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Laptops · Apple MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro 2014

11owners with an opinion
57%of verdicts positive
4/2positive/negative since 2024
10 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and durability; criticized for performance.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 10 yearsStill going
> Printing from web browser on a Mac? Completely broken. Doing this more than a decade? Didn't see any brokenness to be honest. > Wanna use your 7 year old Mac to browse the web? Oh wait you can't because the os blocks it. Nope. My 2014 MBP is a happy camper and use it daily at home. No blocks whatsoever. > Linux on desktop has been ready for years now, it absolutely shreds apple and microsofts offerings That's true though. Laptop power management is not there yet, but I prefer Linux over anything else for the last ~15 years or so. I use Mac laptops because I like the hardware and see where another UNIX based OS is. > Mac on the other hand is an absolute nightmare to administer for clients. Same with their phones. I think Apple phones are relatively easy to mass-manage via Apple Configurator, but MDM is a totally different story in macOS. Glad that my machines are not managed.
Doesn’t like it
There might be no reason while the hardware is latest and greatest, but installing a different OS can keep old hardware going for longer. My 2014 Macbook Pro is uncomfortably slow on the last supported MacOS but works perfectly fine when running the latest Fedora.
Neutral
My daily driver is a 2014 MacBook Pro. It's had a few repairs over the years, but in addition to Apple no longer supporting current macOS for it, I'm starting to feel the performance is impacting my work as well. I'm still debating a replacement, but Linux on Ryzen is a leading option. I don't like Apple's recent work with macOS, and while the hardware seems to continue to be excellent, I'm not sure that's enough. I've looked at Framework, Tuxedo, Lenovo ... nothing really looks great though, which is why I haven't made the jump. Yet.
Likes it
My 2014 got a little screwy around 2022 and eventually wifi stopped working entirely (I suspect battery swelling putting pressure on something) but if not for that I'd still be using it. Hell, I probably could have gotten it fixed, though I'd prefer to put that money toward another machine that'll last me 8+ years. I'm on a 2020 [edit: I got it as part of comp for a contracting gig, is why the overlap in years with my 2014 MBP ownership, but didn't switch to using it for personal stuff until after that was over and my MPB wifi broke] M1 Air now, so close to or in year 6 for that. No issues yet and battery life still stellar, should get at least 2-3 more years. (Folks who are like "LOL who even needs 18 hours of battery life?", which is a common sort of post on Apple laptop announcements: well for one thing it's extremely nice to be hunting for outlets even less often, and to maybe go on a whole light-laptop-use 3-day trip and not charge it the whole time and it's still alive at the end of it, or to have that battery as reserve for charging your phone, but also and perhaps most importantly, it means that a 30% degraded battery after several years of ownership still gets you 10+ hours of real-world use)
Likes it
> I wouldn't be surprised that the average upgrade cycle for a lot of folks is in that 3-5 year range, for both personal and corporate buyers. My personal laptop is a 2014 MacBook Pro. I'll be buying one of these new M4 Airs, and comparing to an 11-year-old computer .
Neutral
I switched from a 2014 MacBook pro to a 2020 M1 MacBook Air, yeah the CPU is much faster, but the build quality and software is a huge step backwards. The trackpad is feels fake, not nearly as responsive, keyboard also feel not as solid. But now I'm already used to it.
Doesn’t like it
EDIT: I should point out that, although I don't like MacOS, I ditched Apple-related products first and foremost because of both the hardware itself and the company. Every Apple product I've owned has failed in some spectacular way, and Apple's response is typically something along the lines of "You're SoL dude, you can either recycle it and buy a new product, or you can pay us something close to the value of the device to repair it" (because they solder everything unnecessarily). Framework finally came along and showed that you can have a sleek, elegant (and modular!) design without soldering everything together in the name of reducing weight by 0.01kg or whatever (or making it a hair-width thinner). Most recently, I had a 2019 Macbook Pro ($3K) that would frequently give me a "red screen of death" under load and crap out completely. Before that, a brand new 2018 Macbook Pro I bought (for nearly $3K mind you) became unusable within an hour after taking it out of the box because of the faulty keyboard (several keys either didn't register key presses, or they would turn one key press into multiple occurrences of the same letter). Before that, I had a Thunderbolt Display ($1K) that would fail intermittently, and it took 5 trips to the Apple store before they finally gave me a new one. Before that, I had a 2014 Macbook Pro for which the screen started peeling off -- I had to buy a matte screen protector to even be able to see the screen. I have several more examples as I go back
Neutral
Based on my (admittedly unusual) workloads, the effective charge time of the 2016 is awful. I already only get 4-5 hours out of a 2014 MBP. I bought a 2016 and only managed 3 1/2 hours. Maybe they've improved that with some software fixes, but it's still a non starter. So I returned it. I know I'm not a typical user, but I get much better battery life (with lower productivity) out of my windows laptop. Which was not the case when I switched to Macs years back.