In Late 2008 I bought my first laptop–a sleek, state-of-art unibody MacBook Pro–and used it for a couple of years until what I presumed was a catastrophic mishap interrupted the splendid relationship that was developing between us… I had the machine in a bag slung over my shoulder, a la bike messenger mode, when ducking into a sort of low basement doorway it swung around and impacted the doorjamb with a savage, sickening THUD. The sudden motion sensor probably kicked in and shut the machine down, but at the time I was unaware of this functionality and nothing would resuscitate it from its apparent coma; the large dent left in the corner of the aluminum case seemed to bode for a total loss.
So I got a Late 2011 MBP to replace it, and after years of sitting dormant under my desk, one day I idly plugged in the charger to my battered ‘first baby’ and pressed the power button… I was astounded, to say the least, to hear the buzzing whir of the hard drive and the iconic Apple chime! Alas, however I was too far down the path with my newer machine to start over/resume correspondences with the beat-up, bent-but-not-broken-after-all, beast from 2008.
I added a refurbished Thunderbolt Display to the mix in the early teens, and my Late 2011, 5.1 unibody MBP had been my go-to instrument for everything work- and audio-visual-project-related until the model’s notorious GPU failure began to rear its head in the summer of 2018. Long out-of-warranty, I had it repaired at a third-party shop who mentioned that the problem was likely to return sometime further down the road. Which it has, with a decided vengeance! After twice removing the old thermal paste and superheating the GPU with a Wagner heat gun, elevating the chassis on a sloped, fan-assisted cooling board, and even adding some thermal pads to the Ram chips and heat sink, to try drawing a few increments of total generated therms away from the underside of the logic board and into the aluminum bottom casing, I have tentatively restored it normal functionality.
While I futz around with various jerry-rigged cooling strategies for the ailing AMG Radeon 6750M 512 MB discrete GPU of the 2011 MBP, I’m trying to get the last, latest and greatest(?) OS possible for my original 2008 model installed to try running Aperture 3.6 so I can clean up a decade's worth of libraries with varying degrees of 'orphaned' and 'marooned' offline images–before taking the plunge to Lightroom conversion (as 32-bit Aperture has long-since been unsupported since the evolution from Mojave to Catalina, etc…)
I am running Mavericks on the 2008 machine and when I try Software Update, the window shows No App Updates Available, though there are a few unrevealed Incompatible Apps (among them Aperture 3.6) that I can unhide and (frustratingly) reveal as so close and yet so far away… There are scads of Yosemite tutorial and optimization apps, but I can’t find a page on the App Store to download the actual Yosemite OS, or as you rightly suggest the more recent update–El Capitan.
Some chat thread I perused a while back suggested that I would need 8GB of RAM installed to be able to run Yosemite/El Capitan on a 2008 MBP (mine currently only has 6GB of RAM); I thought I had maxxed the RAM on this device, but am happy to get another 4GB card (and lose the 2GB) to bring it to a balanced total of 8GB–but only if my stoopid dream of running Aperture 3.6 on a long-ago mothballed machine can definitely be achieved… Help me Obi Wan.
