Tips to tame scratchy hardware on old MacBooks (screen + speakers)

I've posted a couple of times about a 2012 11 inch MacBook Air that I got Sequoia going on recently. It runs pretty smoothly, but my main laptop is a one year old M2, and it’s difficult not to compare. But all is not lost!

Improving the screen

The screen on the old Air is its weakest link and I'd been told I couldn’t do anything about its crappy contrast issue. By default, it’s sickly pale and both the standard calibration tool and the Accessibility contrast slider don’t help. But I discovered you can easily run a full calibration process which makes a massive difference.

So, try this:

Hold the Option key down in Preferences > Displays > Colour Profile > Customise > + (Add new profile). This enables the off-by-default “Expert mode” option that’s otherwise not present.

With Advanced on, you can create a full profile including adjustment of the gamma. I set mine to 2.4, the max (2.6) went a bit too far. I now have a deeper, more contrasty and colour accurate profile.

Nothing can improve the terrible viewing angles or turn it into a Retina display, but it’s much better than the stock “LCD Display” profile. You can switch between your new profile and the factory one and startle yourself at the improvement.

Improving the internal speakers

The Air’s speakers sound like a tinny portable radio from the 80s. But they can be improved too. This one’s a simple matter of downloading an equaliser tool. I used eqMac which works well and is free.

I tweaked the basic tone controls to reduce the treble by -11dB and upped the bass a similar amount. This makes these old rattlers sound pretty similar to my M2’s internal speakers. I'm not exaggerating. It’s not clear why Apple didn't optimise them. The difference is night and day.

I haven't tried on other old machines or other OS versions. It’s possible the 11 inch screen is particularly bad. I’d be interested to know if other old banger Macs, brought up to date with OCLP, can also have their screens and speakers improved.