channel sponsor ifixit we are going to be giving these macbooks a complete makeover and i have enough parts left over that with a couple of additionals i can get i think another five working macbooks so in the next episode on this series we are going to be giving these macbooks the special treatment they're going to be getting upgraded they're going to be getting batteries we're going to add five more working macbooks to the mix and we're going to give them all a beautiful sparkling clean get rid of all of this sticker residue it should be quite the site to behold so definitely make sure to get subscribed you are not going to want to miss that video when it comes out i've got a huge pile of boxes just off camera it's going to be good so thank you guys so much for watching if you want to take on a project like this i definitely recommend it it's a lot of fun you can get these macbooks for not that much money and ifixit has you covered they have all of the tools all of the repair guides and even the parts to get your giant pile of macbooks working too so with that thank you guys so much for watching let me know what you're most excited for in the comments below and i'll see you in the next one youyou join me in front of a rather large box and this box is full of macbooks about which i know very little but what makes this video slightly different from the other macbook unboxing and repair videos that i have done on this channel is that this isn't the only box i bought 32 macbooks and we're gonna fix them today's video is sponsored by nordvpn nordvpn is an easy to use and extremely fast vpn that what's up it's me techluke look you're watching a video about repairing a giant pile of macbooks which means you're probably aware of nordvpn's 5200 plus servers in 60 countries and their support for pretty much every major platform like windows mac os ios android linux and more but did you know that nordvpn uses diskless servers so it doesn't have to store any data or configuration info on site or that they have an automatic kill switch that disconnects a device from the web when the vpn connection is dropped yeah that's useful information for you and i us techies okay anyway nordvpn lets you access tv movies and other content from anywhere with just a simple click protect your gaming with ddos prevention and escape geo restrictions right now you can get an exclusive nordvpn offer by heading over to the link in the description below it's risk free and is covered by nord's 30-day money-back guarantee so check it out today and now back to the video oh my gosh okay i may have bitten off slightly more than i can chew with this project but i mean i couldn't say no because i paid 700 for both of these boxes that are just absolutely filled to the brim with macbooks we only really need to get about seven of them working for this to be worthwhile because usually a macbook in any sort of working condition is worth at least 100 bucks so this should be pretty interesting but first we got to figure out which box to open first so leave a comment down below let me know which one i should pick uh i'm gonna pick this one so thank you if you commented that because that's definitely how it works i will say this box does look slightly worse for wear so it has seen better days oh you know what this has been packaged pretty well um i'm not seeing a whole lot of complete units in here i mean first off the bat hanging by a thread this oh god this is like fully not even attached this is like a first gen macbook air no battery no screen no drive i'm missing a key pretty massive dent have i just bought a box of like scrap metal oh no okay this oh looks like we got a 15 inch here okay base only actually somewhat good condition i see a logic board in it all right next up looks like we've got another 15 inch oh i really don't like that these are put in logic board to logic board that's slightly concerning next to it we have what looks like a 2009 you can tell that difference because in 2009 the logic boards were shiny in 2010 they were mad a little quick tip something that you learn when you buy massive bulk orders of old macbooks 13 inch core i5 late 2011 all right nope just kidding there's no logic board okay and then this is in a bag what is this oh this is a screen for that old macbook air that doesn't really have a battery or anything this looks like another 13-inch unibody oh this one's very complete i mean it doesn't have a screen but battery hard drive we got ram even this one similar situation core 2 duo sorry just kidding there's nothing that's a shell all right some bottom cases hey look this is the bottom case for that first gen macbook air we're slowly rebuilding that computer piece by piece apparently the majority of the first box was like this various incomplete units that were missing pretty key components but that's okay because in this project which by the way is sponsored by ifixit what we are looking for is to have as many parts available to us as possible so that we can use the protect tool kit and the repair guides on ifixit's website to get as many of them working as possible and then finally for this box we have three more top cases let's see if any of these okay we do have a logic board here we have a logic board here hey and we have a logic board this one even has some ram so hopefully hopefully one or two of these logic boards we can get working but let's go on to box number two oh these macbooks are much more complete oh i'm i think we did this in the right order because all of these macbooks have displays that's crazy i paid 700 for all of this i mean even the other box i think has a decent amount of stuff in it but these look pretty good so it says on top here i mean it doesn't say it's not working this is a 2009 keyboard and screen are good or not i'm not seeing any cracks or anything here we have another 15-inch 2010 ooh yes look at that we have the anti-glare display i love those okay next up we have another mid 2009 fully intact looks like it's got everything no cracks keyboard looks good this one oh not looking the best from that angle uh oh um okay i can't say that i've ever had that particular thing happened to me the aluminum has actually detached from the oh no okay so that display is definitely no good and in fact on the display it says broken you don't say here's another 15 inch uh oh no motherboard no hard drive no battery this one is just a shell and i can definitely tell by the weight all right we got another 13 inch here what does this one say not turning on in giant letters now the 13 inch also not turning on here's another 15 inch what do we got going on uh oh that is a mega swollen battery i'm just going to go ahead and get this battery out because one thing you don't want to have happen if you do have a swollen battery fortunately this one didn't have the bottom case screwed on but you can totally bend this or or even crack a track pad if you leave a swelling battery installed in a macbook fortunately i was able to use the wide tip screwdriver bit from the protect tool kit to get this battery out and i found that it did not in fact crack the trackpad which is good news because this could really cause serious damage ooh throwing it back retro style with an old 2006 macbook pro it says half a gig of ram 80 gigabyte hard drive wi-fi not working no battery all right we're on the home stretch here just a few more macbooks to go this is already overwhelming 2010 this one says screen issue keyboard issue so that doesn't bode well for us but it is intact physically and it looks like it's in pretty decent condition no cracked display what do we got here this one is as it says on the top 2010 no hard drive no cd drive no battery this one is 2009 panel and screen only no motherboard no hard drive no battery this one is massive because this is a 17 inch oh man absolutely caved in on the palm rest there and finally we've got two 13-inch ones these feel pretty heavy these feel complete this one's a 2009 says not turning on this one is a 2009 says no display let's go ahead and pile all this up and we can get an idea of what we're working with here after that unboxing it became clear that this was going to take a lot more than solid-state drives and operating systems so i sat down to try to figure out the most efficient route to get as many of these working as possible but i think what we really need to do now is test the complete units that's i think a good starting point so let's set that up a this one is posting we have a flashing folder light bong screen light power display that's good i was a little nervous that going into this we were just gonna have like zero working macbooks because i mean there's no guarantees who knows this could just be someone throwing out a bunch of random broken parts it works it boots this is so exciting sorry you're dead oh it's blinking oh yay it worked this is huge but so far that's three that work so i'm happy with that let's move on to the 15-inch macbook pros i'm getting fans i'm hearing optical drive i think this predictably being a 2011 has a failed gpu next looks like we're booted into lion here and this is not a wiped hard drive trackpad does not seem to work okay so it's just completely unresponsive and yeah i'm not really sure what the issue is there whether that's an input thing or whether this logic board is just screwed that is definitely odd it looks like it came on then went off and then on again let's try to do a p-ram reset it's actually booting now after i did two p-ram resets did a p-ram reset actually fix something for the first time ever it booted we have a 2.53 gigahertz core i5 we have four gigs of ddr3 ram we have a 500 gigabyte hard drive it says last modified may 16 2016. i don't know maybe this thing just hasn't been turned on in a while and that's why it was having some issues oh yes this is the one with the anti-glare display please work please work yay right so this one is boot looping it boots up we see the mouse and then it shuts off and starts over again all right the final complete unit this one is saying no cd drive no battery okay one of the fans is shot it's making a very terrible sound okay it's posting i'm gonna kill it definitely gonna have to replace one or both of the fans but hopefully this one will work so i'm gonna add that to the good pile so after the initial round of testing we have five macbooks that worked or at least pass the initial wave of testing and would boot or post so remember at the start of the video i said we wanted to try to get seven of these macbooks working well we're most of the way there and i haven't even touched the giant pile of incomplete units in fact that is my next task so please enjoy this montage of me at least attempting to boot up some of those non-complete units okay so here we are i'm sure you guys are curious to know what the result of the first round of in-depth testing was and here's essentially where we're at down here is my pile of computers that i just couldn't get anything out of then if we move up onto the table here these three stacks all of these posted or fully booted and have hard drives in them they all have ram as well i think so we've got two 15-inch 2010s we've got three macbook pros and an original macbook air and then these two 15 and two 13-inch macbook pros that also don't have bottom cases but all of them booted up so that's already pretty good considering that we haven't even done any repair work so that brings us over to this pile and these four macbooks are just top cases and logic boards and they all like spun up the fans but wouldn't boot or display anything so i don't think we're going to be able to do much with those we'll see though then these needed further investigation these three 15-inch macbooks booted but it didn't actually load into the os and then finally we have these three which warrant further investigation as well these are incomplete units that are missing bottom cases or displays but they partially booted or completely booted and just need some more attention and then finally there's the 17-inch over there and this miscellaneous pile of parts that i don't think is going to be particularly useful and so that is the current state of these 32 macbooks all right so it's a new day we've got ourselves a new task and that is to take the pile of macbooks that were a little bit iffy the ones that needed further investigation and further investigate them these four here i don't think we're gonna be able to get working because they wouldn't post or boot the fan would spin but nothing else so that's something i've seen fairly often however i think i might be able to get some of these six macbooks working so we're gonna try to do that let's get to investigating and see what we can find out so we're now making some progress i have tested these four and they they just don't work the 313 inches just won't boot up the 2011 has graphics card failure over there uh this one however i was able to get working it was hanging on boot so we did p-ram reset we did smc reset swapped the ram around and look at that now it's booted up looks like it's got lion on it this one as well uh it wasn't booting the fan was just going crazy so i moved the ram from the top to bottom slot and now it seems to be booting up so that one i think we can get working but i don't know it's it's definitely rough so we might not have a shell for that logic board to go into and then we just have these four left to test okay i've got a theory so this is one of the macbooks that i was going to come back and test it's a 2011 and the the gpu is shot uh sadly the two newest machines that were both 2011 15 inches are both suffering from that issue it's not exactly surprising and frankly even if i can like heat shock the gpu it's not really a permanent fix and the goal with these is to fix them so with that in mind i'm i'm not going to pursue repairing this logic board however we do have this other 2010 macbook pro that works but it has a bad fan it doesn't have an ssd the arrow keys are coming off and the side is caved in so i'm going to try to put a 2010 logic board in this 2011 casing because it's in good condition and i am noticing a difference actually in the antenna here there's a different wi-fi card so hopefully that will still work but we're gonna find out i guess oh dear i've encountered an obstacle and it's a really dumb one so i've now got the 2010 logic board in the 2011 case and absolutely everything is in the same place except for this connector this is the camera and on the old logic board the connection was here whereas on this one it's there just slightly out of reach why did they move it they didn't move anything else oh my gosh this is so dumb so what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna cheat plug it in like that and then this just won't be seated right why do they this is so pointless that was such a stupid change from one year to the next so there you have it if you ever wondered yes it is possible to downgrade a 2011 macbook pro to a 2010 macbook pro not that you would want to do that when you can also upgrade it to a 2012 which seems objectively more useful but anyway you can do that all it takes is an ifixit protec toolkit and their repair guides online and a little bit of ingenuity and honestly the fact that i bought these in a bulk lot of 32 really saves you because uh well we had a working logic board with a bad fan missing components and a beat up case but because where there are so many of these things we have all the spare parts that we need to get this thing working you know what else is really handy this 2009 macbook pro does boot up however it's missing the cd drive and the case is really severely damaged the display is fairly mangled yeah it's a little bit rough around the edges but if you'll recall from earlier we have another shell for this with no motherboard no hard drive no battery but conditions pretty good this is just an empty shell that is perfectly compatible with this working logic board we're in business this is the final stretch for this video i've addressed all of the 15-inch macbooks i've addressed most of the complete 13-inch ones and now all that we have left to do is assemble the working parts that remain for the 13-inch macbooks and get them all put together so we have three logic boards here which means we need to scavenge enough parts to put three of them back together so here is a display for macbook pro here's the top case for it so we're gonna put those together then this display is for a macbook a couple of these are actually not macbook pros they're 13-inch aluminum macbooks very similar but they have slightly different internals so that's going to go with that and then we have another pairing of the same thing it's a macbook with the display the only thing that we need now are the screws to put them together so the macbook that has unfortunately suffered some serious damage that is going to contribute screws i've pulled screws from two of the other housings and we should have enough although i do need to find a clutch cover for this and i've found one so let's get to scavenging and let's fix these things up i've done something really dumb and that was i checked to see that this macbook logic board was working before i checked to see that it's missing half its keys that was really stupid so what i've done now is i took the other top case with the dead macbook logic board in it that does have all of its keys and we have to now put the trackpad back in it because i took this trackpad out for that macbook it's fine this is this is the last thing that needs to be fixed today this computer is now working we're almost done oh man i got one more by the way that i couldn't fit on the table uh so 14 is the number of complete working macbooks that i was able to get out of the initial batch without spending a dollar on parts now yes obviously it was not able to get all 32 of these macbooks working but that's because they weren't all complete so the goal with this project wasn't to get 32 working macbooks it was to use the massive amount of parts to fix as many of them as possible and so that has left us with this we have six 15-inch 2010 macbook pros we have four 2009 and 2010 13-inch macbook pros and then we have four 13-inch aluminum unibody macbooks from 2008 which are internally almost identical to the 2009 13-inch macbook pro so all in all that makes 14. so all of these macbooks are more or less complete they all have ram they all have hard drives and they will all boot but none of them really have batteries only two batteries i was actually able to get a charge out of and then this one is also missing a bottom case so i have to order one of those but apart from that these are complete working macbooks and that is pretty insane in fact if i were in this purely for trying to make as much money with as little energy as possible each of these macbooks would probably fetch on average a hundred dollars the 15 inch a little more the 13 inch a little less average it at 100 and i would basically double my money because i've got 14 working ones but that's not the goal of this project the goal of this project is to maximize the number of working macbooks and to not just have them work but actually be usable so batteries solid state drives and that has given me a plan with the help of channel sponsor ifixit we are going to be giving these macbooks a complete makeover and i have enough parts left over that with a couple of additionals i can get i think another five working macbooks so in the next episode on this series we are going to be giving these macbooks the special treatment they're going to be getting upgraded they're going to be getting batteries we're going to add five more working macbooks to the mix and we're going to give them all a beautiful sparkling clean get rid of all of this sticker residue it should be quite the site to behold so definitely make sure to get subscribed you are not going to want to miss that video when it comes out i've got a huge pile of boxes just off camera it's going to be good so thank you guys so much for watching if you want to take on a project like this i definitely recommend it it's a lot of fun you can get these macbooks for not that much money and ifixit has you covered they have all of the tools all of the repair guides and even the parts to get your giant pile of macbooks working too so with that thank you guys so much for watching let me know what you're most excited for in the comments below and i'll see you in the next one you\n"