A1466 i7 2.2 Ghz Upgrade Advice needed

[Lobell]

Dear All,

I am trying to breathe new life into my wife's 2015 Macbook Air (1.6 Ghz / 4 GB RAM) by upgrading the logic board to an i7 2.2 Ghz with more RAM.

That's when the advert below caught my eye: 16GB on the i7 A1466 - that's double what Apple originally put on.

I know that this is technically feasible, but has anyone made experiences with it?
Do you know and rate the vendor, Yopolean? I am ignorant and don't know them.
How did the performance turn out?


I hope this is an appropriate question for this forum.

Many thanks,
Sebastian

[piernov]

280 € is a lot of money to invest for a nearly 10 year old machine that's been out of official macOS support for 2 major versions already.
While the RAM upgrade from 4 GB to 8 GB could make sense for a bunch of use cases, the CPU upgrade won't make a world of difference, it's still a dual-core low-power Broadwell, just with slightly higher frequency and cache.

[Lobell]

Hi Piernov,

Many thanks, that's a fair assessment about the usefulness of the upgrade and you are right.

My curiosity however is on the other part: do we believe and trust that this board with 16GB RAM is a real item sold by this vendor (Yopolean)? Whether I will eventually buy and use it I am not sure, but im intrigued to find out whether someone actually sells an improved version of a7 year old main board. Is there a business case for it?

All the best,
Sebastian

[mon2]

Hi. Received your PM. Have had a few dealings with Yopolean and the transactions were fairly smooth. Checked our purchase history and found that we ordered the wheel cutter tool for the iMAC + a box of tape to seal the LCD display back up. Our staff feels that the tape is good but Apple quality was better. In general, the vendors on Aliexpress will try their best to support you and have you return as a regular customer but concerns of - warranty? shipping fees if you must return the logic board (during the warranty period) - who will pay for this return? A few years ago, we have a client wanted to pimp up their iMAC to 16GB as shown in the iBoff videos on YT. We were not ready to perform this surgery and cringe even these days even though we have purchased a fully automatic BGA tool from ZM. In the end, we shipped the board to iBoff (Singapore?) and the board worked fine for about 1-2 years. The client returned with the non-working iMAC and sold the unit to us for a fair cost as he was interested in the next and new kid on the block (not the boy band). It is on our work pile to review when we have some free time. Full disclosure, I am not a mac person but do hardware engineering for our company with our target audience is the Windows platforms. Enjoy getting non-working Apple hardware to function once again when Apple insists to throw it out and buy a new one. It also keeps the mind from rotting. On this note, checked with my bro earlier today and he too confirmed that the logic board may restrict the OS you will be able to deploy on this new motherboard. He mentioned to seek out 2015 or newer. We were an Apple repair depot for 10 years and he was one of the techs who took the $$ courses. The other tech staff members no longer work for us.

I think you are coming from MacRumors forum? Do review the offer from DosDude1. I think he is in the USA - not 100% sure. There are a few propeller heads on this forum that are very rich on knowledge on macs (@Piernov / dosdude1 and others).

[reformatt]

There is a config on the boards for 16GB and there are just the chips available for the upgrade. But the cost vs benefit is not there. These boards are not workhorses by any means, but ok for watching videos etc. If you want anything for serious work you get a Macbook Pro. But these run hot and heavy on battery with Intel CPU's, hence why Apple went and developed there own ARM based CPU's in the Mx series. 1.8Ghz 8GB boards are fine for this model for cost vs benefit. Better to find a 2nd hand machine on eBay with dud screen etc than buy a board off Aliexpress to be honest. I have bought off this vendor before, no issue. Actually, Aliexpress has really improved their game of late. I ordered UK keyboards instead of US, was allowed to send these back as free return and got a full refund. Same for a Dell keyboard I got that was wrong.

Officially, OS support for the 2013 models ends on Big Sur, 2015~17 on Monterey. This is becoming an issue if you want free stuff from Apple like Pages, Notes etc, as they will only allow you to download it if you are running the latest OS (Sonama currently). 3rd party support is being tailored off on the older versions, like Office 365 only officially supports last 3 versions of MAC OS and Safari or Chrome stop getting updates etc. (BTW, there are older installers still available to get Office 365 onto older versions).

Open Core Legacy Patcher has breathed new life into these MAC's. I've installed Sonama on a few 8GB 2015 machines to get around this Pages restriction for some users. It runs fine for what they use it for. Older MAC's like the 2012 A1278 actually run Sonama not that bad considering. The other alternative for these users running Catalina was to dump it in the bin as software support is rapidly being withdrawn for things like Chrome etc.

One last thing, these MAC's will run Linux perfectly fine. Crucial P3 Plus SSD's are also working via adaptor as well if you want to expand storage. I just put Linux Mint on one for a customer, there is some work to do to get WIFI, trackpad and camera working, but this is pretty simple to do.

[Lobell]

Dear All,

many thanks for taking the time to help and provide information! Apologies for the slow reply, i was out of it with the flu...

mon2 yes, you are right, I did come from MacRumors and I have found the dosdude! Thank you also for explaining your Yopolean experience

reformatt Thanks for the background, that cost vs benefit opinion was exactly what i was after (together with an understanding of the trustworthiness of Yopolean). I also completely agree re Linux: that's normally the path I take: when kit is too old / slow / too little RAM for anything else, i normally stick Ubuntu in it and it is good for a while. I was under no illusion to create a high performance piece of kit.

Just as background: I was mainly curious about a few things:
-technical feasibility of Yopolean offering something that is objectively better than the Apple original
-what their business case for that is, since the things are 10 years old, yet there still seems to be a market for it
-personal ambition and practice: i have built plenty of desktops, but have never taken apart and upgraded an Apple notebook; my son and i do a summer project together every year; so far this summer we built a media-server and his desktop from pieces we found in the scrapyard, next step will be to tweak his mother's old Macbook so that he can use it for one more year as a glorified typewrite in school (and learn how it is done)
-the frankly childish ambition to prolong the life of that piece a bit more so that my son can have it as a cheap (disposable) school laptop


Thanks to you guys, I can make a much better decision now.

The way forward: I won't buy the Yopolean16GB board, but an 8GB one from a Macbook with a broken screen (€50) and transplant that.

Does that make financial sense? Probably not. But it is a good and inexpensive opportunity for my son und me to learn

[reformatt]

With 8GB RAM, still a good machine for light tasks with OCLP and Sonama (if you want that MAC OS experience). One of the last Mac's where you can upgrade the storage easily. Sequoia no benefit right now as AI features and iPhone mirroring won't work and the Open Core team still working on some issues. I don't normally touch any new Apple major software release till they issue their first couple of bug patches anyway.

You can also put Windows on them as well, although I don't see the benefit given refurb HP elite books are so cheap. Chrome OS flex also another option.