Apple MacBook Pro Retina

My Retina MacBook Pro lasted over a decade, that's 200$ a year plus $50 battery replacement and $8 speaker. It still runs fine. Macs are an absurd value/quality for money. If M series Macs run this well, no one else comes even close.

I have a 2014 Macbook Pro Retina which I bought refurbished in 2015. Using it since then and made millions in revenue (for my business, not personal to be specific).

Well, like so many people, I've not given much thought to what I'll do if my laptop "pops", because I've had this one for 8 years now, and it's been pretty solid all that time. Presumably if it blew up tomorrow I'd use my phone to pick up a used laptop of some kind and restore from backup. Right now that's an MBPr. In future I hope my FreeBSD Framework. As for sharing, I believe I can run what I need to be productive under FreeBSD. But time will tell. (It would be nice if a FreeBSD guru would volunteer to baby the Framework crowd with a guide. I would click the paypal donate button.)

Mid-2012 Retina MBP, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 2.3Ghz Quadcore i7. I just ordered a new 500GB SSD for it and need to get some new rubber feet. Software development, mail, browsing. I also have a SFF desktop (similar specs) from about 2015 that I upgraded the GPU and storage in recently. Lastly, we're about to resurrect my wifes 2008 (2.1Ghz Core2Duo) white Macbook with by upgrading to 4GB RAM and a new 250GB SSD that will sport a fresh Solus-Mate install when the parts get here. She'll use it for browsing mostly.

I'm still on my Retina Macbook Pro late 2012, so not really...

I think that you keep apple products longer than others, I kept my mbp retine 2013 till 2 years ago, iphones I change every 4 years or so (but they support for 5 years the mobile devices iirc), I bought in 10 years 2 apple tvs, while with google you can’t keep your device more than 2/3 years because of updates, most cheap laptops are thrown in a year or two. So I disagree with you, apple isn’t generating that much waste, but indeed they could generate less by opening the unsupported devices to install alternative OSes.

Guess we’re sharing how our Macbooks do I got a rMBP 2012, used it daily for work for 7 years - never had any issues. Got a MBP 15” 2019, used it for 2 years so far - no issues. Got a MBA M1 day 1 - no issues so far.

I used that same model for 5 years until I finally upgraded in 2017 and totally regretted it, the upgrade was not worth it at all, I would have been just as happy with the 2012. I quickly replaced it again with the "Mea Culpa" 2019 where they added back in ports, etc, would have been just about worth the upgrade over the 2012, 7 years later, but again, not by a big margin. The 2012 MBP 15" Retina was probably the only machine I bought where the performance actually got better over the years, as the OS got more optimized for it (the early OS revisions had very slow graphics drivers dealing with the retina display) The M1 Pro on the other hand, that was a true upgrade. Just a completely different experience to any Apple Intel laptop.

I'll be sticking with my 2015 Macbook Pro Retina 13". Great machine, not too thin, heavy enough, no stupid touch screen, usb ports, great keyboard. Everything apple has done since hasn't compared.

I had keys go bad twice on my 2017 MBP, but both times I've managed to "massage" them back to life by pressing down hard and wiggling the keys around. My previous laptop, the original 2012 MBP Retina, lasted 5 years. I have my doubts this one is built as robustly... That said I actually enjoy typing on this keyboard. The short travel and sharp, stable clickiness has lowered my typing error rate and makes it feel like I'm typing faster. I was never a good typist though.

The 2013 15" Retina Macbook Pro Got it to upgrade from a 2008 15" Macbook Pro in 2013, and it's still running like a champ. I only really upgrade my laptops every five years and it looks like it will easily beat that. I even have it encrypted with FileVault and there's absolutely no slowness with development. I even use it to use Remote Play for my PS4, really nice way to game when I'm not at my house. The only real issue is that I wish I would have splurged on the SSD. For me, 512GB doesn't cut it with the amount of projects and repositories I have on my built in SSD, and this includes my extensive prog rock music collection. It's not lightweight though, ~5 lbs in your backpack does add strain to your shoulders if you walk around with it. The battery is sufficient for me at around 4 hours of use with medium to full brightness, enough, at least, so I don't /need/ to take my charger in to work.

So this happened to me. My 2012 retina MacBook Pro battery was dying. Which makes sense, I used it every day for over four years. I figured I could take it to Apple for a battery replacement. They said they would do it — for $900. They told me it involved replacing the entire bottom half of the computer as the battery was glued in. So I called their support line and complained that the laptop was perfectly fine and it shouldn't cost that much to replace a battery. They ended up replacing it for free, as well as the screen (because they identified that the anti-reflective coating was starting to wear). So while the policy was ridiculous, the actual outcome was very positive.

Something weird is going on, my friend. I have been using a 2012 rMBP 15" w/only 8GB of RAM (ordered the day they were announced before we found out the RAM was not upgradeable, whoops) every day, 10 hours+ a day and never have any problems. The only time my fans kick on is when you'd expect; when I'm doing heavy load tasks like playing a game or doing anything using Adobe Flash. I can stream HTML5 video full screen for hours and the fans never become audible. I can run Xcode for hours and as long as my app isn't being a CPU hog, everything's kosher. So, something is wrong with your machine. The OS X reinstall failing to resolve the issue points away from malware, and towards an environmental or hardware issue. If your machine is only a few months old Apple will take a look at it for free, I'd consider that option to rule out any hardware issues if you can't think of any obvious environmental causes (Do you smoke? High temperature in your working area(s)? etc.)

This idea that laptops should be tinker able is just so weird to me. No laptop is really tinker able. The best you can do is replace RAM and HDD. Motherboards, battery modules, etc. are all proprietary in these things and usually anything beyond those three is non-trivial to replace. Call me crazy but I'd rather just have a machine that's specced right out of the box, and with a battery module that I never need to replace. My 2012 15" Retina MacBook is still going strong over 3.5 years later. Not only that but the machine has been a pleasure to use every day. It's true there should be alternatives to Apple products out there that are similar build quality, but I have yet to find them. Some of my coworkers are hard line anti-Apple and their laptops are all really poorly made, IMHO.

I ran Linux on the desktop for 19 years, running many years with all the big ones, from Slackware to RedHat to SuSE to Gentoo to Ubuntu. Except for gaming, it was my main OS at work and home for about 15 of those years. I even worked 4 years at a place that used Gentoo for all the mission critical stuff, for a person who was a prolific contributor. I finally switched to a MBPr about 3 years ago, and have never been happier. Except that the hardware prospects seem dim. So I've been contemplating moving back. The problem is that the great battery life, flawless suspend and resume, and reliable external display handling of the MBP have forever spoiled me. For a couple years, I used Gentoo on a Dell laptop, and it was very touchy about how I shutdown and suspended, lest it get stuck, and need to have the battery removed to reset it. At one point, in dealing with Xconfig, I even fried the video card (which Dell covered under warranty). When I read stories, like this one, about people running Linux on a laptop, I'm very careful to note the points they make about these things, but nothing I've read makes me think that any available Linux install is going to do well handling these things out of the box, and I'm just tired of tweaking kernel settings and config files to make them work. If someone could say that some particular laptop works perfectly with some particular distro of Linux, I'd probably give it another go. I really hold out hope for Dell's XPS Linux machine, but I read th

I built a desktop with a quad core i5, 16gb ram, a GTX970, an Intel SSD, and around 2tb of spinning disk storage. The whole build cost around $700 and it's a very fast machine. I also have 2x 1440p 25" monitors, a mechanical keyboard, and recently added a (normal looking) gaming mouse. I use it primarily for programming/research and occasionally games/oculus rift. Also makes a great web server. I run Ubunutu, with i3 window manager. I really like this combo after some personalization. It's very stable, and lightweight. I also have two Windows versions and a secondary Linux installation which come in handy. I also have a 2013 15" rMBP of which I think very highly. I can mount my 2tb of desktop storage, and my SSD as a network drive on the MacBook for sharing files. I also use SSH to run intensive scripts (sometimes GPU stuff) on the desktop. 10/10 would recommend this setup

In 2012, I switched away from using Windows all my life and purchased a Macbook Pro Retina (which was expensive considering I had just finished my undergrad). The one factor that prompted the switch? The display. I've always been a sucker for high quality screens, and even before I saw what a high DPI screen looked like, I knew I couldn't stand the low-res 1680x1050 monitor I was working on. I'm frustrated that it's almost 2016 and there still aren't any good desktop monitors available for a reasonable price. My MBP is nice, but I like having lots of screen real estate while programming, so I either set the font to 8 px and squint, or I hook my laptop up to an iMac and try to ignore the pixelation. Neither is a good solution, and 4K displays still look kind of pixely to me, so I'm not going to buy one of those. The 5K options, as mentioned in the article, include the one that Dell sells or the iMac 5K, but the Dell is expensive for just a monitor and the iMac's CPU/etc. will quickly become obsolete. The problem is the amount of bandwidth current generation display cables are capable of handling (HDMI, DisplayPort, etc.), and if I remember correctly, I think the few 5K displays that exist have to kind of hack together a solution — one cable is not sufficient. As soon as I can get a nice 27" or 30" 5K IPS display for a reasonable price (preferably OLED with a wide color gamut if I'm dreaming), then I'll be set for years to come.

I was burning through lots of Apple laptops for the last ~10 years. Finally, when I started my own startup (and was doing heavy consulting in the beginning) I decided to take all the spare capital I had and invest in a "top of the line" Macbook Pro. I got a deal through a third party apple reseller and still paid around $2300. This was late 2012 and I am still typing on it today with no desire to upgrade. 3 years on one machine is an eternity from me. I got the 512 SSD so I could run multiple OS's and not worry about still having room for any media I might want. I still have ~80gb free with all my mp3's and VM's. 16GB of ram and a retina display as well. I get the "apple hate". I really do. I have 3 laptops total in my life (Chromebook Pixel and Debian HP Stream 11 which serve very different purposes) and I still feel that the OSX is the best Unix based operating system for productivity in my market (startup/web development). Maybe when Linux display tools wrap their head around high dpi displays, my opinion will change (Chromebook Pixel handles it very well so it must be coming!) but I really urge anyone who says "I personally will not buy anything from Apple" to reconsider why they're saying that. Even Microsoft is making some pretty awesome choices these days, so I for one would never rule out the possibility of someone woo-ing me. ..a brief aside on the price... if I bought this for $2300 in December 2012, then I used it for all of 2013, 2014 and 5 months in 2015. 29 mo