I didn’t use my Macbook for a long time, so I decided to put it up for sale. Before posting any ad, I wanted to be fully sure it was working correctly, to avoid any surprises to the future owner. My computer was a 2019 Macbook Pro, with an Intel CPU, therefore I ran a series of tests to ensure it didn’t have any issues. Besides the onboard diagnostics available in the pre-boot environment, I wanted to run additional tests. I also recommend, to guarantee the best and most realistic results, running the tests a few times and comparing the results.
Disk
Most modern Apple computers come with non-removable internal drives, because they are directly soldered to the motherboard. Hence, SMART Utility, a GUI tool for querying and verifying SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data becomes very important, as its showing the number of hours, GB/s written to the drive, and it’s overall health. This is important because HDDs and SSDs have a limited amount of writes.
Memory
MemTest86 is a self-booting USB tool that allows testing with detailed reports of almost every x86 based CPU and RAM type in the market. It requires creating a bootable USB pen-drive and an adapter, but its worth it.
FAN
Intel based Macbooks need a fan to run at optimal temperatures, that’s why a full blast fan for a couple of minutes with Mac Fan Control can help diagnose any issues with it.
Battery
The application coconutBattery will show the battery health, cycle count and even the temperature.
Stress test
The benchmarking tool novabench will run 11 tests that span from CPU, GPU, HDD and RAM, that will show actual performance in usable units such as GFLOPS or MB/s. The build in stress test is also super useful.
