Well, can you really upgrade? Because I don’t think so. This twelve-year-old Macbook Pro is my first Apple computer, and there are times when I am thinking of possibly getting a newer machine, but will it be worth it? Will that MacBook Pro run also for the next 10-ish years? I do have my doubts. Fun fact: I bought this Apple machine for 800 Ls (Latvian lats), huge money for me, worth every “santims”.
What can I say about this computer? Yes, the battery is old and has not been changed, so working without a wire is usually no longer than for 30 to 40 minutes. Recently the Macbook has started discharging even when connected to a wire, if you don’t notice the battery being drained and don’t unplug/plug then you end up stressing about why your Mac just switched off and is not turning back on. 2 GB of RAM, I was thinking of upgrading it at some point in time, but still have not done so. Maybe I will. The only piece of hardware that is changed is of course the storage drive. Initially, it had an HDD, but a couple of years ago I changed it to an SSD. That is it. That was the only time when this computer had seen a repair shop (or even been opened up).
Currently, I own an Apple iPhone 13 mini, but before it, I had an iPhone 7. A nice phone, but I had to change it three times because all the previous phones broke down. And from what I read and see about the newest Macbooks then the issue of reliability is quite pressing. Therefore I don’t know what to do. Maybe just get a new iPad Pro? That could also be a solution since the newest iPads (the Pro for that matter) can easily be run as workstations, you can connect one to an external monitor, add a keyboard and you are good to go.
Should I upgrade? Or maybe I should switch to a powerful Windows laptop? But I like the Apple ecosystem, and I would like to learn the Swift programming language (my current Macbook does not support XCode or Swift playground). At the time of writing, I have not found a solution on how to learn iOS development without a newer machine. Maybe skip Swift and take on a different beast, C++ probably, or C#? Seems daunting to say the least. I don’t really feel as a programmer and learning French currently is much more important, but then again programming languages are languages of the future and more universally spoken.
I do not know. It is tempting to have a new powerful machine with an M2 chip, but do I really need it? Currently, I use my old machine almost mainly to watch YouTube and Netflix, browse the internet, and create this blog. I have an old Windows machine as well, but luckily it is not that old that I could not install MS Office 365 and run Office applications. So if and when I need to prepare a complex document, I run it. To be fair I have a legal MS Office for Mac version as well, but running a spreadsheet or doing something on Word usually makes my Macbook go supersonic.
Will see. It would be cool if you could go to an Apple Store, hand over your old Apple devices, and get a 25% discount on a new Apple gadget. Then I would seriously consider getting a new Macbook Pro, even though for my needs probably a new Macbook Air would be enough, since I am not planning on dipping my toes in the photo/video editing world. But then again… You may never know.
Christmas is slowly coming. A new laptop would be a nice gift to me. Also, I am really tempted on trying to upgrade my old Apple Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a new battery, so I just to see what happens and how will it feel after.
Could be a nice blog post, don’t you agree?
Kind regards,
Olaaf
Update: It turns out that in Belgium (don’t know if in Latvia as well) you can hand over your old Apple devices and Apple will give you a small (50EUR to 160 EUR) discount on your next Apple purchase. The discount amounts depends on the device(-s) you give back to Apple.
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