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MacBook 2007 Upgrade to higher res display

Hello everyone, first time poster, I have heard of iFixit for some time now on various youtube guides and wish to learn more about my tech.

Lately I have been feeling nostalgic and wish to buy an old MacBook 2007, the black one, upgrade it through and through to the maximum specs accepted and use it as a leisure device or as a backup computer.

Matter of fact I already have this laptop but the white version, but as many as myself, I couldn’t be asked to pay a +300 US$ premium price just for a tinted version. I’m planning on practicing on my mother’s (the white one) and leave it to her while I figure out if it’s convenient and eventually get my black one.

The idea started a couple of days ago from a video from a YouTuber, Snazzy Labs, this is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLVvP3WC....

Basically it’s a Hackintosh way get Mojave installed on this particular old machine but I guess it works on any obsolete Mac.

I’ll get to the point. I want to know if is it anyway possible to upgrade the display from the crappy native TFT panel to a nicer newer one, at least an LCD FHD. I guess 4K is not supported by the native integrated card Intel GMA 950. The native resolution is 1280x800.

I’d like to know your opinion. thanks.

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pipe dream def. ''From the fantasies experienced when smoking an opium pipe.

I would start with the higher end 2008 machine:

Apple MacBook "Core 2 Duo" 2.4 13" (Black-08) Specs

Identifiers: Early 2008 - MB404LL/A - MacBook4,1 - A1181 -  2242

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbo...

You are only going to be able to go to 10.7.5.

It does have a

Video Card:Intel GMA X3100

Bump it to 6 GB of RAM and put in an SSD that’s backward compatible to

Serial ATA (1.5 Gb/s).

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Thanks. So the 2008 is the last black MacBook model? Good to know I'll aim at the last possible version to come out.

Watch my video link, it is possible to push up to Mojave with a modified installer.

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The hardware is what it is …

There is no means to upgrade the display beyond what the system offered. The display inter-connection changed LVDS to iDP (eDP) and this also requires a different GPU logic on your logic board which is why you can’t alter things.

Update (02/26/2019)

You can take the shell off on the MacBook’s allowing you to dye them or paint them (urethane) to what ever color you want!

As @mayer stated getting a SSD for this system would be what I would spend the money on. You’ll need to get a Samsung 870 EVO drive as its one of the few that runs at SATA I (1.5 Gb’s).

DosDude’s patcher does work and its not bad. But Mojave needs RAM! And as your system is quite limited you’ll end up using VRAM off of your drive (SSD) so keep that in mind as you want a larger drive to make up the limited RAM.

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Yea of course I'm getting an SSD, and I already have that exact drive. Matter of fact I'm investigating if I can set up a raid 0 with 2 ssds and gutting the DVD drive.

In the requirements of Mojave says it needs 2GB, aren't 6 GB good enough? 6 GB is the maximum ram it can theoretically support, as Mayers confirms. I've upgraded it the same way on my old 2007 iMac.

The thing that concerned me the most was the display, but since upgrading to higher resolutions it's a "pipe dream" I'll let it go.

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Theres a big difference starting your cars engine than driving it up a mountain! This holds true for PC's as sure we can boot up with nothing else running Vs running some heavy RAM app or two. I would mac the RAM to 6GB if you can. You'll still be leveraging VRAM off the SSD.

Sadly the optical drive in this series is PATA not SATA so RAID is not workable as the I/O speeds are very different!

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