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Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

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Re: Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

#21

Post by shirro »

I have an ancient mid-2009 MacBook. I walked out the Apple retailer and straight into a cut-price PC parts shop and upgraded the ram and hard drive to avoid some Apple tax. I am probably overdue to replace my second battery but I haven't been travelling much for awhile. My second or third HDD was swapped for an SSD quite some time ago.

It wouldn't be fast enough for some jobs but as long as I have browser and terminal I cope ok. I have been going to replace it for years but Apple keep on making more and more unserviceable hardware.

I am a very satisfied Apple customer who will never buy another Apple product. When this machine dies I will buy a quality laptop that isn't disposable and run Linux again.

Re: Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

#22

Post by secondtimeuse »

I just realized that this is the one that I use and love. Given the ample number of ports USB/Ethernet/Thunderbolt and SSD I have never felt a need to replace it. The lack of non-Retina screen does not bothers me much since I use it with an external monitor. Having read this article I am now worried about breaking it since it seems Apple has no better options yet.

Re: Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

#25

Post by Negative1 »

Writing this on mine right now. I went with the mid-priced model figuring the HDD size and extra RAM would basically cost me about the same if I bought and installed them myself.

After a year I took out the DVD drive and replaced it with a 512GB SSD giving me over a TB of storage. That hurt the battery life (and increased the weight) quite a bit but it dramatically decreased startup time, made everything a bit faster and made sure I wasn't constantly hurting for storage.

Next up is the battery which is definitely not holding the same charge anymore.

At work I have the latest and greatest and it is fantastic but most of that is just cake for most users. Biggest things I like about newer Macs? Retina and a thinner/lighter profile. For the really hefty stuff (games, graphics programming, 3d modeling...) I have a custom built PC from the same time that blows it away performance wise.

In the end, right tool right job.

Re: Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

#26

Post by dflock »

soared wrote: post #16

> It’s very inexpensive, even when specced up. $1400 buys the fastest CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB disk from Apple I had to laugh a little at this. $900 bought me a 5th gen i7, 16gb RAM, 1TB SSD and 256gb SSD. I do have to suffer through w10 and a lenovo backdoor though.

You don't have to - you can install a different OS, if you want to.

Re: Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

#27

Post by SloopJon »

verisimilitude wrote: post #10

I'm writing this from a late 2008 Macbook (the first Unibody Macbook, and the direct ancestor of the Macbook the article talks about). On this laptop, I finished school, develop, Photoshop, store all my pictures/videos/music. It is my only machine. It's great. I'm about to purchase my third battery for it (they decline dramatically at around 1300 loadcycles); replacement is very simple (there's a door on mine), even…

I just upgraded my father-in-law's mid-2010 MBP from 4 GB to 8 GB, and replaced the HDD with a SSD. Total cost was about $150. Should be good for another couple of years at least, if it holds up, although battery replacement looks a bit trickier.

Meanwhile, my late-2010 MBA is stuck at 4 GB, and battery replacement looks even more difficult.

Re: Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

#28

Post by happycube »

gruturo wrote: post #8

One additional reason it still makes sense as a product: last 3-4 years have been... Quite underwhelming, from a CPU power perspective. A little bit of power efficiency, which does have its place on a laptop, but other than that, hardly anything noticeable in day to day use. Intel is clearly not feeling the heat from competition and their pricing, minimal improvement and feature fragmentation clearly show it. Giving…

Yup... so we get things like dual-core lie7's even in platforms that look big enough to fit a quad-core, Celeron lines downgraded from mainline chips to Atom's, etc. sigh

Re: Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

#29

Post by Alex3917 »

verisimilitude wrote: post #10

I'm writing this from a late 2008 Macbook (the first Unibody Macbook, and the direct ancestor of the Macbook the article talks about). On this laptop, I finished school, develop, Photoshop, store all my pictures/videos/music. It is my only machine. It's great. I'm about to purchase my third battery for it (they decline dramatically at around 1300 loadcycles); replacement is very simple (there's a door on mine), even…

My primary computer is also a late 2008 MBP with 8GB ram. I have to say, having used a modern MBP at my last job, it's crazy how little day-to-day difference there is. I do plan to finally upgrade if the Skylake MBPs are good, but if not then there's really no immediate reason to do so. Given the rate of change in the 90s, it's wild to think that this thing might make it past Obama's presidency on both ends.

Re: Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

#30

Post by mschuster91 »

dkrich wrote: post #6

The short version of this is that there is a lot of money to be made from enterprises by selling them outdated technology because enterprises are almost always slow to adopt new technology. That's how Dell and Microsoft Sharepoint still make a lot of money. It's not necessarily a bad thing when taking into account the economics of training IT personnel and the added costs of supporting cutting edge technologies. But…

> The short version of this is that there is a lot of money to be made from enterprises by selling them outdated technology because enterprises are almost always slow to adopt new technology.

A end-2011/2012 MBP has more than enough resources to fill most day jobs' needs. Give it an SSD and enough RAM and you can run IDEA just fine as on a brand new one.

The only thing that's not really possible is doing video editing or high-res photo editing because the screen is not high-res enough. Unless you're doing one of these two workloads, no need to shell out the double amount of cash if you don't profit from it. Or attach the MBP to an external screen, that works fine too.

Oh, also if you have >1k MBPs in service already and you don't want your IT service guys to have them sent to Apple for everything (after all, the guys are expensive and you want something to do for them other than packing Macbooks into parcels), the mentioned MBPs offer the advantage that you can do a LOT of the common stuff (hard disk swapping, battery replacement, RAM upgrades) yourself on these machines. When I had to swap the disk on my work MBP (end 2011) I needed under 5 minutes.

Also, enterprises like consistency because it makes spare parts acquisition and user troubleshooting really easy.

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