UKC

A friend is asking about a couple of options she has for buying a second hand Mac:

"Does anyone know much about apple laptops? Enough to have an opinion on a 2012 macbook pro 'classic' style / versus an early 2013 macbook pro: Older one has more storage, and a built in CD drive, second one less storage, no CD drive, but with retina screen. Both £500, cannot make decision. Any advice?"

I know nothing about Macs so any input gratefully received.

In reply to Rob Naylor:

Get the one with fastest processor and most ram.

OTOH, retina screens are nice.

There's plenty of space to upgrade the hard drive - take the CD drive out on older one and put dual SSD's in, you can also max out the ram to 16gb on these, even though officially it's 8gb. Tutorials on YouTube or your local community puter repair space will do it for you.

D

In reply to Rob Naylor:
£500 for a five year old laptop...? Wow.

[edit: eBay suggests that's about the going rate for a 2012 MBP...]

In reply to captain paranoia:

That's what I thought, but it's a Mac and I understand that these Apple things seem to cost much more than Windows machines, even second hand!

In reply to Rob Naylor:

Get the one with a CD drive and then perform careful surgery on it to replace it with an SSD. Install the OS and main applications on the SSD and you'll have something awesome.

If they use other computers don't go for the Retina screen - once you use one on a computer all lower resolution screens start to look impossibly awful. This really crept up on me and caught me out and now the non-retina machines I use seem horrible.

In reply to wintertree:

I'd agree - I couldn't possibly use a non-retina laptop level of resolution
It's a tough call - I'd be inclined to go with the one that has the most RAM, especially as I'm guessing that they both have spinning drives

In reply to pneame:

MIght be wrong but I think the retina macs are all using SSDs for storage.

In reply to Rob Naylor:
I have a MacBook Pro Classic (2012). So long as you max out the RAM and install a fast SSD, it's still a good machine for many tasks – even things like Lightroom (although newer Macs will of course be faster). It will run the latest version of MacOS fine and is very fast in general operation. The great thing about the Classic is that you can install a second hard drive alongside the SSD, if you remove the optical drive. For me, this was more important than a Retina screen. Unlike the Retina MacBook Pros, you can also easily replace the battery and many of the other components yourself. That's why I went for the 2012.

Must stress that the SSD upgrade is *essential*. It's only fast if you run the system from an SSD. MacOS is slow as a dog from a spinning hard drive, no matter how fast the processor.

EDIT: Forgot to add, don't get a used Mac laptop with a discrete graphics card. They are notorious for failing. Integrated graphics (like on the 2012) are less powerful but far more reliable.

In reply to captain paranoia:


It does sound a lot, but the 2012 retains its value because it's the last fully user-serviceable Mac laptop and still more than adequate for most users. It also has very few known faults. It's one of the most reliable Macs to have been produced this decade.

I plan to still be using my 2012 MBPro as my main production machine five years from now, barring mishaps!

In reply to Mike-W-99:

I believe you are correct - certainly this became the point that the innards became more challenging to modify. I like OAH's suggestion for modifying the older machine.

It is definitely advisable to have an SSD - increasingly, Apple's OS has been optimized for an SSD rather than a spinning drive. You can always hook it up to an external monitor for more screen real estate

In reply to Rob Naylor:

Thanks all....I think a consensus has emerged.