Apple MacBook Pro 2015

The last desktop I built was in 2011. I built an absolute monster at the time. I ultimately repaired it and gave it away to someone else when I moved 2ish years ago (at ~11 years of age) and it is continuing to function as it was for that person. Last I discussed with them (a few months back) they're still successfully running everything they need on it. That said, I enjoy the hardware improvements happening, because it allowed me to go from that huge full tower desktop with multiple GPUs and water cooling to doing everything I need in my life, pretty much, from a 14" M1 Max Macbook Pro. I replaced a huge, power-hungry device, with something that's tiny, portable, and can be powered off USB. For me, I am not quite ready to replace my M1 Max MBP with an M4, but I am likely going to bump to an M5, simply for performance when editing photos in Lightroom / DxO Photo Lab, but that's more of a recent requirement. Before I got this M1 Max MBP, I had a 2015 15" MBP that worked just fine for 7 years, and would have kept going if it didn't have a bulging battery and I decided to upgrade rather than repair it. I may just stick to my M1 Max MBP in the end, I can be patient.

I used a 2015 MacBook Pro up until 2021 when I replaced it with its M1 successor, the 2015 MacBook went to a sibling where it's still their main machine. Apparently it works fine, a little slow but perfectly usable for decade old hardware. I'm in a similar position to you OS-wise, I still use my Mac for things I specifically need macOS for but my main OS is definitively Linux these days. I use Kubuntu at work and CachyOS at home, needing a machine with a decent GPU for some of my projects got me back into PC gaming after a decade or so and gaming on Linux is actually good now which surprised me. People meme about the year of the Linux desktop but modern KDE is legitimately really good and certainly the least annoying UX out of the major desktop OS environments in my opinion.

I've been using a 2015 macbook pro for 6 years or more now. Still works great, to be honest it works so well I actually can't justify upgrading to a framework laptop running Linux. Maybe when Apple abandons it for macOS upgrades in a year or two I'll give up on it.

Anecdote: I bought my MBP 2015 model 15 inch in 2016. It’s my only laptop and still works like the first time (battery cycle: around 600/1000). Zero problems. Still on Catalina, though. I removed like half of the stock software that came with it (e.g., Garage band). Having said this, I’m looking forward to the new MBP model coming this year.

Similar experience. In active use in my house: 2012 MacBook Pro 2015 MacBook Pro 2019 MacBook Air 2020 M1 MacBook Pro The longevity is incredible.

I use a 2015 MacBook Pro all the time--like right now. It does have 16GB of memory. It's what sits on my dining room table where I do most of my writing/browsing and which I take for travel. I do have an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro in my office but my downstairs "office" is a lot lighter and airier.

For a while when I bought new computer (recently Intel NUC), I'd just keep the Windows installed there in case I needed it and I'd dualboot into Linux. More recently I just reflash the whole ssd with Debian and I haven't looked back. Interestingly enough I also have older Macbook Pro from 2015 that I also installed clean Debian on and it's been working amazingly well too. The only thing that would need any patching is the camera, but I don't use it. Everything else worked out of the box - keyboard backlight with nice UI controls in GNOME, LCD brightness, sound, bluetooth, etc.

I avoided the entire butterfly keyboard/touch bar Macbooks by buying an older model (2015 MacBook pro, the last one with scissor switch until 2020) and not upgrading until M series. That turned out to be a good decision.

Not the whole story. As an example I just got a new scanner. It's almost twice as fast as the ten year old scanner it replaced. Or I got a computer with a larger hard drive. Less mental overhead in managing files. I loaded my macbook pro from 2015 recently and it runs great (though past security updates). But the fans spin, as they did in 2015 as well. Newer Apple Silicon blow it out of the water, including on say video editing or other areas where bloat isn't the issue. There's a lot of genuine technical improvements in ten years that aren't just keeping up with bloat. These are prosumer use cases above but the same sort of thing applies to corporate systems.

Not Asahi but I recently revived a 10-year-old MacBook Pro (MBP 2015) that had been sitting in my closet for many years by installing Fedora on it. To my surprise, it's fast and sleek, just like a brand new computer. All of the drivers worked! The laptop now serves as a desktop when I'm at home and as an SSH server when I'm at work. And my 5-year-old M1 MacBook is now sitting in the closet, waiting for its turn in the next 10 years.

It took me two weeks of farting about with Rectangle, alttab, hammerspoon and karabiner to make MacOS not give me face cancer every time I had to use it. I still kinda hate it because I can't get keyboard shortcuts to just fucking work. On the work MacBook I use the mouse more than I'd like because I can't reliably do stuff that I have done fluidly on windows and Linux for decades, mostly around keyboard cursor control, selection, jumping in blocks of words and paragraphs, sane use of home / end, page up/down etc. Just when I think I have it cracked, I try to select the next two words, or from cursor to end of line, and it's like "no sir, in this fucking app it does something completely different, good luck finding out why it how to fix it" I agree about the hardware though. Since the early 2010s MacBook Pro has been the best hardware. Before the M series I had a MBP13 2015, and in fact, it's still the "kitchen laptop", running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

I find similarly annoying issues with Mac software and hardware. Exporting all your keychain settings can't be done as a bulk export last time I tried; it kept prompting my password for every entry using the `security` cli tool. I had a fusion drive iMac at my workplace and it was a horrid experience, and similarly I've had butterfly keyboard Macbooks were pretty unusable (I gave up on work laptops and just use my 2015 Macbook Pro) etc. But I find the competitors in shambles. The hardware for virtually all PC laptops is pretty horrible. Software and UX have their own issues etc. What keeps me on the Mac is Apple dedication to accessible technologies and having a *nix base, and for the most part they've been pretty consistent with that offering.

I feel there's a cliff drop of quality in both hardware and software with the release of Big Sur, the version where I believe they rewrote a lot of the softwares. It's very obvious when I replaced my 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2020 MacBook Pro M1, everything downgraded, but now I'm getting used to software being clunky and buggy. I always really liked a lot of apple software, like Preview.app. It's a viewer for almost everything, images, documents, 3d models, but it doesn't feel bloat at all, I'm glad Apple doesn't seem to change the app much. Also shocked the first time I found out TextEdit.app is also a WYSIWYG HTML editor.

What are computer standards actually? I have two macbook pros from 2015 running still, perfectly fine for regular "computer" usage (non-development).

I had the 2015 MBP and I held onto it until the M1 came out…I still have it and tbh it’s still kind of a great laptop. The two best laptops of the past decade for sure.

If it's a M1 Macbook Air there's a very good reason you've never heard a fan! Blows my mind how it doesn't even have a fan and is still rarely even anything above body temperature. My 2015 MBP was still going strong for work when I bailed on it late last year but the transition purely on the heat/sound emitted has been colossal.

I still have my 2015, and it lived just long enough to keep me going until the death of the touch bar and horrible keyboard, which went away when I immediately bought the M1 Pro on release day.

I loved my 2015 MBP, probably the best machine Apple made, overall, until arguably the 2019 16" (read: after the butterfly keyboard debacle) Traded it for an M1 Air in 2021 and was astonished at how much faster it was. It even blew away my 2019 16" from work. You're going to be even more blown away!

I loved my 2015 MBP too. I recently replaced it with a used MBA M1, 16GB, 2TB. It's insane how much faster it is, how long the battery lasts and how cool and silent it is. Completely different worlds.

I have a 2015 Macbook pro and an iphone 11 that works great save for that they don't hold a charge. I would happily spend a several hundreds dollars to save these and continue to use them, or give one to my parents or kid, but I can't find someone who will do a battery replacement. I live in Austin TX and have called 3-5 different apple repair shops. If I can't find someone to do it in a city with the second largest Apple office in the world, I don't think anyone else will be able to.

I don't recommend it unless you're doing it for its own sake. My 2015 Pro runs much smoother (better performance, less hot) with macOS. You can run these services on macOS too. The setup wasn't fiddly at all. I had to fiddle much more with ordinary PC laptops. Any distro should be mostly fine - Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch...