Thanks for the tip. Having said that, Raspbian is Debian, Ubuntu is Debian too. So operating system wise its the same. Raspbery Pi's have a bunch of SD cards which get corrupted over time due to read-writes. Also, The Pi, its a headless server, while this Macbook has a screen and keyboard attached.
Ubuntu has a more developed GUI than Raspbian. So one can do most of what one does on a Pi, on these old laptops running Ubuntu as well.
The only thing is that Raspbery Pi has good headless installation scripts and controls.
The old macbook pros have some serious hardware useful for audio.
I have tons of RPI devices, practically in every room and for each of my headphone and amps. In addition a macmini for headless playback of apple music. One macbook air for spotify screen and two macbook pros one from 2022 and one very old macbook pro of 2011.
Of this the most useful device turns out to be my old macbook pro of 2011. Advantage of old macbook pros
1. Integrated Screen, allowing you to carry the device with you wherever you want it to go.
2. Integrated keyboard and touch pad
3. Powerful CPU. Even my RPI4 struggles when transferring encrypted DSD files. Apart from the encryption speed, RPI 4 runs pretty fast. Due to this even a RPI4 is never able to reach 1 gbps on the gigabit network port when using SSL. It maxes out to around 800 mpbs. My macbook does 1 gbps without a sweat. If not using SSL, there isn't this difference.
4. Integrated IR port. My 2022 macbook pro doesn't have this. The apple tv remote, my apple hi-fi speaker remote, all work seamlessly. I can stop, pause, rewind, play, forward, increase/decrease volume with the remote. Using a remote is any days faster than picking up your android/ios phone, then unlocking it, running some app to do the same thing which can be done in a fraction of a second. It is faster than calling hey google or alexa
5. The macbook by itself can be used as a remote as well as a player.
6. The headphone out of macbook is better than the noisy headphone out of RPI. It has SPDIF output too.
7. The audio can easily be optimized on the mac as long as you don't run Apple's own OS. Run any flavour of Linux and you will be good. I use Fedora Core. Apple's own os OSX is so dumb that it cannot automatically adjust the audio sample rate.
8. If you run linux, you can create your own run level that doesn't run any of the non-audio services. I have created a bunch of systemd scripts that optimizes audio on Linux. Reach out to me if you want to optimize ubuntu on your old macbook.
9. Unlike the Raspbian OS on RPI, upgrade on almost all linux flavours is much better. Unlike RPI you don't have to start from scratch when a new OS version is released. e.g. If you are on Raspbian 11 (bullseye) and you wan't to upgrade to Raspbian 12 (bookworm) you have to again download the OS, burn it to SD card and do all the customization you did before. The upgrade process is still not foolproof and hence even as of now Raspberry PI Foundation recommends to start from fresh. Using a standard linux distribution you can upgrade directly by doing dist-upgrade and all applications get upgraded too.
One disadvantage of the macbook is using the noisy SMPS power supply.
