Chrome on an old Mac
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I've toyed with the idea of a Chromebook, but never saw a compelling reason to get one.
However, I'll probably be retiring Mrs. George's old MacBook Air later this year, early next year, and I might just keep it to install Chrome on it.
Is there an old out-of-date Mac that you desperately miss using? Well, you’re in luck because it’s incredibly easy to install a modern version of Chrome OS on old Intel Macs for free. CloudReady isn’t a new product by any stretch, but I had always been itching to try it out. Just last year, Google acquired Neverware, the company behind CloudReady. This means that Google offers an officially sanctioned way of reviving old computers with Chrome OS. Here’s how to get CloudReady up and running on an old Mac.
I was able to get CloudReady running on a 2014 Mac mini and a 2012 13″ MacBook Pro. Both of these machines have run-of-the-mill specs for their time. Each of these Macs had 4GB of RAM and much older Intel processors. Neither run recent versions of macOS particularly well, and they certainly aren’t good for power-hungry tasks. The MacBook Pro model that I used for this experiment only runs macOS up to Catalina, so it’s already out-of-date. The Mac mini that I used can run Big Sur, but it’s severely underpowered, being seven years old and not physically upgradeable.
You can install CloudReady on virtually any Intel Mac from 2007 on.
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Okay that's pretty cool. I have an 8-or-so-year-old Air just collecting dust here that I might try this on just for kicks.
