Hi everyone,
My girlfriend has MacBook Pro from 2012 which has already been upgraded with more Ram and an SSD.
From what I understand, her OS (Catalina) has reached end of life in 2022 and doesn’t get any support from Apple anymore.
As that machine works perfectly, what should she do?
I hate Apple products (even if it’s painful for me to say that they’re good) and I’m a Linux enthusiast, so I’d tell her to install Fedora Asahi, but I wanted to know if the Apple enthusiast crowd had a better idea.
My girlfriend isn’t geeky at all (despite her geeky glasses) and she would want to stay in the safe environment provided by an Apple OS. But we also don’t want to replace that powerful machine as we hate programmed obsoletism.
10 years of support. Not bad.
Just install Linux on it (if this is what she wants, regardless of if you think it’s better) or find a M1 MacBook Air for 7-800 if she wants a Mac.
I have a 2012 laptop, and upgraded to the M1 Air. Using the old machine is painful now, I didn’t realise how slow it was.
10-11yrs from a laptop is pretty great. I wouldn’t call it planned obsolescence.
Yep I upgrade my SO’s 2012 MBP and my 2012 Mac Mini to the M2 versions and it was amazing how large of a jump it was. I don’t know if I will drag another 10 years out of these machines, I think I probably could but I may sell them off in like 5 years and upgrade if there is something worthy out there.
Would it have been nice for Apple to support them for an extra couple years? Yeah, but I’m sort of happy they forced me to upgrade as I too didn’t realize just how much I was missing.
Keep using it until it no longer serves her needs. Then buy a MacBook Air (evidently not a power user).
Also, what 2012 pc laptop would still be usable in 2023?
I’m writing this on my phone from the toilet.
Before that I was using my 2011 thinkpad x220. Those 2012 MBPs have twice the cores and a usable screen.
Never met anybody that uses a laptop while they crap. Might have to give it a go.
Also, what 2012 pc laptop would still be usable in 2023?
A lot of them, especially if you’re doing a fair comparison and look at Windows laptops that were in the same price bracket as the MBP (though even many cheaper ones will still work).
11 years old
“programmed obsoletism”
Serious question, how old is your laptop?
I have a 2019 Surface Go with Fedora on it and a 2006 Asus with Windows XP on it.
Planning on installing a lightweight Linux on it as it was mainly used for backups (iTunes) of my work iPhone (which I didn’t buy and didn’t choose to have).
But now that I can use my girlfriend’s Mac for that, I don’t need windows anymore. I also have a windows virtual machine in the Surface Go.
I heard about something called Open Core Legacy Patcher the other day which is supposed to allow updates for older macbooks but I have not tried it yet.
I have tried it with a 2012 Retina MacBook Pro and it’s really cool. I installed a recent version of macOS on it so it wasn’t great performance wise (the OS itself ran pretty well but the computer was very warm all the time), but I think you can make it work still.
I’d try Big Sur or Monterey.
Also if you have performance issues, changing the battery can help a lot.
I’m going to disagree with the OCLP people: it’s a fine project, but it’s absolutely horrible to deal with from an end-user perspective because they’ll update something without realizing it’s going to break something, and now you have to deal with someone’s computer not working and get to maintain it.
If you can move to Linux, and she’s happy with that, then great. Though you’d probably want normal Fedora, and not Asahi since it’s not a M1/M2-based Mac.
But it sounds like she wants MacOS and, unless you want to fiddle with something that’s finicky, failure-prone, and not guaranteed to work in the future, just go buy a used/refurbished M1 for like $600, and then not worry about it for the next 5-10 years.
