Because for the first part of the #MARCHintosh challenge I used a 1984 Macintosh Plus and for the second week I used the iBook G3/500 from 2001, it felt only right to move on to the next time period, and I stopped at another white laptop, this time, the 13.3" MacBook from 2006, the white one.
From the get go, this is a very special laptop to me, as it was the first Apple laptop I ever got, bought second hand from someone found online. I had to travel 30km with a very good friend to see it and pick it up, and I still remember that day like it was yesterday. That laptop has been in a ton of countries, been through some serious physical damage (as it can be seen) and had its screen replaced. But it’s still going strong with 3GB RAM and a new SSD unit.
Running Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.8) in 2025 is not a breeze, being stuck in a pretty good spot, with a lot of resources for its time, and this is mostly because for about two years, it was my main computer, from about 2009 until 2011. This computer has seen everything. From lightweight gaming, like the Popcap Games I demonstrated in the previous episode, to Diablo 2 and even Half-Life and Portal! Unfortunately, I don’t have these installed anymore, as the SSD it rocked for about 5 years or so crashed eventually, taking all its data with him, the new drive having only a couple of programs, that I used to showcase some screenshots when I wrote the initial article about it.
So it’s good to spend some time with this great piece of technology. The unit itself was brilliant. You can easily change the battery, access the hard drive and RAM bays, in order to upgrade them (I used to have a 256GB SSD and 4GB of RAM once upon a time), so it’s easy to make this work fine in 2025. And this is what I’ll do in this third week of the #MARCHintosh challenge.
But before that, I wanted to tell you a bit about how this computer is. First of all, it’s white polycarbonate and, while it shows a bit the passage of time, I like it, because a bit scuffed on the edges means well-loved. Additionally, the speakers are way way better in comparison with the iBook and even though the screen is only 1280x800, it has decent colours and brightness and could be used to watch a movie just fine, as long as it’s not 2025 very dark slop, like House of Dragon. It has a bazillion of ports, including two USB-A, microphone/line-in and headphones/line-out jack ports, Firewire, mini-DVI out, RJ-45 LAN, and most of all, MagSafe (version 1).
I am a bit bummed that Bluetooth is not working for some reason, and I cannot use the Mighty Mouse, but at least the trackpad is more than decent, actually being of a good size and supporting two-finger scroll, something that Windows laptops barely started to do 10-12 years after this came out.
My plan has a few steps that I want to manage to do over the 7 days, depending on how much spare time I will have:
- ✅ install at least 7 pieces of software and/or games that I remember I used. That’s fairly easy to do, as most of the programs I used back then I still do. Plus I wrote about Mac OSX software I really like (and use) back in 2011. I also want to use these a bit and spend some time with them.
- ✅ choose an iPod to re-sync with this computer
- ✅ send at least 5 emails from this computer
- ✅ watch one movie
- ✅ chat one hour on IRC
- ✅ read some news / browse some feed articles
- ⌛ find a way to use video/voice
✅ Install some software
So without further ado, I fired up iTunes and put on some Romanian bangers and I started searching and downloading.
VLC doesn’t need any introduction, it’s the de facto video player for MacOS (and not only) for many years, and it’s trustworthy and works great.
XLD is a tool for Mac OS X that is able to decode/convert/play various ’lossless’ audio files. The main usage for this program is to rip CDs into FLAC, as it can be pretty automated. Unfortunately, the internal CD drive has started to act up, so I’m using an external USB CD-ROM drive.
Adobe Photoshop CS5 was one of the best Photoshop versions out there, so many very useful features as well as a stability that hasn’t been matched since then, in my opinion, at least not by having a cutting edge system.
iMovie was and still is a great video editing tool, so I just fired it up and decided to make a video and I imported some old videos I took with my iPhone 6s. I didn’t even notice they were full HD videos and after importing and quickly editing a 50 seconds compilation of a few clips, it will take me somewhere around two hours to fully export it.
Two hours later: Well, it wasn’t two hours to export, it was about 40 minutes to “Finalize project”. Thankfully, exporting a Full HD and then a 720p version of the movie was almost instant, only taking a couple of seconds to write the 156 and 79 megabyte files, respectively.
iWeb was Apple’s counterpart to Microsoft FrontPage, which was included with MS Office since XP. However, by the time I discovered this, I was already doing web development for many years. However, it was a really nice tool. I even made a page, which you can see here that has the intro of this article written in it.
AppCleaner is a really nice program that can help you uninstall most of the apps you have on your Mac, removing plists and other library files and junk.
✅ iPod shenanigans
For this, I chose one of my favourite iPods, the 5th Generation U2 Special Edition iPod Classic, which was released in 2006 as well. At 30 GB it has enough drive space to hold the 1000 songs library I have added to this laptop.
✅ Send at least 5 emails from this computer
This wasn’t a hard task to perform, as my personal emails are all using web interfaces, so it was easy to just log in and reply to some of the ones I got. However, it took me more than I was expecting, as I don’t get too many emails anyway.
✅ Watch one movie
Instead of watching a movie, I chose to run some Cartoon Network blocks from the middle of the 1990s. Here’s one of them. I chose this because pretty much all movies I have on my home server are in HD format and I don’t want to kill this laptop, although I remember it running 720p just fine. It’s okay, Scooby-Doo can always overcompensate.
✅ Chat one hour on IRC
I jumped directly into Adium, to use as an IRC client, to join my friends at #oldcomputerchallenge on Libera.chat. This was so easy to do, it counts as cheating.
✅ Read some news / browse some feed articles
This was another “cheat-like” item on my list, because all I had to do was to export the RSS feeds available in my main NetNewsWire and import them into an older version (FYI, version 3.3.2 works fine in Mac OSX Snow Leopard, just make sure you edit the .opml file to use http instead of https for the feeds urls.) The only thing I’ll miss is the sync with my phone, but that’s not a huge issue.
⌛ Find a way to use video/voice
Among the software I wanted to install there are some who unfortunately are now defunct, like Yahoo! Messenger and Skype. While the latter still exists, its code base is no longer compatible with very old versions, so I can’t even log in, so that will put a serious dent in my “video/voice” checkbox, but the week is not yet over.
Unfortunately, there’s something really wrong with this computer, and I am thinking it’s because of the old age. Even though it’s shut down properly, it keeps forgetting the password to the wireless network and loses the date if it’s unplugged for more than 20 seconds. The main battery doesn’t charge and it shows its serial number as ˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇq and 0 mAh charge remaining. Bluetooth never works and the laptop just turns off its backlight after about an hour of operation, or even less, but luckily you can turn on “Screen Sharing” and use the Screen Sharing app from a modern Mac, to have it as a remote monitor.
I will probably give this laptop some love, maybe next year during #MARCHintosh, maybe sooner. We’ll see. For now, I’m leaving you with some cute beauty shots while I’m doing a backup of my home directory onto an external drive.
