Conserve Your Digital Stuff

The weekend is a great time to do those jobs that you've been putting off. It's also an opportunity to work on your impact to the environment by repairing or restoring your old equipment.

In that spirit, I recently replaced the battery in a 2015 MacBook Pro that has been my daily driver for the last 9 years. I have had plenty of other, more modern laptops knocking about the house: a bunch of my projects depended on some of the data on that old machine.

Opening it up, I discovered that the batteries had ballooned and expanded. That is not safe to take on airlines and the build-up of 9 years of dust meant that the fans were often working overtime to keep it cool. Additionally, the battery life is depleted so that it is only really useful as a desktop rather than as a laptop for an hour a day.

It is still a fantastic machine. Even without some mod-cons like a fingerprint reader and lacking the efficiency of the modern Apple native silicon, it still has 32GB of RAM, a great AMD video card, and a 512GB SSD. There's still plenty of life left in it and I want to preserve it.

The first thing to do is to back up everything. The next thing to do is to recover that backup onto a new device and verify that all the appropriate projects build successfully (dependencies having been packaged correctly using pdm), and terraform state/providers and versions are all such that our terraform builds still work. That was actually the most intensive part of the project.

You might wonder why we would use the backup and restore route over using an SCM. We do use scm for tracking changes, however for development environments, we maintain our own light-weight infrastructure, which helps with our security posture and ensures we maintain control of our data.

I got hold of a replacement battery from an Amazon store called SNSYIY. This turned out to be a great product.

Then all that's left is to get stuck in: don the blue gloves, and bring the muscles to deal with the copious amounts of adhesive.

I pried off the six batteries after detaching the touchpad connector and the battery connector, gave the whole unit a clean with q-tips, some alcohol swabs, and hoover everything up with a vacuum cleaner, and then put everything back together with my iFixit kit.

Plugging the machine back in, it started charging first time. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Soon I was back in business.

I hope this article inspires someone to refurbish some of their old equipment.