Clinging to Life on an Obsolete Intel Mac

On 13 August 2026, Apple listed my old Intel MacBook as an obsolete product. According to the official description:

Products are considered obsolete when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 7 years ago.

…

Apple discontinues all hardware service for obsolete products, and service providers cannot order parts for obsolete products.

…

That means that, except for the battery, I cannot get any repairs from official support. I would only be able to try my luck at a third-party repair shop if this old fellow breaks again.

Over the years, I’ve spilt milk on it and had to get the motherboard repaired. I dropped it at Connolly Station, thought it was definitely broken, and I literally held my head in my hands on the bench for several minutes. But this old chap has pulled through time and time again. Thanks to its 32 GB RAM, I can at least dip my toes into some small-size LLMs on it. While the lack of Metal framework support, which is only available on the M series of Macs, is really a pain in the ass, considering the recent price of RAM, I need it to keep chugging along for a couple more years.

The problem is, it’s not just the lack of hardware repairs, the fading software support is coming back to bite me in the ass too. I even started seeing this issue when I updated using Homebrew:

Error: node: no bottle available!
If you're feeling brave, you can try to install from source with:
  brew install --build-from-source node
This is a Tier 3 configuration:
  https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers#tier-3

This means they are withdrawing support for the pre-built bottles for my old fellow. Although I could download the source code and compile it myself, that would mean more work. And the last thing I want is any hassle. Luckily, I found a workaround. I replaced the current one with node@24 LTS.

Replacing it is quite simple:

1. Install Node.js 24 LTS:

   brew install node@24

2. Uninstall the unversioned formula:

   brew uninstall node

3. Link node@24 and overwrite any remaining npm files:

   brew link --overwrite node@24

4. Verify the active versions:

   node -v
   npm -v

According to Homebrew, this allows me to cling to life until 30 April 2027. I hope I can afford a new Mac before that time comes, otherwise, this kind of issue will become more and more common in the foreseeable future.

As a Node.js developer, I have found that running this command from time to time can reclaim a noticeable amount of disk space:

npm cache verify

Some might be tempted to use this to free up space:
npm cache clean —force

But be careful with it, not only is it unnecessary, it could also waste bandwidth and slow down future installs.