hell yeah! I just bought a Macbook Pro 15 2011, Core i7 for a whopping $10! according to the seller, "it just died", so I got it to transplant the screen to a MBP 15 2010 i5; way cheaper than the $30-40 ask for a replacement screen.
turns out the fucker is fully functional, the keyboard is shorted somewhere and that's causing the problem. replacement keyboards are like $10, so I'm presently installing and tweaking Fedora 41 and this old boy (fully kitted out - SSD, 8 GB, Radeon works, 90% battery health) is getting dragged into 2024 kicking and screaming.
edit: is there a lemmy community that's into repurposing, fixing and upgrading old laptops, phones, etc.?
macbook boards are ultra-resilient, if you get continuous fan spin you can almost always get them to a useable state. in this particular case, the machine powered on, spun the fans, turned on the screen, displayed the white loader screen for a second and immediately powered off.
never heard of such a thing, their quirks and failures are pretty well documented (logi.wiki, r/macbookrepair, etc.), so I unplugged everything from the board (battery, keyboard, touchpad, HDD, ODD, wifi, camera, display, etc.) and connected it to power and - continuous fan spin!
then started reattaching one by one until it failed again and it was the keyboard. so, ran it with an external keyboard and checked everything and it's in excellent working condition. I used the opportunity to change the decade old paste on CPU & GPU and cleaned it from dust, insects, hair and other crap. I'm getting a new keyboard on monday ($13 new, $15 used) and assembling everything. maybe do a write-up.