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Laptops · Apple MacBook

Apple MacBook 2015

13owners with an opinion
69%of verdicts positive
8/4positive/negative since 2024
3 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for software and battery.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 3 years
I had a 2015 M5, it was easily one of the best Macs I've owned. Ultra-ultra-ultra portable, I had great battery life with mine, and it was as fast as my 2013 Macbook Pro. I used it as my daily driver for 3 years before I got a new job (and a new work-issued laptop). Paired with a monitor that provided USB-C power (there were a few at the time, I got one of the Philips displays) it got me through several sizeable web dev projects. It's only just been retired, as the battery finally made it unusable, and now its logic board (and 2 others: my wife's 2015 Macbook and a lucky score on eBay) are part of a 3-machine cluster with Ubuntu installed, because why not... each one just has a USB-c power/ethernet dongle plugged into it, and I've got a little compute cluster that punches way above its weight for the amount of space it takes up (and the power it consumes, which is very little, especially with the display removed). If you could buy SBCs based on the m5, I'd eat them up.
Doesn’t like it
Thanks for the clarification. I did not understand. My knee-jerky reaction to the author’s blithe exhortation to upgrade stems from pain of watching as my prized workhorse (a 2015 MacBook) dies in my arms despite its magnificently healthy and powerful body.
Likes it
I'm on Sequoia (v15.7.4). I have the original 2015 model (1.1Ghz Core M-5Y31, 8GB of RAM). It's a little slow, but fine for what I use it for (web browser, syncing music/photos to/from my phone, simple coding tasks). My main gripe is the battery only has 60% of its original capacity. Apple won't replace the battery, and doing it yourself is pretty tricky. At some point it'll break or no longer get security updates, and then I'll probably get a MacBook Air. If you're using OpenCore Patcher, it's important to install the root patches to enable graphics acceleration. Otherwise it'll be ridiculously slow.
Doesn’t like it
Attention to detail? Apple built a phone that would bend in pockets because they used flimsy aluminum without enough internal structure, something they should have had ample experience to avoid from the exact same thing happening to tons of iPods. Apple insisted on developing a moronic keyboard implementation to save less than a mm of "thickness" that was prone to stupid failure modes and the only possible repair was to replace the entire top half of the laptop. They also refused to acknowledge this design failure for years. Apple built a cell phone that would disrupt normal antenna function when you hold it like a cell phone. Apple has multiple generations of laptops that couldn't manage their heat to the point that buying the more expensive CPU option would decrease your performance. Adding to the above, Apple has a long long history of this, from various generations of macbook that would cook themselves from GPU heat that they again, refused to acknowledge, all the way to the Apple 3 computer which had no heat management at all. Apple outright lies in marketing graphics about M series chip performance which is just childish when those chips are genuinely performant, and unmatchable (especially at release) in terms of performance per watt, they just aren't the fastest possible chips on the market for general computing. Apple makes repair impossible. Even their own stores can only "repair" by replacing most of the machine. Apple spent a significant amount of time groun…
Likes it
I don’t think there are any fanless x86 but I had a system76 pangolin for work. It was quite well built (I bought the next gen one for myself). They OEM the notebooks though, so the quality is decent (I’m coming from a 2015 Mac book, pretty much the gold standard of Macs) https://system76.com/laptops
Likes it
>They fixed the keyboard and the trackpad has been good even in the emoji keyboard models. I actually have one with my previous company and they are still not as good. New Scissors has a key travel distance of 1mm instead of 1.5mm, and trackpad is too large that causes false positive compare to zero on my MacBook 2015. Was rather hoping Apple to walk back these two thing by the time I get a new MacBook for myself. But looks like not.
Likes it
Probably makes sense, if you're organized enough, to get a battery swap while it's still in coverage if you'll use. My 2015 MacBook had a battery that got swollen a few years ago. Got it replaced and continue to use it as basically a browser and it's perfectly usable.
Likes it
As a counterpoint, I have a 2015 MacBook, a 2015 iMac, and a recent Apple Silicon MacBook. Of course I do Photoshop, Lightroom, Generative AI, etc. on the Apple Silicon system. But I basically don't care which system I browse the web with and, in fact, the iMac is my usual for video calls and a great deal of my web document creation and the like. I suspect that people who have somewhat older Macs (obviously there's some limit) who find their web browsing intolerably slow probably have something else going on with either their install or their network.
Likes it
I tried pretty much everything except the Framework and I have no hope. Personally I'd go for a MacBook and run Linux in a VM because I'm afraid the battery life on Linux won't be good enough. If you can stand the look of Thinkpads they're quite durable. I'd give Framework a chance, albeit I've heard conflicting reviews. Dell, Surface, Lenovo, HP: utter garbage. My current setup is an old MacBook running Mac for travelling and a Linux desktop PC. I used to have a MacBook 2015 running Linux and it was pretty neat, but Linux support is just not there with my current MacBook.