I have an early 2015 Macbook Pro and it's still working well and is able to run the latest Apple operating system. I did have to replace the battery a month or two ago (the old one was still functional but was swelling); I got the new battery off Amazon, it was simple to install and it came with the tiny screwdrivers that are necessary to open up the case. Mine has solid state memory instead of a hard drive, which I'd recommend.
I'm typing this from a MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012) rocking a 500GB SSD and 16GB of RAM. It is a work horse like Keith said. Faster than it should be with the SSD. I'm always a few versions behind on OSX, so I'm running El Capitan on it. But I run my business from it, including photo editing. Should be easy to find a cheap one online somewhere.
I am glad someone asked this questions because I have been reading about buying cheap Macbook and refurbing them on Reddit. My wife wants a mac, The battery issue, screen going out (old age), upgrading the ram $$$, PC laptops are just cheaper. PC you can get a Intel i5 with a SSD drive for a couple hundred bucks. I purchased a Dell Gaming Laptop 3-4 years ago for steal blackfriday and it still plays all the newest games, price to price I couldn't do the same with a MAC. Then again every trendy mom with their own blog has one so theres that lolz.
In reply to Placemotorsports :
They're old, but the Pros were designed as workhorses. If it does what you need it to, I wouldn't rule them out. They are getting a bit long in tooth, but then again I'm still using a 2010 Mac Pro as a semi-daily driver. Admittedly a pretty heavily upgraded one, but it's still 12 year old technology.
In reply to trigun7469 :
If you're only looking at the specs, yes, you can get PCs cheaper. But the funny thing is, if you compare like for like, a MacBook Pro and a similarly specc'd PC laptop of similar quality (ie, a higher end business HP or Lenovo) aren't actually that far apart price wise when new. The Macs tend to hold their value better, though.
IME - and I say that as someone who has at least five different OSs in view right from where I'm sitting - Macs tend to "just work" (although it's sometimes harder to figure out why when they don't). It's one of the advantages of having hard- and software come from the same place.
In reply to BoxheadTim (Forum Supporter) :
I very very much disagree. The 2015 macs were poorly designed, with screen issues and power issues. I watch lewis rossman repair macs, and as far as I know they are still running the power feed right next to the display feed. Power crosses over and it's goodbye motherboard. There is nothing pro about anything apple pro. In a perfect world pro would mean its robust and able to handle harder use. Apple has turned the word pro into, add an extra feature and call it pro.
It's great you haven't had issues, but Apple "features" are still a thing. They have denied the keyboards were an issue when after class action lawsuits, and just recently got away from the butterfly problem after 6? Years of denial.
Hm...I can only speak for my own experience but my 2015 Macbook Pro has been rock solid.
That's kinda why I was gonna steer her toward a Max cause they just seem to work. I haven't heard anyone weary of the blue screen of death or bogging down from just being old
My wife has a 2012 17" MacBook Pro with an OWC ssd and ram. I have a 2011 MacBook Pro with the same. We have two iMac's both 2012 27 inch with ssd's and max ram. We edit hundreds of thousands of photos a year, iMacs stay on 24/7 connected to a NAS and we edit 4K video.
last week my iMac fell while moving it and usaa gave me 4000 to replace it. I bought a refurb iMacPro with all the latest Do dads.
ive had incredible success with our computers and they have all been refurb. I've also had new windows laptops- I have a dell i5 loaded up now, so far it's crashed this week and the usb keyboard just stopped working. But it's the computer the new job gave me so I keep using it. Also the screen is really bad.
Everyone has their own experience but we do more with our computers as most folks and I'll keep paying for Macs- they just work, and keep working.
So I'm a little confused, If I find an older 2011 Macbook pro that is running 10.13.2 can that not be upgraded at that point?
In reply to Placemotorsports :
That should be able to go up to High Sierra 10.13.6. To make the jump to Mojave 10.14 you need a 2015 or newer machine.
My 2015 Macbook Pro is running Big Sur 11.2.1 which is the latest operating system.
So main things to look out for is maximum RAM and SSD instead of hard drive right?
You can usually retrofit an SSD in place of the hard drive. RAM can be harder. But the SSD will have a huge effect, more so than RAM.
Placemotorsports said:So main things to look out for is maximum RAM and SSD instead of hard drive right?
Looks like my previous comment didn't post...
If you're looking at 2011 or older that still have 'regular' 2.5" HDDs or SSDs, I would look for one that has as much RAM as you can find, then replace the SSD myself. You probably don't want to run a fairly old SSD anyway as the older models tend to have pretty limited lifespans.
Also, as Keith says, the SSD is likely going to make a bigger impact than more RAM unless you're throwing enough work at the machine to max out the RAM in the first place.
Edit: Forgot to mention - ISTR that these are using SATA-II for the disk interface, so no point in buying the latest snazziest SSD as the laptop is unlikely to be able to get the max transferrate out of it. The SSD is still going to make a huge difference performance wise, you just won't be able to squeeze the maximum performance out of it. SATA-III is backward compatible to SATA-II so either will work.
Since this seems to be for work If she has to collaborate with others and share files I would strongly recommend keeping the platforms the same that she is sharing with or the company that she works for. Someone is always going to be considered the PITA in these situations and introduce a low level of annoyance because they need to be special / different.
While file formats are supposed to be compatible across platforms things like formatting and lot of other little things seem to get lost in the translation between MAC and Microsoft. This may have changed but last I looked it was a real annoyance to have an employee generate a letter and then having a secretary proof it and have to reformat it and make corrections due to anomalies introduced due to the file format translation between software platforms. This is just not productive and waists company time and $$$$
As a company owner I don't allow mixing the OS with in a business environment. The exception would be if I needed something done that was only doable in that particular OS. But to date I have not run in ot this situation yet.
I don't even like mixing variants of the MS OS. I spent 10K + on a new large format printer/scanner because our old one did not have drivers for windows 10 and HP was firm about there was never going to be one. (I have since kept track of this and they never have issued new Win 10 drivers for that piece of equipment. I did not want to keep one computer running Xp or 7 on the network that in order to use the plotter you would have to go to that computer open the file and then plot it from there instead of plotting fron the work station where the user was. And this was all because of an OS "upgrade" from the same company (Microsoft).
I know there are emulators and third party drivers and I looked in to it but I have been doing this a long time and as a business owner you really need to not start making janky fixes. I the short run they may get you around a problem but almost always then result in more costly upgrades down the road. The pain from ripping the Band-Aid off in the begin is always better then the slow pull that occurs with jankey fixes to a network.
Anyways I got way off topic here. MAC versus PC? Depends on who you are playing with in the sandbox and who owns the sandbox.
Dean, I'd be interested to know if you've run into the formatting shifts with the newer cloud-based applications such as Microsoft 365.
FM uses PCs for almost everything, but there are two Macs: one for the graphic designer/video guy, and one for the web guy who likes the way that Macs play with *nix. Hasn't been a problem but we're not passing formatted business documents to secretaries because we don't have secretaries.
I just assume that any product from HP will not have any new drivers written for it immediately upon release to the public.
BoxheadTim (Forum Supporter) said:In reply to trigun7469 :
If you're only looking at the specs, yes, you can get PCs cheaper. But the funny thing is, if you compare like for like, a MacBook Pro and a similarly specc'd PC laptop of similar quality (ie, a higher end business HP or Lenovo) aren't actually that far apart price wise when new. The Macs tend to hold their value better, though.
I got a high end Lenovo ThinkPad X1 to replace my fading Macbook Pro. Not their very tip-top model, but one of the nicer ones with tenth gen i7, 16gb ram, 1TB SSD, nice Nvidia GPU... about half the price of a comparably spec'd Macbook Pro.
There was more of it downloading all the drivers and system updates for the first week than with a Macbook. Had to go into more settings to adjust certain inputs more to my liking (I don't want the cursor to click if I accidentally tap the touchpad). A few little things where I need to find workarounds I didn't with the Macbook (preventing the computer from going to sleep when it's just playing music; needing to go into settings to get a printer to do double-sided).
There's also the tradeoff that I have more game options with the Lenovo, and I can drop in another SSD or more RAM if I feel so inclined.
Definitely not >$1000 worth of difference between these machines.
if you buy an older Lenovo Thinkpad laptop there is this website that shows you how to upgrade it ,
Thinkpad T440p Ultimate Buyer's Guide
https://octoperf.com/blog/2018/11/07/thinkpad-t440p-buyers-guide/
Is there the same type of website for upgrading an older early teens MacBook Pro ?
dean1484 said:Since this seems to be for work If she has to collaborate with others and share files I would strongly recommend keeping the platforms the same that she is sharing with or the company that she works for. Someone is always going to be considered the PITA in these situations and introduce a low level of annoyance because they need to be special / different.
I missed this part earlier...while I like my MacBook, it isn't compatible with my company's computer system so for working remotely I have to use a PC laptop. So, I agree that finding out what will or won't work is the first thing to do.
She just needs to be able to use Microsoft office for word and excel.
So I found a good deal for one on Marketplace, it's running High Sierra. When I go to the app store to download excel it says it won't download cause I'm not running 10.14. Is there a work around for this or do I just have to buy a package?
Yes, you will have to buy the suite, or at least the bits you want.
Note that LibreOffice is a pretty good free open source office suite. Depending on what she's doing, it may be suitable. I've been using it for years in a shop that is MS Office based and it rarely causes a problem for me.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Can you convert them to excel or Word files?
In reply to Placemotorsports :
IIRC LibreOffice can read/write Excel and Word files. I haven't tried it in a while, but I remember the word processor rendering Word documents a little different - not massively different, but there was a slight difference.
I just checked the system requirements for the "off line" Office 365 installation (ie, the actual Word/Excel applications) that I use, and those are only supporting the last three OS releases, which right now would be 10.14, 10.15 and 11.
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