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Laptops · Apple MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro 2012

31owners with an opinion
77%of verdicts positive
19/6positive/negative since 2024
14 yrslongest happy owner
2happy after 3+ years

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

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 14 yearsStill going
I'm typing this on a 2012 MBP with 8Gb of RAM. That seemed like plenty when I bought it, and I did dev work in Xcode on the thing. Granted, it can only run Catalina, but it still gets the job done for what I use it for now. "Now" being web browser and running the Numbers/Pages/Keynote apps, which is about what anyone buying the Neo is going to do with it. After 14 years of service, though, he'll get to retire soon, probably taking it easy running some version of Linux in his old age. Just as soon as that new M5 MBP (with 32Gb this time) shows up tomorrow.
Likes itOwned 13 yearsStill going
My 2012 mbp is still going strong, only needed a new battery. Great keyboard, great screen, great trackpad. The second hand market seems to reflect this in my experience if you look at resale prices vs non-mac equivalents.
Doesn’t like itOwned 7 years
Crunchbang was such a good distro! I ran linux for about seven years. Ubuntu and then Crunchbang. Had my 2012 MacBook Pro dual boot into Crunchbang. Battery life was awful. It had no automatic fan control, so the laptop got so hot I could barely touch it. I ended up writing a bash script to manually control the fans using function keys https://gist.github.com/nwjlyons/b29ee6f7e26595f55a2a As cool as it was, I can't be bothered with any of that these days. Just give me a Macbook Pro, as I know it will work and have amazing battery life!
Doesn’t like itOwned 4 years
I bought the Macbook second hand in 2013 and went into the Apple Store in 2017 when the kernel first panicked. It was a very close cut-off on the "vintage" designation, but I think that's besides the point. If there is a inherent flaw in a computer that can manifest much later on, the company should replace it or offer some sort of compensation. Otherwise, any company can retire a product and escape all responsibility. If you think that's being unreasonable, just search 2012 Macbook Retina kernel panic and you'll see hundreds of threads from 2021 and onward about the issue. Those people paid for a product with a defect that manifested decades later and are now left to hang dry.
Doesn’t like it
I had a 2012 mac book pro that burned out 2 different crucial memory sticks. Would have bricked the machine if it was the soldered-on type, but it was the last model apple sold that have swappable memory. Crucial had a lifetime warranty so they replaced them for free. I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.
Likes it
I gave my wife a 2012 macbook pro running ubuntu. It was a huge upgrade over her ~2014 macbook air running stock, which couldn't even update itself anymore. It never occured to me to consider it might qualify as a "challenge" since it is 14 years old. It just works fantanstically and was my daily driver until 3-4 years ago. I got it off ebay for approximately $100, cleaned it, and put in a new battery.
Neutral
Any advice for finding them other than partaking in whatever premimum drugs eBay sellers smoke to make the prices they are charging for essentially e-waste make sense? God I want to pick up one so bad but $150, $200, $300, hell there's one out there asking $1200! For a computer that was pretty crap when it was new? I absolutely loved the one I used from 2017-2021. It was a maxed out 2017 model in gold. Some bozo director bought it for himself with his budget then quit a month later, so this thing no one really wanted ended up on the spares pile. I grabbed it to replace my 2012 13" MacBook Pro as my "going to town" computer, i.e. the one I'd take when I needed to step away from my desk and my desktop workstation. And whaddya know, the 7Y75 i7 benchmarked about the same as the Ivy Bridge i5 it was replacing. The wedge shape is so undeniably more humanistic and comfortable than the current MacBook Air/Neo slab. 0.14" at its thinnest, rounded at the bottom to make it easier to pick up. An excellent screen. Great trackpad. Full size keyboard, and yes, I liked the butterfly keys! Key travel is dumb! I never had issues with it and I took it into network closets and steam tunnels and ate greasy lunches next to it and all kinds of dusty, dirty places, and never had a key failure. God, what a wonderful portable computer! It was like carrying an empty clipboard around, you'd barely notice it in a stack of papers or notebooks, but open the screen and bam, full-fat macOS! Honestly it was…
Likes it
I have a similar problem. My handicap makes it impossible to use the huge trackpad of all newer MacBooks. I am working still with a 2012 MacBook Pro that had a considerable smaller trackpad. Any idea from you guys how to circumvent these trackpad monsters? Thanks for any suggestion.
Likes it
>the butterfly days I skipped that entire generation, but the modern silicon keyboards are slick. My workshop computer is a 2012 MacBook "Pro" (disabled GPU), which also has fantastic keys. Best Apple keyboard ever has to be the 12" PowerBook G4, but that may just be nostalgic ... ---- My major critique of the Neo is: for its intended market (younger), it should be more durable, not less — why is there no MagSafe power connector? From a computer repair technician's POV, there will be lot$ of U$B port replacement$, due to power supply abusers (have you seen some students' charging cables?!). From manufacturer's POV: if they had MagSafe, they probably wouldn't need separate USB ports (IMHO). It's almost guaranteed that the second revision of this product line will use MagSafe (you own the patent already! ).
Neutral
I stayed on Catalina for a long time as it was the last version my Macbook Pro 2012 supported natively. It is a pretty solid OS, though it is harder to get Apple services running on it now. I personally just use Sonoma now on my Macbook Pro M3 Pro.
Likes it
I had to do this to my 2012 MBP (along with fixing the gpu solder problem) and I found it wasn't that hard to disassemble / reassemble. Also replacing the battery, upgrading the ram/storage was very easy to do. Contrast this to my 2017 MBP which has to score on the top 10 list of worst apple products of all time as far as quality and ease of repair go. Have these new M3/4 MPBs gone back at all to being easy to dismantle or change the battery in? The OP with their M1 mentioned tearing overly thin ribbon cables.
Likes it
I fixed the eGPU disconnecting issue on my 2012 MacBook Pro by placing the entire motherboard inside an oven for 10 minutes (a rather unconventional solution for reballing). So, yes, MacBooks from that era were not as fragile as they are now. By the way, that laptop still works.
Likes it
Yes, macOS/iOS aesthetics reached their peak around 2013-14. Hardware-wise, the story is similar; the 2012 MacBook Pro was the most marvelous piece of hardware I've ever bought. I miss that feeling. No part of me would agree that Apple is a more impressive company today than it was 13 years ago, despite its market cap.
Likes it
I'm actually typing this reply on a 2012 MacBook Pro which is still working pretty well. I've also used several recent MacBook models at work so am familiar with those. Things that I like better about the 2012 MacBook Pro compared to newer models is that it's easier to replace/upgrade items. On my 2012 MacBook Pro I've replaced the original hard drive with a SSD, upgraded the memory, and replaced the failed battery (which shouldn't be unexpected for such an old laptop) which were all fairly simple to do. I also do not like that Apple has completely removed all USB type A ports on the newer MacBooks. USB type A plugs are still very common and I wish Apple left one or two on the newer MacBooks in addition to the USB-C ports. Yes, you can use USB-C to USB type A adapters but it is annoying. I also do not like that Apple has removed the Ethernet and microphone jacks. Both jacks are still useful to have on modern computers. I'll make an exception for removing the Ethernet jack on the MacBook Air to accommodate a thinner chassis but wish the MacBook Pro chassis was kept thick enough to accommodate the Ethernet jack.
Doesn’t like it
Years after AppleCare ended, they replaced literally every part of my 2012 MBP, for free, except the bottom cover (new display, new circuitboard, new battery, new keyboard). Unfortunately, it was replaced with new hardware (identical RoHS solder problem), so it failed again relatively quickly (to crickets from Apple). I didn't buy another Apple laptop until the M3 MacBook Air debuted (what an impressive machine — particularly battery life!). I already know this machine is "disposable" (i.e. delicate), but heat is definitely not going to pop any circuits (like the MBP from a decade+ ago — that thing got HOT).
Likes it
Seems correct. I might not use you average-user-device (iPhone SE 2016) but liked your idea and clicked the link. The page freeze for ~15s for the first load but then refresh only takes ~4s. The animation is smooth if I’m not scrolling the list . Scrolling seems hard to handle as the new items takes 2s to appear. Do you use a virtual table [edit: just read you sibling comment saying you don’t, yet] or heavy JS for styling the list? I usually have no problem scrolling long text lists. Another guess would be the logos size but I’m not in my computer to check it out. For context: I know my device is old but it handles fine most sites that don’t have too many ads, js shenanigans or super heavy assets. Kudos to you, I’m sure my 2012 mbp will handle it fine though :-)
Likes it
My 2012 macbook pro would have still been working today had an unfortunate water damage incident not happen a couple years ago. It was theseuses macbook in a way. Trackpad had been replaced. Microphone replaced. Battery replace. RAM upgraded to 16gb. SSD upgrade. Disk drive swapped out and replaced with hard drive caddy making use of that extra SATAIII. It was no slouch. Sure it was only a dual core but 2.5ghz is plenty for a lot of things and most software doesn’t even make much use of multithreading anyhow. Not anything I’d try and run on that computer at least. It could handle creative suite and that was enough. Older games like TF2 worked great too like 80 or 100fps with a little config wonking. I can’t even get my replacement m3 pro running TF2 that well albeit over wine because valve doesn’t like arm.
Likes it
1) Which version are we talking about? Segfaults were exceedingly rare either way. Especially so when I stopped using raw pointers. But yes, to no one's surprise, early versions were a mess. I can agree with you on that. I can't agree about the same about the last versions though. It was replaced by WebRTC that would sometimes just suddenly disconnect your calls, right. > I managed to improve the situation after weeks of refactoring and testing Did you submit any PRs with your improvements? I used to review and merge those, unlike the Android app devs. 2) It might provide the best UX in the entire universe, but that still doesn't justify having a two-megabyte Java file with over a hundred anonymous inner classes that gaslight you because it's often a `new FrameLayout(activity){` that overrides onLayout and does something completely different. So you see a FrameLayout, you assume it behaves like one, you add views to it, then it doesn't work the way you expect. You start questioning your sanity and only then do you realize that it's one of these stupid things. Oh and did I mention that even just editing ChatActivity.java is an exercise in frustration? At the time, I had a 2012 MacBook Pro that worked fine for everything I did on it, except editing 2-megabyte Java sources in Android Studio. It would sometimes take a solid 10 seconds for keystrokes to register. In other words, it might be the best Android app in the world, but it blows up in your face nearly every time you t…
Likes it
Perhaps, but when the asking price is on the same levels as a mac book pro, i think its fair to compare it against one. Personally i have been using macs since 2012 (windows and ubuntu before that), and can not go back to anything else yet because of the insane quality of the mac hardware. My favourite ones are the 2012 MBP, and then later (what im still using) is the M1 from 2021. For me it boils down to (in order of importance): 1) Keyboard 2) Trackpad 3) Screen 4) Battery life 5) Performance And overall OSX is just a good, solid OS. It never crashes, its fast and is UNIX-y enough for me. My dream setup is a macbook with an 100% linux compatible OS. Something like Asahi Linux. Maybe in 10 years.... one can dream.
Doesn’t like it
Those problems can be really tedious: - Writing a screen saver on Window NT 4. Starting the screen-saver blue-screens the computer. Rebooting + loading Visual Studio takes several minutes. After several days of this, it turned out I forgot to zero out the structure you pass into every Win32 Create function. - Was assigned to modify some old Fortran code (never claimed to know Fortran, just got the assignment) a long time ago. Got weird compile errors, couldn't figure it out, finally just started taking things out of the line until it worked. Found out it failed if I had a line of over 70 characters. What?! Turns out some of those old things of Fortran were still around... - Spent a week tracking down why my C++ code was my crashing, due to a variable magically changing values. I was using Curl, and one of the calls requires a pointer to long and I passed a pointer to int, and the compiler didn't complain. Got so frustrated I ended up stepping through the assembly code to see what was happening (which is how I discovered it). Not fun. (Also, the constant recompiling and dockerizing desoldered the nvidia chip on my 2012 MBP, so this bug cost me a lot of money for a new laptop, too.) - 3D meshing algorithm isn't working. Narrow it down to a small enough mesh to print out vertices before and after in a tractable quantity. Stare at changing outputs long enough to identify the problem. - Emscripten WASM wants to load async, but exported global function uses the WASM to do work and…