It's crazy how much of the internal footprint used to be taken up by an optical drive!
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Apple Adds Last MacBook Pro With CD Drive to Obsolete Products List
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I have the 15” version and still going strong... A more versatile machine than what they offer now.
The only time the 10 year extended battery replacement option would be a certain "no" is when you're trying to get extra life out of a butterfly MacBook....
The risk of the whole device being rendered useless by a single broken key is beyond ridiculous..
My anxiety levels dropped massively when I got rid of my 2015 MacBook Retina in early 2020... the extreme cost of even a simple repair was just too much.. and it was such a nice device otherwise.
The risk of the whole device being rendered useless by a single broken key is beyond ridiculous..
My anxiety levels dropped massively when I got rid of my 2015 MacBook Retina in early 2020... the extreme cost of even a simple repair was just too much.. and it was such a nice device otherwise.
A little salute for the symbolic end of the “Rip. Mix. Burn.” era that effectively marked the start of the resurgence of the Mac and Apple itself.
Although really, the build-in CD-ROM drive (with caddy!) from the earlier Centris era was central to what made Macs fun and educational—that plastic book full of demo discs that came with a Mac was the source of much entertainment back in my childhood. The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was functionally Wikipedia of the early ‘90s.
It occurs to me that, as a good example of people extrapolating current technology instead of imagining something different in the future, that most sci-fi from the 1990s set in the 2020s featured some fancy advanced version of optical storage instead of what we actually ended up with which is just about everything in the cloud.
Although really, the build-in CD-ROM drive (with caddy!) from the earlier Centris era was central to what made Macs fun and educational—that plastic book full of demo discs that came with a Mac was the source of much entertainment back in my childhood. The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was functionally Wikipedia of the early ‘90s.
It occurs to me that, as a good example of people extrapolating current technology instead of imagining something different in the future, that most sci-fi from the 1990s set in the 2020s featured some fancy advanced version of optical storage instead of what we actually ended up with which is just about everything in the cloud.
Seconding that. I liked mine quite a bit, but had to have the keyboard replaced twice under extended warranty in the 3 or so years I had it.
Apple's internal DVD drives were never very robust - I don't miss them at all. I always ended up needing to use an external drive anyway.
OCLP is required to install Big Sur, without a root patch. Mine is now with Sonoma and working as a web server.
3,1 2008 pro towers and up
Are “obsolete “ yet can hold 32gb ram with 8 slots, retrofit with ssd, gpu with pcie.
Are “obsolete “ yet can hold 32gb ram with 8 slots, retrofit with ssd, gpu with pcie.
No it wasn't.
Simplifying the board was done, and is done to this day, to reduce cost. That is why other makers are now soldering in RAM.
The day of the DIMM is over.
1959 Cadillac collectors car:
It can still get you around town, in high style.
Yet... it really is obsolete.
Show us a computer from that era that can do something as basic for todays standards as sending an email.
Do it.
Hey! I have one of them! And the logic board failed after 2.5 years. Since I bought AppleCare with it, it cost me nothing to get fixed. And I still have it. (gathering dust, replaced by an M2 MacBook Air). I do have a third party external CD/DVD-RW drive (since Apple doesn't make a USB-C Superdrive) that works just fine.
Still have mine. Did the RAM upgrade and a SSD drive - runs like a champ.
False conflation! A 1959 Eldorado is a legendary design and worth serious coin. The 2012 MacBook Pro would fetch you maybe $100 at OWC. And you could buy one from them for $250.
I bought my wife her mid-2012 thirteen-inch MacBook Pro for Christmas in 2012 and it's still going strong. I upgraded the OS from Mojave to Catalina earlier this week. Its hard drive and memory had a makeover a good while back. Meanwhile the original battery continues to provide admirable service. Hugely impressive all round. I think I missed out by not buying myself one, too!
As for CDs and DVDs, I often watch the latter – movies and TV series mainly –via the Apple USB Superdrive and my Mac Mini M2 Pro (and before that via my MacBook Air; even earlier via my white MacBook and its built-in Superdrive). Horses for courses. Or to put it another way: One size doesn't fit all.
As for CDs and DVDs, I often watch the latter – movies and TV series mainly –via the Apple USB Superdrive and my Mac Mini M2 Pro (and before that via my MacBook Air; even earlier via my white MacBook and its built-in Superdrive). Horses for courses. Or to put it another way: One size doesn't fit all.
On laptops. On desktops the need for small size, light weight, and minimal power consumption is not there. Multiple slots for DiMMs are still useful and available, as are SATA ports, NVME connections, and even PCI-e slots.
Even if you want a small desktop you can have one with upgradeable memory and NVME slots.
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It also has more USB ports than the Mini.
The base mini is really only useful in a stereo cabinet, and even then I have to add an IR remote to it. Why Apple dropped that I don't know. Were they trying to force you into an Apple TV with no storage so you must stream everything (and pay them?) Probably.
Too bad, as it was a pretty popular model when it was on the market. We still often get a bunch of them at the electronics recycling/reselling company I work for, and I would put freshly-wiped and imaged hard drives into them and 8 GB of RAM.
I love the modular layout inside them; you simply unscrew the bottom panel allowing easy access to the logic board, RAM, HDD/SSD, SuperDrive and battery.
Nowadays that MacBook Pro can still be useful for making DVDs with, even using now-discontinued Mac DVD authoring applications like Apple's iDVD and DVD Studio Pro or Adobe's Encore. My 13" unibody Pro here even has a 2.9 i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD running Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan for a throwback, with the aforementioned DVD apps installed...
iMovie HD 6...
Final Cut Express...
...and an older version of Carbon Copy Cloner for wiping and cloning older Mac OS system installations onto bigger drives.
I love the modular layout inside them; you simply unscrew the bottom panel allowing easy access to the logic board, RAM, HDD/SSD, SuperDrive and battery.
Nowadays that MacBook Pro can still be useful for making DVDs with, even using now-discontinued Mac DVD authoring applications like Apple's iDVD and DVD Studio Pro or Adobe's Encore. My 13" unibody Pro here even has a 2.9 i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD running Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan for a throwback, with the aforementioned DVD apps installed...
iMovie HD 6...
Final Cut Express...
...and an older version of Carbon Copy Cloner for wiping and cloning older Mac OS system installations onto bigger drives.
Split Apple hardware and software divisions. Like government once threatened to do with Microsoft's OS and application divisions. I'm sure there are plenty of users who would happily pay for OS updates on older machines to keep them safe. And a software business would be happy to accept the money.
That's a pretty good one, but the best was the FireWire PowerBook G3. Hot-swappable capable battery, could have a CD drive, a floppy drive, a Zip drive, or a few other 3rd party things you could put in those bays. You could even upgrade the processor card.
It was one of the best designed products Apple has ever released, the TiBook was a terrible replacement.
It's really kinda surprising, when you consider the power and speed increases over the last decade, and how we think of those increases as meaning exponential increases in performance. If you don't think too hard about it, it seems like one of these machines from 2012 must have been about as powerful as a wristwatch and should barely have been able to even run much less run anything intensive. And then you fire one up, and launch Logic, open some old project, and there it goes, doing the job just fine without a hiccup. And it's a practically worthless throwaway computer.
A big part of it seems to be that the farther back you go running older OSes, the more they couldn't afford to be so cavalier consuming hardware resources with a million background services.
A big part of it seems to be that the farther back you go running older OSes, the more they couldn't afford to be so cavalier consuming hardware resources with a million background services.
Great machine. Had everything including upgradable parts. The screen yes it was small but was very unique. Severed me well for 10 years but recently it stopped working.
I didn't have any trouble with mine, but OMG the SOUND...
Not a drive you could eject a disc from without getting some attention.
