I have a mid 2012 MBP and it is has been running very slow lately. The only demanding applications that I run in my opinopn are Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and my large iTunes library, that's about it. But I can be running Safari with iTunes in the background and it will freeze and I will get the rainbow wheel. I have run virus scans and nothing has popped up. I replaced the RAM last year because one burnt out. Is it time to just get a new laptop and trade this one in? I have attached my specs also. Thank You in advance!
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MacBook Pro Running Very Slow
- Thread starter Sabercat
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You sound like you need an SSD more.
SSD is always the answer to boost a computer's performance by several orders of magnitude.
The exact same thing happened to my wife's 2012 MBP and it was driving me crazy. I'd be willing to bet your data cable to your hard drive is going bad, especially if it is noticeably slower than it was a couple months ago. The locking up randomly to the Pinwheel of death is also a symptom. The harddrive itself is just fine, so the SMART status will be ok, but the cable itself is intermittently dropping data causing all kinds of hiccups and headaches. One way to test is to just unplug and replug the cable onto the hard drive. If it runs noticably faster for a little while, say until you move your MacBook, then it's 100% the cable.
You could do it yourself or have Apple do it. They actually did it for free for me out of warranty, but it's like 70 for parts and labor. Definitely cheaper than a new Mac.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Mid+2012+Hard+Drive+Cable+Replacement/10379
You could do it yourself or have Apple do it. They actually did it for free for me out of warranty, but it's like 70 for parts and labor. Definitely cheaper than a new Mac.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Mid+2012+Hard+Drive+Cable+Replacement/10379
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My sister bought one of these about a year ago and constantly complains about the speed. I'm pretty sure it just needs a SSD and maybe more RAM. I told her to buy the rMBP, but she wanted 500GB storage and didn't want to spend the extra for the 512GB SSD on the retina.