I'm really jonesing for an M1 MacBook Air, but just don't have the funds and my Mac Pro is doing everything I need. So to scratch the laptop itch, and in honor of the computer's 10th birthday, I dug out my old early-2011 13" i5 MacBook Pro that I've had since it was new.
Having already replaced the battery in it last year, I refreshed the rest of it by taking it almost completely apart, tightening the screen hinge, blowing the dust out, redoing the thermal paste on the CPU, cleaning the screen, cleaning the crud off the keyboard and trackpad and cleaning all the stickers and residue off the lid.
Does it scratch the new laptop itch? Actually, kind of yeah now that it's all shiny and tight and running cool again. The display still looks pretty decent minus some odd light spots from wear, and it looks even better now that it's clean.
I remember getting real close to the advertised 7 hours of battery when it was new, and even now on High Sierra with the addition of all the iCloud stuff I can still get 5 hours of usual use out of it, and squeeze out 7 if I'm only doing document editing.
It's still plenty snappy thanks to the SSD and extra RAM I installed about six years ago. Web browsing is just fine, if a little more battery hungry than it used to be. The only sites that really bog it down are Facebook and YouTube (which bog down my Mac Pro even). Videos play fine though and it streams from all major media providers without a hiccup.
Reliability wise, absolutely everything still works. Optical drive, headphone jack, all the keys, not a single issue (other than the original battery failing last summer, but that's a given). This laptop has been the single most reliable piece of hardware I've ever owned.
Thank you, MacBook Pro, for getting through two college degrees, endless hours of 90s games and Call of Duty 4, and still being pretty cool and completely usable even though you're ten years old.
Having already replaced the battery in it last year, I refreshed the rest of it by taking it almost completely apart, tightening the screen hinge, blowing the dust out, redoing the thermal paste on the CPU, cleaning the screen, cleaning the crud off the keyboard and trackpad and cleaning all the stickers and residue off the lid.
Does it scratch the new laptop itch? Actually, kind of yeah now that it's all shiny and tight and running cool again. The display still looks pretty decent minus some odd light spots from wear, and it looks even better now that it's clean.
I remember getting real close to the advertised 7 hours of battery when it was new, and even now on High Sierra with the addition of all the iCloud stuff I can still get 5 hours of usual use out of it, and squeeze out 7 if I'm only doing document editing.
It's still plenty snappy thanks to the SSD and extra RAM I installed about six years ago. Web browsing is just fine, if a little more battery hungry than it used to be. The only sites that really bog it down are Facebook and YouTube (which bog down my Mac Pro even). Videos play fine though and it streams from all major media providers without a hiccup.
Reliability wise, absolutely everything still works. Optical drive, headphone jack, all the keys, not a single issue (other than the original battery failing last summer, but that's a given). This laptop has been the single most reliable piece of hardware I've ever owned.
Thank you, MacBook Pro, for getting through two college degrees, endless hours of 90s games and Call of Duty 4, and still being pretty cool and completely usable even though you're ten years old.
