Apple Adds Last MacBook Pro With CD Drive to Obsolete Products List

This is my wife's exact computer, she has an i7 model. We got it used to upgrade from a core2duo MBP. I put 16gb and an SSD inside and it's been rock solid.

My laptop is even older, a 2011 13". I added 16gb ram, an SSD, a blu ray drive, and the wifi module from a 2012. Oh, and a new battery. Rocking Linux on mine though as the i5 and iGPU really hold it back after El Capitan.
 
SuperCachetes said:
What strikes me most about it, 3 MBAs and an rMBP later, is that 4.7 lbs is A LOT. Those original unibodies were tanks.
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yeah… I got a 2014 MBA shortly after the 2012 MBP and the difference in size and weight between those was something 😂

The only thing I really, really didn’t like about that MBP was the 1280x800 screen.
 
blazerunner said:
That was the last truly upgradeable laptop. Soldering the RAM to the motherboard after that was a giant middle finger to the consumer and force them to buy whole new laptops instead of a simple small upgrade. You just can't respect Apple for that... their 'environmentally friendly' claims are complete garbage.

That said, pro-consumer policies don't concern Apple which is why they're now worth 3 trillion dollars... by ripping off consumers. Nice.
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I still have my MBP 2015 to this day. After upgrading the SSD a few years back, the machine got a new lease in productive life. For a company that boast so much about the environment, not allowing RAM and HD upgrades are the hypocrisy at its best.
 
blazerunner said:
That was the last truly upgradeable laptop. Soldering the RAM to the motherboard after that was a giant middle finger to the consumer and force them to buy whole new laptops instead of a simple small upgrade. You just can't respect Apple for that... their 'environmentally friendly' claims are complete garbage.

That said, pro-consumer policies don't concern Apple which is why they're now worth 3 trillion dollars... by ripping off consumers. Nice.
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Well said, @blazerunner .

Tim Cook doesn't care about consumers. He cares about shareholders.

Soldered RAM and soldered SSDs are very anti-consumer.

Steve Jobs was a jerk to some of his family members, employees, and business associates, but at least he was pro-consumer. Under Jobs, Apple had some of the highest profit margins in the industry, which was not great for consumers, but at least the products he sold offered consumers a lot of value in terms of functionality. What makes Cook so awful is that he raised those profit margins substantially while simultaneously offering consumers much less value in terms of functionality.
 
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I still miss it, I now have to lag around an apple’s external DVD drive when i have dub films and tv shows that are not released on the itunes store like planet earth 3 its still not available on the Australian itunes store.
 
MacRumors said:
Apple today added the Mid 2012 model of the 13-inch MacBook Pro to its obsolete products list worldwide, according to its website.
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I have that same mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro. In 2012, I bought the cheapest base model because that was all I could afford at the time. I was able to use that computer for over 10 years because I could upgrade the RAM from the stock 4GB to third-party (Crucial brand) 16GB. Also, I was able to upgrade the painfully slow stock 500GB 5400-rpm HDD to a far faster third-party (Samsung 850 EVO) 1TB SSD.

But now, thanks to the unrelenting corporate greed of Tim Cook, Apple only offers soldered RAM and a soldered SSD on all laptops and desktops, so consumers will have to upgrade their Macs sooner. That's great news for Apple shareholders, but bad news for consumers.
 
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blazerunner said:
That was the last truly upgradeable laptop. Soldering the RAM to the motherboard after that was a giant middle finger to the consumer and force them to buy whole new laptops instead of a simple small upgrade. You just can't respect Apple for that... their 'environmentally friendly' claims are complete garbage.

That said, pro-consumer policies don't concern Apple which is why they're now worth 3 trillion dollars... by ripping off consumers. Nice.
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Soldering the RAM, while I disagree with it, isn't the problem. The real problem is the prices they charge for the upgrades. True market value in line with the price of RAM and it would be fine. No beef from me there.
 
guzhogi said:
I know most music albums are on streaming services, but I also have many CDs, and DVD movies for that matter, that aren't available on streaming.
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In my imagination, Apple will release a MacBook next year with built in Blu-ray. Or at very least upgrade the increasingly inaccurately named SuperDrive. With native video decoding support and updated disc burning software.

A man can dream.
 
I bought a 15" 2012 MBP after my 2014 died with no feasible way to repair it thanks to non replaceable components. I have a 4TB SSD, 16GB RAM, and a high-res matte display which does not at all look as pixelated as another commenter claimed. It looks retina enough for me from a comfortable distance, and still does everything I need with ease. It's nice to have ethernet and loads of other ports, too. I'm sure I'll be using it for a long time. I consider the newer Macs very cool but very much disposable.
 
blazerunner said:
That was the last truly upgradeable laptop. Soldering the RAM to the motherboard after that was a giant middle finger to the consumer and force them to buy whole new laptops instead of a simple small upgrade. You just can't respect Apple for that... their 'environmentally friendly' claims are complete garbage.

That said, pro-consumer policies don't concern Apple which is why they're now worth 3 trillion dollars... by ripping off consumers. Nice.
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Tell me you don’t know how packaging and performance have benefited from soldered on RAM and HDD. Batteries are larger, computers are more slim, having unified memory makes them faster and more efficient. Lastly, very few people upgraded after purchase. Are you always so short sided?
 
Westside guy said:
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.
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I remember that was the case when my college's video editing lab had aluminum 24" iMacs from 2009 to 2017 (early 2009 top-of-the-line models, with 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM, 1 TB hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce GT 130 graphics with 512 MB dedicated VRAM, and were originally set up so they could also dual-boot into Windows via Boot Camp). By the time we had them replaced, roughly half of those iMacs (if not more than half of them) had dead internal SuperDrives. And since they were already using external USB DVD burners with them, losing a built-in optical drive wasn't a big deal to them when they replaced them with 21.5" Retina 4K iMacs in the summer of 2017 (mid-2017 models with 3.4 GHz quad-core i5 processor, 16 GB of RAM, 256 GB SSDs, ATI Radeon Pro 560 graphics cards with 4 GB dedicated VRAM, and are currently running Mac OS 13 Ventura). But now they are looking to replace those iMacs again, aiming towards M2 Pro Mac Minis and third-party UHD monitors.
 
My pre unibody MacBook Pro 15 inch fell off my bed with a usb device attached, breaking several internal components, and I couldn’t afford a brand new machine so picked up one of these beauties from a resale store in my home city.

I upgraded the storage to an SSD and popped in double the ram and it was great for years!
 
I visited a long term client that had a 15" version of one of these 2012 models today. It's only had an SSD upgrade in its time which I did many (7?) years ago. It had an uptime of 515 days. A reboot fixed the issues they were having with it but what a machine to simply last that long with zero faults.
 
Still have an use a MacBook Pro 2010, upgraded it to 16 GB of RAM, SSD and swapped out the DVD and added a Blu-ray player.

Still using it...every once-in-a-while, but still a "go to" for old programs.

Those few years of MacBook Pro's were good. The current M-Series are incredible, but something about those old macs...even without Retina.
 
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