I’m operating on a Macbook Pro 15 from mid 2010. I upgraded the hard drive to SSD, upgraded the memory to 8 gigs (max supported), and the mobo has been replaced twice (fried from overheating .. the thing gets really hot). This has prolonged my machine for a bit but it’s starting to getting long in the tooth. They also just dropped my model from being able to install the newest mac OS (for a 2010 that might make sense). Seems being able to upgrade modular pieces of your tech is a thing of the past. It has saved me some really time and money being able to remain on the same machine for 9 years. If it weren’t upgradeable that probably be a totally different story.

Biggest features that I would miss from my macbook:

--Touchpad with BetterTouchTool - I heavily use custom gestures and it’s insane how much this drives my daily work flow and speed

--Unix environment is super nice

--Reliable and quick resume from hibernate or suspend

--Never really lags at the OS level .. but individual apps might get a little bogged

I would use a windows notebook as my daily driver if the experience were close and it had a solid build (weight and slimness is not a huge deal to me). Laptop + linux would be fine as well but I don’t know about the user experience with the newer touchpads in linux.

Does anyone have any success stories with notebooks that mirror my experience and isn’t OSX?

> upgraded the memory to 8 gigs (max supported)

You should be able to put 16GB in it. Apple doesn't say so, but I ran that much with 0 issues for years in machines from that time.

Are you sure it was a 2010 model and not a 2011 one?

I may have had a 2011 model.

A quick peek at https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2010.h... suggests that the Core 2 Duo systems (13" MBP) could handle 16gb, but the i5/i7 models (15"/17") couldn't. This Stack Exchange answer confirms: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/105036

You should be able to run Linux on this laptop, once Apple drops support for the Mac OS version you're running. It's only with very recent Apple hardware that you encounter real problems with Linux. (Recent Linux distributions support touchpad gestures as well.)

5 years ago if you'd told me I'd be buying a Microsoft laptop (not just Windows but Microsoft's own hardware) because of the hardware quality, I'd've laughed. Yet here I am.

As a Surface Pro 4 owner, I gotta say that Microsoft is arguably even worse than Apple on this issue, because their machines can't be repaired at all. They can't even replace the battery! All they can do is swap out a defective unit with a refurb. And if you're out of warranty, you'll be paying $400+ to do it.

The usb C issue on surface laptops is annoying and trackpad is a joke compared to MacBook Pro, also the scaling of the ui on windows is just ridiculous, I hate using it because of these factors ( have both surface laptop and MacBook Pro )

I had a 2011 MBP that died in 2015. There was a defect with my models Nvida GPU where the solder would fail over time. My machine wouldn’t run Apples GPU test due to the GPU failing completely. There was an open recall but since it wouldn’t run the test I was SOL.

Haven’t been able to pull the trigger after the price increase for Retina display and Touch Bar. Didn’t want to after the new keyboard issues and now after these display issue I’ll pass again.

I can’t spend $2-3k on a laptop and get less than 4 years out of it. If my 2011 MBP was still running I would still be using it. I built a $700 desktop that crushes most Macs and I can remote into when I need power.

The 2011-2013 video repair extension was for AMD GPUs. They only did it after a class action lawsuit dragged them kicking and screaming. And they replaced logic boards with the same flaw so just outside the 2 year extension program, you could expect the same failure. I did. My friends did. My customers did. This kind of hassle isn't worth the price premium.

I used to think there should be a law requiring a three year warranty standard. It probably would alter the calculus. But at this point I'm so burned by Apple I don't care.

You are correct it was AMD.

From the early 2011 MBP 15 inch spec:

“AMD Radeon HD 6490M graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR5 memory on 2.0GHz configuration; or AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory on 2.2GHz configuration”

You can get a used 2015 machine (last before the Touch Bar gen) for around $1000-1200.

I have a TB Mac, but the late 2013 machine I have still works great. (It does have the screen coating issues that plagued that generation have, and I missed the window to get it fixed ... I may try throwing a tantrum at a local Apple store however and see it that works)

I have a 2012 rMBP, one of the first revisions. I genuinely don't know what I'm gonna do when this thing eventually dies on me. It's been a great piece of hardware and I use all the ports on a consistent basis, even hdmi.

I have the same one. It died on my 2 years ago and the cost to fix it ($600 for a new motherboard) was right at the tipping point between worth and not worth it. So I did it out of laziness. (Everything is backed up fine, but reinstalling all the tools etc is just a pain.)

Absolutely no regrets. I replaced the battery myself last week.

Crazy that we're now 7 years later and nobody has been able to come close to this kind of laptop perfection.

I'm in the same position. My MBA has got to be 5 years old. I would be willing to replace/upgrade it, yet everything current seems like a compromise in some way (if not compromise in direct features, compromise in what you really net in upgraded performance for the price).

Likewise, I've a late 2013, i7 with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.

Things have moved on, it's been 5 years, but not that much. And my MBP still works. I only intended on having it for 2-3 years before upgrading - it's paid for by my business and is critical to my work.

And yet what's putting me off a new purchase is that the new models are vastly less attractive propositions than they would have been had they just followed pace without touchbars, butterfly keyboards, T2 chips and thin wires you can't replace.

Apple today seem lost with respect to Macbooks and I can't see things improving. I fear I'm going Linux on a Dell XPS at some point this year and I hated the last Dell I had.

> I fear I'm going Linux on a Dell XPS at some point this year and I hated the last Dell I had.

Why not something like a ThinkPad?

I'm considering the same move for the same reasons. What did you hate about the Dell?

same, 2012 15" rMBP (gen0 with the screen persistence issue) that I keep around just because it's hard to replace the easiness of certain video editing suites. not going to buy another because all the newer model just go into deep throttling at the first hint of a heavy workload. they're pro only in price.

If I recall correctly, wasn't that just a power management bug that was fixed a year ago?

They fixed the excessive bugged throttling but significant throttling is still there https://cdn-macrumors-com.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w1200/cdn.ma...

It's a direct result of their form factor.

>but significant throttling

Is an 8% drop really significant? Further all modern Intel processors aside from a few low clocked Xeons throttle. That's the whole point of the "turbo" speeds -- they utilize what they can within the thermal threshold.

you still get the baseline performances; turbo extends that for workload that use less than full cores. this makes the cpu go below the baseline.

What is your problem with the hardware? The current MacBook Pros has an 8th gen. i7 and up to 32 GB Ram. Pretty good hardware if you ask me. Would I pay for it out of my own pocket? No. But I wouldn't buy a current ThinkPad either. It is just too much money for a mere mortal.

Hardware reliability != hardware specs.

Very true. Never had any issues whatsoever. Not a single one in the last ten years.