Upgrading old MacBook Pro - Do it.

I'm so damn impressed with my laptop that I had to share it! Now, this advice would seem obvious to someone who is literate in computer hardware, but this is a small review coming from someone who isn't.

I was given a 2012 Macbook Pro by a family member after she upgraded to a new one.

The laptop had 4gb Ram and a 250GB HDD, factory spec in 2012, pretty basic spec.
I use photoshop, lightroom and iMovie most days, and I knew full well that this thing couldn't hack any of those, but I gave it a go to see how well it would handle even Lightroom. It was terrible, I've never been so close to throwing a laptop off the desk before.

I had my heart set on buying a brand new laptop from Apple. Upon visiting the store, I didn't have a budget in mind, but I just wanted to see how much I'd have to pay to get the laptop I wanted, which turned out to be around £2500 - a lot of money.

I then walked out of the store and upon my return home I headed to Youtube, to find there's almost a 'cult following' of the mid 2012 (no later as they soldered parts) Macbook Pro. I watched all the videos and then dived in and ordered 8gb of Ram and a 125gb solid state drive.

When the parts arrived I followed the instructions and it was a doddle, super easy to clone the hard drive and swap it + replace the ram.

The reason that I'm posting this is to share with you all how fucking fast this computer is... it can handle iMovie, Lightroom, Photoshop and video web browsing all at the same time.

The laptop was free, but a little research has given me the conclusion that they can be had for £200 +/- and the parts cost a total of £120.

I did a test next to a brand new £2000 13" Macbook Pro, and my 2012 model beat it in just about everything, I'm incredibly impressed and would recommend this to anyone. It was far surpassed my expectations and the computer is a pleasure to use.

If you've got an old Macbook Pro or you're on a budget, give this a go before replacing!

If any of you would like some extra info or what parts you'll need, feel free to PM or if there's enough interest I can post them on this thread :)

been looking to do this with my 2012 Mac book did you swap out the optical drive also?
links to parts and instructions would be great

Wow, if only we'd thought of doing this over on the Apple thread...

Oh, wait... We did! #UTFS

I missed it coz I'm always late to the party so happy to see it but merge away.

will have a look at Apple thread looking to do this

Easy peasy, max out ram and chuck an SSD in... My 2011 MBP was running so beautifully til the GPU gave out... Again! Dodgy batch of Macs... I loved that fucking machine, it's still in a box in my office!

Easy peasy, max out ram and chuck an SSD in...

The same goes for a Win based laptop.... probably more so than Mac

6GB and HDD must have taken +2 minutes and the egg timer was still popping up from the delayed startup programs, so its not exactly usable.
8GB SSD booted, logged in and ready in 25 seconds or less.
Was slightly quicker with Ubuntu, but the speed benefit wasn't worth having 2 OS for me.

well this is sweet; Mac fanbois, Linux jihadis, Windows mavens come together with mutual love and respect. All it needed was insanely fast boot times. God bless the solid state disk upgrade.

[here: early 2011 MBP 17" with max'd RAM and SSD]

I souped up my sister's 2012 15" MBP, went a bit crazy with it. 1TB SSD, 2TB HDD where the optical drive used to be, 16GB RAM, new battery. It flies. If you're buying one of these used and want extra power, go for the 15 inch models as they have the quad core processors.

2009 MBP with 8GB ram and SSD. No real reason to replace except that I can't upgrade to latest OS.

You can ;)

Any links on how to?

Not a dodgy batch, seems to be a problem on quite a few macs and imacs, not jsut the pro.

Apple even did free repair for a while on the pros.

Thanks for the info...

Apple did mine three years ago...

It was a fucked GPU, stick to the car thread, m8... Oh... But wait...

Where are you seeing these for £200? On eBay it's £450 - £700.

I'm still on my mid 2009 MBP.

Sorry, wasn't a confrontation thing. Just pissed at buying a macbook pro and having the gpu fail. Have an old Imac that had the onboard gpu fail too. Have a later Imac with mxm card and that has failed too.

Seems to be an issue.

Hi @JamesNQ what spec is your machine please , i5 or i7 ?

i5 :)

really? Check Gumtree. When I was given this laptop I wanted to check the value out of curiosity, and they were changing hands for under £300

This sounds really interesting. I might well have a shot at it!

Why does this have its own thread?