Looking for inspiration

Community
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Hi everyone, I have a bunch of old laptops (MacBook Air 2014-2017) laying around the house and I am wondering what can I do with those. Do you guys have good ideas you want to share? Let me know

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If they are broken, you can try board repair

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Laptops could be an easy start into the homelab / homeserver hobby.
They already have Keyboard, Display, Mouse and a Computer all-in-one, so you don’t need all of those things separately for a start.

But you’ll have to look into compatibility of software with Macbooks, and those might need a dongle for Ethernet?

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  • Kubernetes to deploy containers for redundancy, load balancing and general shenanigans just to learn something.

  • Tools to learn vSphere, since you can make a bunch of nodes out of those.

  • Render farm for any software that supports that functionality.

  • Share them for a folding@home team. Choose a project you like and let them work at it.

  • Hand them out through schools to childern and families in need. I think that, especially during the pandemic, some that have been using their phones to follow remote classes would really enjoy a laptop.

Can’t really think of much more to do, but I think these are some interesting starting points.

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Laptops make great home servers to start with. They even have built in UPS (assuming the batteries still work).

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I think those still have relatively decent hardware. Have you tried putting Linux on it? I think those are the last few models that can run it no problem. The M1 isnt so much compatible.