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Laptops · Apple MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro 2020 Intel

9owners with an opinion
38%of verdicts positive
2/3positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

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

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it
The icons in the menu bars are rough, the spacing isn’t great and the inconsistent window borders aren’t great. I’m not that opinionated though - I don’t really care that much. But the part that sucked was installing it on a 2020 intel MacBook Pro. It basically made it unusable to the point of being ready to throw it out. Going back from Tahoe breathed so much life into it that it was fairly upsetting to see Apple release it. It reminded me of early iPhone updates that would basically brick older devices due to the performance impact.
Likes it
It really is a very simple setup. I basically had an old Intel based Mac mini from 2020. The intel chip inside it is from 2018). It's a 3 GHz 6-core Core i5. I had upgraded the ram on it to 32 GB when I bought it. However, the ollama only uses about 5.5 gigs of it. So it can be run on 16gb Mac too. The Qwen model I am using is fairly small but does the job I need it to for classifying headlines pretty decently. All I ask it to do is whether a specific headline is political or not. It only responds to me with in True or False. I access this model from an app (running locally) using the `http://localhost:11434/api/generate` REST api with `think` set to false. Note that this qwen model is a `thinking` model. So disabling it is important. Otherwise it takes very long to respond. Note that I tested this on my newer M4 Mac mini too and there, the performance is a LOT faster. Also, on my new M4 Mac, I originally tried using the Apple's built in Foundation Models for this task and while it was decent, many times, it was hitting Apple's guardrails and refusing to respond because it claimed the headline was too sensitive. So I switched to the Qwen model which didn't have this problem. Note that while this does the job I need it to, as another comment said, it won't be much help for things like coding.
Doesn’t like it
Tetr.io looks great but all the visual flair makes my laptop's fans go crazy and adds small but noticeable amounts of latency to the game. Sure, my 2020 Intel Macbook Air is a bit pokey compared to the newest models, but shouldn't a 3 year old computer be more than enough to play 40 year old game?
Neutral
While screens of earlier MacBooks could be turned off with a single magnet, my 2020 Intel MBP requires both the left and the right sensor (around the tab and the enter key) to trigger at the same time to consider it closed. It would be nearly impossible to trigger that accidentally. For starters, you'd need to wear two watches..
Likes it
I've used Ollama to run Llama 2 (all variants) on my 2020 Intel MacBook Pro - it's incredibly easy. You just install the app and run a couple of shell commands. I'm guessing soon-ish this model will be available too and then you'd be able to use it with the Continue VS Code extension. Edited to add: Though somewhat slow, swap seems to have been a good enough replacement for not having the loads of RAM required. Ollama says "32 GB to run the 13B models", but I'm running the llama2:13b model on a 16 GB MBP.