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Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

marco.org

31–40 of 78 posts

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

#31
post #26
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.

Even OSX, potentially and with enough trickery

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

#32
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.

Yeah, I can't argue with the rest of the article, but that line sounded strange to me. I understand paying a premium price for a modern MBP (I paid a similar price for a Windows ultrabook that has lasted me a long time,) but $1400 for a laptop that even the author admits is mediocre is not "very inexpensive." It seems a lot like people who buy the 2012 MBP are doing it for brand recognition alone and they would be better off with some other laptop that has a DVD drive.

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

#34
post #14
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The short version of this is that there is a lot of money to be made from enterprises by selling them outdated technology because enterprises are almost always slow to adopt new technology.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…

I see a lot of complaints about Sharepoint, but this one is new to me. What about it is outdated, and especially when you compare it to what other options? I'm no fan, and Sharepoint is super-heavy and requires enterprisey-typical levels of care & feeding, but it's a mature platform and offers a lot of pretty spiffy bells & whistles when correctly configured. None of the open source options remotely compare.

SharePoint lets you glue together a lot of business process with (gasp) paid software. Somewhere in Idaho there's a five person dev shop who's really, really worried about making the tool for production companies that have to deliver 30 second radio spots in 40 languages. And somewhere in Burbank there's a couple production companies happy to pay them $1200/seat each for ten people instead of hiring a bunch of devs to rig up or whittle down some open source stuff. Unsurprisingly, the open source crowd neither likes nor understands this tradeoff.

SharePoint is sort of a mess, but it's precisely the kind of mess that WordPress is: it's big and dumb and breaks predictably and people know how to deal with it.

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

#35
post #21

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 termina…

> I will buy a quality laptop that isn't disposable and run Linux again.

you have a model to suggest ?

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

#36

An excellent write up. In 2013 I was afraid they were going to get rid of the 101, so I bought it. Still using it today, and I just purchased a hard drive upgrade to put in it. It will probably be my last MacBook for many years to come. Upgradability, is the most important feature in my book. I still have A 2009 model running Snow Leopard, and it works great. I see no reason to go to a retina machine

My wife is using a 2009 15" MBP with SSD and original spinning HD moved to the opti-bay, and maxed out RAM -- same upgrades for me except I have the late 2012 MBP 15".

The trackpad is one of the main reasons I love the mac book pro's -- the PC laptops all have such crap trackpads I just can barely stand the computer at all--on my mac I never use an external mouse -- ever. I think the stupid / dirty / lame reason Apple switched to the retina MBP's is that they are easier to force people to upgrade.. super difficult to upgrade hardly anything, super lame..

I use VMWare Fusion like crazy and its awesome.. with a fast quad core CPU, SSD, and ~8-16GB of RAM, VM's are awesome on the MAC.

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

#37

13 inch is SMALL. Does a MBP exist with the same features (user-accessible disk/ram/battery/optical) in the 15in range?

Yea when they killed the 15" MBP with matte display, I pretty much freaked out since I was planning on buying it as my main computer from the remainder of my life if Apple continued to exist as a company.. instead, I am now trying to figure out what to do next.. I've been thinking about getting a new computer, but really don't want to buy a non-apple piece of junk that has a super crappy battery or trackpad or display.. those are things apple just does a great job with and are so critical to the normal use of the device, and most other vendors do a terrible job with..

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

#38
post #33

13 inch is SMALL. Does a MBP exist with the same features (user-accessible disk/ram/battery/optical) in the 15in range?

They don't make them anymore, but you can get them used and they're still great machines.

In my opinion (the market clearly disagrees with me), the mid-2012 15" model was the last great Macbook Pro that Apple ever made. That they don't make the unibodies any more is pretty much the main reason why I went back to a PC laptop.

I loved my 2011 MBP because I didn't have to pay Apple prices for RAM and storage, and was gradually able to upgrade it as prices for RAM and SSDs came down. That was until it got bricked by the famous GPU overheat issue.

By the time Apple finally acknowledged and started fixing the problem, I had already switched away.

The Retina MBPs are nice, but thin for thinness' sake did not align with what I wanted. I would have rather they put in a bigger battery in the unibodies instead of shrinking the body.

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

#39
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…

I want an ARM MacBook as that implies OS X on ARM which means an iPad Pro should be able to dual boot

ARM is not magic. I bet that as soon as it performs in the same range as an x86 under OSX, power consumption will be similar. You may feel better the ISA is neater, and that it may be Windows-proof, but that's about all you'll have.

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

#40

One reason not mentioned is that you can actually replace the disk drive with a caddy to put in another hard drive. I replaced mine with an SSD. I also upgraded the RAM so I could finally appease Chrome because I would get a lot of swapping to disk previously. I'd say it's quite competitive to the later models and does everything I need. (Just don't look at a retina screen or you'll be jealous) Repairability is a hug…

I did that drive bay caddy thing on my 2011 MBP for a while. That setup ate battery like you wouldn't believe. I could barely get 2 hours of time on it.

Thankfully, SSD prices dropped significantly and I ended up replacing both drives with a 1TB SSD and sticking the optical back into it.

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