Apple MacBook Pro Late 2013

I standardized on 16gb for my laptops over 10 years ago. I keep a late 2013 MBP with 16 for testing projects on, separate from my main Linux box. Getting an extra five years of longevity (after RAM became fixed) for an extra 10% was a no-brainer imho.

I'm still using a Macbook Pro from late 2013 as my daily driver for work as a software developer and other things. Using it now to read HN. That's over 10 years of use, every day including weekends. It's been great. I bought it when two non-Apple laptops failed on me within weeks of each other. A Fujitsu-Siemens which was also great until then, and a Compaq. The Mac's 16GB RAM is bit tight these days but that's mostly due to memory used by Firefox with my many tabs. The 512GB SSD has been annoying for a long time as I filled it up fairly quickly, and rarely find the time to clean things up. When I bought it, I thought I'd be able to upgrade the SSD capacity a few years later at third-party prices, much lower than Apple's prices. But it turned out to be a non-standard interface with expensive upgrades, and I didn't end up upgrading, just living with it. A few keys are getting a bit unreliable, but not enough to make is unusable. The battery is still going surprisingly well after over 10 years of daily, intensive use, a lot of it on battery. It's down to 55% of design capacity. I think that's excellent compared with what I saw with the non-Apple laptops before, where I bought a number of third party batteries to carry around with me and swap, and they deteriorated faster. However the battery flakes out occasionally when the system is under load now. I'm getting the battery replaced by Apple in a few weeks, at their standard battery repair fee (which is reasonable), a…

It's great. It's complicated. I have a MacBook Pro Late 2013 – very old. NixOS runs totally great! Even the proprietary hardware just works, with the nixos-hardware channel. Battery life is awesome, 4 hours of office work. There is a snag however: Drivers for the built-in Broadcom Wi-Fi card are unmaintained and bug-ridden. Replacements do not exist either. The driver doesn't work most of the time nowadays and I have to rely on a USB Wi-Fi adapter that is sooo slow. Maybe more recent Wi-Fi chipsets in Intel Macs are better off. Or maybe you don't need Wi-Fi!

Is this a design detail that has changed over time? I have a MacBook Pro Late 2013 and the top edges on the body are not sharp at all. They are already rounded down, with maybe 0.5 mm radius. It's very subtle. I find that the edges are rather pleasant to the touch.

Well "use it" is a bit of a stretch. I’m a bit of a device hoarder. It's one of my experimentation platforms for Linux stuff, currently running Fedora Kinoite (with Universal Blue). My daily driver (of sorts, don’t really need a laptop anymore) is a MacBook Pro Late 2013, with NixOS. It’s so much better in every regard, it’s not even funny. It also still has its original battery.

I have a Late 2013 MBP still going strong. Original battery, original charger, no repairs whatsoever, hours of battery life still. Wife stopped using it just two months ago when I upgraded her to my M1 Air.