Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells | Hacker News Reader

Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells

marco.org

102 pointsdaigoba6676 comments

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 though Apple no longer sells replacement batteries. I've maxed the ram to 8GB, put in a 256GB SSD.

So what happens when I finally purchase a new laptop, use it for 5 years, and Apple no longer supports replacing the battery? Then I'm spudgering out glued-in batteries with iFixit's iOpener. And I'd eventually like to upgrade to 512GB, but $700 up from the base price of the 13" Macbook Pro is not how I want to do it... I'd rather wait and upgrade it myself. Will OWC make the SSD card to do it? Hopefully. It's just... disappointing. I'd like a way to get the bulletproofness (just over 7 years on this one without issue) of a solid aluminum unibody but not give up the upgradeability.

Perhaps I'm a dinosaur.

Guess I'll shoot for another 3 years with this thing until the base Macbook Pros are a significant upgrade. Oh well.

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.

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.

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 up on AMD ever going back to making them feel a bit of heat again.

So wishing for Apple to release an ARM MacBook, just to put some fear into Intel, and return some health to the market.

Plus, when they were new, the 13" MBP (at least from 2010+) had 10 hours of battery life. Pretty good, even by today's standards.

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.

it may be Windows-proof

Fear not, Windows runs on ARM and has done for several years.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/b8/2012/02/09/building-wind...

Yes, but they'd still need to port some bits and pieces. I don't see Microsoft doing that.

You think they would't port Windows to run on an ARM MacBook? Do you know they made Windows to run on the Raspberry Pi ( https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/windows-10-for-iot/ )?

Because I think a MacBook version would have even more backing than that.

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

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.

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

you have a model to suggest ?

Not really. The Mac keeps on going. I lost interest and stopped looking. I bought a nice carbon road bike instead. Much better investment for me. All those components I can adjust, swap and upgrade for the life of the bike. Jobs wanted using a computer to be like riding a bike. Here we are in 2016 and I can still upgrade a bike. No hope with the shit the computer industry is making.

At one stage I thought I should put business Dell's way because they made an effort shipping some XPS-13 with Ubuntu but they were limited to 8GB. I had that in 2009. What is the point?

The nail in the coffin for an upgrade was when I bought a Chromebook to play with. I realised I could just about live with a machine that only had a terminal and browser. I moved local dev to VPS and I can scale that however I want, whenever I want. No concerns about soldered in RAM there. The Chromebook was a bit flakey so I went back to the Mac, deleted a heap of virtual machines and containers and apps and I pretty much live in Chrome and iTerm2 now and feel less pressure to change than I did two years ago.

Librem: https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-13.

I gave $10 to their initial Kickstarter!

> 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

Hackintosh for my model is said to be unstable, otherwise I would've done osx in a hertbeart. Linux is fun to play with, but not something I am willing to use day-to-day. This laptop and w10 have killed all my M$ enthusiasm though, my next computer WILL be a mac.

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.

The article did mention they do development. If it's OSX/iOS development, "inexpensive" probably actually means "inexpensive for an OSX-running laptop."

(And not just "inexpensive for an OSX-running device"; there's always Mac Minis if that's what you want.)

Let's see how that Lenovo is in five years.

Is this a joke? I have a Lenovo-produced T60 in its tenth year in daily use. I also still have its predecessor, a T43 labeled IBM (but manufactured by Lenovo) in regular use, but by my sister. Lenovo has a lot of problems, but they're every bit as capable of making a durable product as Apple.

Wasn't there a change of ownership a few years ago? If so, I'd also tend to a wait-and-see attitude until it's clear what changed and what didn't.

I don't think IBM would have ever gone with the unremovable malware idea.

T60 was also my first Hackintosh. Mine is still in service too, though just doing some light duty.

My 2006 Macbook still looks presentable, if a little bit vintage-ish. It runs well.

My experience with Lenovo laptops is that, with the exception of the ThinkPad line, they don't strike me as very durable machines, which is fine considering they are cheap. I am not very confident the current ThinkPads will be alive 10 years from now. I have no such feelings about my current Macs - quite the contrary: I got them overspecced because I suspect they'll be around for a long time and while 16 GB of RAM seems excessive for Python/Django work now, I am not sure what kind of demand will be placed on them by then.

I actually factored that into my purchase decision. My school paid for this laptop, so I got a cheap one with high end specs that I can replace with a beefy desktop and a chromebook in a few years when this Lenovo breaks.

The built-in ethernet is the biggest selling point for me. My work often requires me to plug into various devices via wired ethernet and it's almost guaranteed I would forget/lose an adapter one day.

If the 2008 macbook I've used every day since I bought it new fails, and the spare I got from a rich client who felt the need to upgrade also fails, I would probably consider buying 2012 version.

I cannot believe this ... I read it here in your comment and I read it in the article ...

This is the only mac laptop available with an ethernet port ? Seriously ?

The current large size (15", right ?) macbook pro does not have an RJ45 port ?

Right. The laptop is too thin to fit one.

You can look up a picture, but to paint one more evocatively through description: there's about 2mm of metal casing above and below the USB ports. The sides are effectively one USB-port high. RJ-45 ain't gonna fit.

With a little ingenuity, an ethernet port could have fitted [1].

A new Macbook Pro is my first Mac (provided by work), and I was surprised how much crap like this there was, which the other developers mentioned over the course of my first day. "Oh, you'll need a Magsafe to Magsafe 2 adaptor." "Careful with the Thunderbolt to ethernet adaptor, we've had to replace two motherboards when the cables snagged on the port." "Here's a USB hub."

And the Mac keyboard has a non-standard USB plug [2], as well as the non-standard keyboard layout.

Apple have very effective marketing though, the other developers didn't seem to think there was any other laptop which had a metal body, or comparable battery life.

[1] http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_migrated/pics/Sony_V...

[2] http://i.imgur.com/YhjBHOI.jpg

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 huge feature that is being lost, so I'm very grateful to iFixit for advocating for it and putting out such valuable guides. Sadly, there's an issue with mine where the hard drive cable breaks after a few months and I've had to get it replaced about 4 times already. The thermals also aren't very good so under heavy CPU load it heats up, though that doesn't happen for me much unless I (rarely) play a game or use all my cores. The added ports are just a bonus, even if I don't use them often like the Ethernet port.

Edit: Just noticed that it is mentioned in the first footnote.

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.

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 don't think many individual buyers would argue that the 2012 MBP is a better computer in pretty much any way than a 2015 MBP with Retina display.

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.

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.

Sharepoint's bread and butter is in Fortune-500 companies' IT departments that use Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett Packard software because they are not in the business of risk. Software is a resource, just like the buildings those companies occupy and the people they employ. It helps them meet a business objective. They do not care what developers think makes them most productive. They care what will minimize IT training and support costs and what will be around in ten years. That is why companies that make their livings off of enterprise sales design their software for C-level execs and IT decision-makers, not low-level developers. It's also why most in-house enterprise software is written in Java and not Ruby.

So the point is that, just like for Apple with the 2012 MBP, there is money to be made from those who are risk-averse and see more cost in moving to a new platform than from sticking with what already works. Somewhere there emerged an assumption that no developers understand that there are real P&L driving business decisions underlying the crappy software they are forced to use. I think most people get that, but that the software sucks to use is still an opinion shared by most of the people who use it for hours a day.

It's not just the Fortune 500. That currently cuts off with United Rentals at #500 with 12,000 employees.

Lots of small 50+ employee companies use SharePoint. It often works even better for them: they can solve problems by dumbly plucking software out of a catalog and clumsily grow their business processes around best-practices implied by that software.

In some future marco.org universe you can apt-get an entire business infrastructure and it all works great provided your MacBooks weigh 1.7 pounds instead of 2.3 with a 220dpi screen instead of 135.

In the meantime, small companies tend to be full of people who haven't figured out what the heck they're doing yet and being able to buy an HR application makes a lot more sense than hiring 6 Ruby devs who 1) know nothing about HR 2) don't care about HR and 3) can't learn about HR or even gather specs because the person in charge is the owner's dumb son who doesn't know much about HR yet either.

I'm no fan, and Sharepoint is super-heavy and requires enterprisey-typical levels of care & feeding, but it's a mature platform

You seem to have just agreed with me.

The Sharepoint vs. open source argument is a straw-man, since I never once mentioned open source. Sharepoint is used by all manner of organization for all manner of tasks. I just recently ran into an organization using it as a CMS platform. Past teams I've been on have used it as a document sharing platform, but even that experience is far from ideal. Sharepoint is used because enterprises are not in the risk business when it comes to software procurement. But for document review and sharing there are a host of better options available. Very few small teams that I've worked on that had their own control over what software they used chose to use Sharepoint of their own volition. Take that as you will.

Actually, I'm not agreeing at all. I think software (especially extensible platforms) are perfectly allowed to require care & feeding.

I also agree that Sharepoint is misused frequently, and that it's totally unsuited to small teams. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about large enterprises, which the GP said is ostensibly why Google bought Bebop.

> 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.

Yes, it can be souped-up to be as fast, but the frame is still larger and heavier, and has an inferior display. So, my point still stands that most individual buyers would not prefer a 2012 MBP to a new one that ships with SSD and a retina display. The ability to change out parts does not really matter to most buyers. Yes, I know, some buyers like that ability, just like some like to have a DVD player in 2016. Those concerns are not what make Apple a $700 billion company, but can still bring in a non-trivial amount of profit so I see why they still make them.

Indeed, but we were talking about enterprises, not private buyers ;)

This 2012 MacBook has been a cult hit amongst doctors and other medical professionals that I support, largely because patient information is still transferred via CD or DVD.

Makes me think that there could be a business in making a snap-in case for the 12" MacBook to add an optical drive, extra battery, Ethernet, etc.

Interesting thought. I could picture it for an iPad Pro as well: a "docking station" with peripherals, that is itself portable. You could market it primarily as an extra battery, the way those "portable USB chargers" work.

Also, for reasons I don't understand, if you are a parent you just have DVDs. I don't know why. I don't buy DVDs for my kids ... but we just have them. And more keep coming.

I am also still on the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro and I love it. I have added an SDD, moved HDD to DVD slot, replaced the battery and added an extra 8gb of RAM (will upgrade to 16gb when I can justify it).

I love my MacBook Pro and am dreading when I have to upgrade, the price of buying a new one doesn't seem worth it considering just a moderate spec upgrade.

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.

I have been thinking about Apple and EPEAT for a while now. Why not make MacBooks with removable batteries etc that are not outdated for governments etc that need it?

I agree. While I understand that Apple's philosophy of controlling the entirety of the user experience is somewhat sacred territory, they have already violated it several times. First ITunes on Windows which resulted in a huge windfall and introduced non-tech people to Apple's software, and then again (although this is more in the opinion realm) when they loosened restrictions on Iphone software.

If they made a modular, powerful, and somewhat affordable MacBook, I just think it would sell like hotcakes.

Apple's laptop internals are increasingly commoditized, to the point that with things like the 12" Macbook, you can basically consider them a battery in a case with ~$100 worth of other stuff attached. You may as well throw the whole thing in the battery recycling bin. (Also, given the way the battery cells are packed directly inside the case now, a sealed Macbook has the same number of layers of aluminum between the recycler and the electrolyte as a regular AA battery has. It'd probably be more trouble for the recycler if you take the battery out: they'd be having to deal with a soft bag of electrolyte that may have been punctured in transit.)

There is still the matter of EPEAT though.

The 13" Air can often be had for $799 which makes it that much more appealing.

I have an i7 2012 13" Pro loaded up with 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. It's a pretty potent machine but the screen resolution holds it back somewhat - I wish they had put a 1440x900 screen in it like the Air.

All the bad things people are saying/ implying about the new MacBook are completely right! But the truth is, I wouldn't trade mine for anything, because I love the fact that it's incredibly light and does not have a fan. I have many, many, MacBook Airs and mac pros, but the MacBook Air has always seemed to have a problem with the fan going on at random. Now that there's no fan, I'm a very happy developer.

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.

I hear that a large Seattle based software company known for being 'cheap' gives their developers the oldest/cheapest Macbooks that they can...

You reminded me of this interesting bit of tech history :)

> "It's an alpha kit, it has the Power PC processor. It's the closest thing to what is in the console. It's the best source," Mario Rodriguez, a Microsoft employee on hand at Microsoft's Xbox 360 booth at E3, told TMO.

> The Xbox 360 has long been known to use a special version of the G5 processor, as has the fact that temporary Xbox development systems were modified Power Mac G5 units. The demonstration at E3, however, are the first time that Power Macs have been used to show Xbox 360 games to the public.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Power_Mac_G5s_run_Mic...

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.

Writing this from a mid-2009 13" MacBook Pro (2.26 Ghz processor). I've also upgraded RAM/HD over the years, as well as replacing the battery. It's mostly for internet with some occasional programming and sound editing. It runs the latest Mac OS.

Is there an obvious reason to upgrade that I'm missing?

I have late 2011 MBP 13. I did upgrade it with 16GB ram/512SSD and 32GB MiniDrive (SD). Don't see any reason to upgrade ATM. Looking at MBP 12'' single port insanity im scared to even think about it...

I needed a Mac to write iPhone apps using XCode. I found a 101 on eBay for about $750; 256GB SSD plus 4GB memory; upgraded to 16GB memory for $80. The 101 was perfect for what I wanted.

This is my favorite model. Just suffered a spill and I'm debating whether to fix it, and I have once before, and it was not easy, or get another one...

I love my current 17 inch 2011 MacBook Pro for a lot of reasons outlined in the article and will not be happy when I need to replace it.

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

No, the 15" only comes in retina/ssd/no dvd drive model, the 15/17 inch dvd drive models were phased out in 2011-2012

Yeah, the end-2011 MBP is my current machine at work, it's a freaking power horse with an i7 and a SSD. Thought I'd get me the successor, but if its SSD and RAM are soldered, no way.

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.

I seriously doubt anyone cares much about raw battery capacity per se. Battery longevity is what matters. I wouldn't mind the smallest battery in the world if it powers my device the longest. The good news is despite the smaller battery and thinness and much much better display, the new Retina MBP 15" has better battery life than the machine you believe was the last great one.

In the end, you might not agree with their trade-offs, but they are giving the customer the best of both worlds (something I suspect most of their customers appreciate), improving across both dimensions of weight and battery life. It's very hard to argue they are making a worse machine now than before.

>> Battery longevity is what matters. I wouldn't mind the smallest battery in the world if it powers my device the longest.

Nobody would mind that. But today, a bigger battery is more likely to power your device longer, all other things being equal.

If the Retina MBP's guts were put in a 2012-style unibody and the extra space was simply filled with more battery, I tend to think that the Retina MBP's battery life would be crazy good. And there are a lot of "pros" who use power-sucking, CPU intensive apps that would appreciate that.

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..

tbh the long battery life of OS X/iOS devices is a byproduct of a more resource-efficient OS.

Apple really can optimize its kernel and userland because it controls the hardware, Microsoft (and Google/Android) not as much because their software needs to run on everything that people dream up when smoking pot.

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