Question How to get Safari to work on MacBook Pro with MacOS 10.6.8 ?

[Isaac Zackary]

Someone gave me a MacBook Pro with MacOS 10.6.8. Apparently this is an older MacBook, since it has a CD/DVD drive, among other things. However I thought this would work just fine for at least browsing the internet.

However, I can't find Safari on the computer (there's just a question mark) nor is Chrome supported on this MacBook. I also can't find Edge. I also I'm having a hard time finding out how to just reinstall MacOS on it.

Do you think that Apple has simply abandoned this Mac and taken away it's power for connecting to the internet or is there any hope I can get this thing working other than just a computer for playing Zuma's Revenge?

 

[Isaac Zackary]

I found out that this is a mid-2009 13-inch MacBook Pro. It had MacOS 10.6 installed. I finally got a version of Safari to install. But then it wouldn't show most websites, such as YouTube, for being out-of-date.

So I installed MacOS X 10.11 El Capitán. Well it worked and Safari could open many websites. But I thought I'd do a complete wipe of the hard drive and reinstall MacOS X 10.11 El Capitán. BIG MISTAKE. Every time I go to reinstall MacOS X I get to a point that it says the service is temporarily unavailable, check back later.

I've been trying to make a bootable DVD or USB with zero success. But since this is the only Mac I, or anyone closely related to me have, I don't have any way of getting the DMG file to burn (or convert to ISO and then burn). This is frustrating!!

I guess I'm going to have to buy a copy on a DVD off eBay or something...

 

[Isaac Zackary]

I finally got PowerISO to work. Seems that Window's thinks it's a virus. So I got the DMG file burned to a bootable USB. But so far the Mac hasn't recognized it.

I've tried and tried several times, and nothing. However, now that I've got Power ISO working, I'll try to find a blank DVD and see if I can't burn to that and try to install from the DVD drive.

 

[Isaac Zackary]

So reading more and more it seems the only way to make a bootable USB or DVD is with another Mac. The instructions say to download the DMG file, then open the file which will install an app, then burn the app over to a USB or DVD as an image.

But in order to complete the first step another Mac is necessary, and it also has to be a Mac that can install the El Capitan operating system since either new or older will not complete that step.

I also tried changing the date on the MacBook but that only made it worse: it wouldn't even get past the first step of verifying that the Mac is compatible with El Capitan.

 

[animekenji]

Try an internet recovery. It will install whatever the last version of OSX is that your machine supports.

How to Re-Install OS X with Internet Recovery on a Mac

In some rare situations, reinstalling OS X on a Mac may be required. This is made fairly easy as all modern Macs include the OS X Internet Recovery feature, which lets you reinstall OS X through a …

osxdaily.com

 

[Isaac Zackary]

Try an internet recovery. It will install whatever the last version of OSX is that your machine supports.

How to Re-Install OS X with Internet Recovery on a Mac

In some rare situations, reinstalling OS X on a Mac may be required. This is made fairly easy as all modern Macs include the OS X Internet Recovery feature, which lets you reinstall OS X through a …

osxdaily.com

I tried that probably a thousand times. I didn't work. Apple says it's supposed to, but it doesn't. There's no reason given by Apple why it doesn't work. After reaching out to Apple Support their answer was to just try again later. After several weeks of trying I gave up and bought an installation disk from a third party off of Amazon for something like $40. It worked fine and the computer is working fine now.