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Best quality of life upgrade for a 2012 MBP ?

Vonnegut5

Vonnegut5

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 29, 2020
74
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So I helped out a teacher friend by giving her some money for a 2012 MBP that she was able to get a free battery swap from with her school district. However I know that these models have some upgradability. So my question is, what would be the one thing you'd do to get the best speed increase?

Any help would be appreciated..
 
I'd go with a replacement SSD if the laptop currently has a spinning hard drive but, dependent upon how much RAM is currently installed, maybe upgrade that at a later date.

I recently upgraded the same model. I replaced the 4GB memory to 16GB and the 500GB spinning hard drive with 500GB SSD. Both very affordable upgrades: approximately seventy dollars for the SSD and a hundred dollars for the memory. I'm in the UK so you may get a better deal. I was happy enough – my wife's MacBook Pro runs silently now and efficiently: it does everything she needs it to do. I'll install Mojave (currently El Capitan) to allow legacy software to continue running and of course Mojave is still being updated for now (bonus!) though this machine will run run more recent OS's too.

There are YouTube videos that show you how to do the upgrades.
 
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wordsworth said:
I'd go with a replacement SSD if the laptop currently has a spinning hard drive but, dependent upon how much RAM is currently installed, maybe upgrade that at a later date.

I recently upgraded the same model. I replaced the 4GB memory to 16GB and the 500GB spinning hard drive with 500GB SSD. Both very affordable upgrades: approximately seventy dollars for the SSD and a hundred dollars for the memory. I'm in the UK so you may get a better deal. I was happy enough – my wife's MacBook Pro runs silently now and efficiently: it does everything she needs it to do. I'll install Mojave (currently El Capitan) to allow legacy software to continue running and of course Mojave is still being updated for now (bonus!) though this machine will run run more recent OS's too.

There are YouTube videos that show you how to do the upgrades.
Click to expand...

Thank you so much for the detailed response. This sounds like the perfect route for me, I have a 2020 MBP that is y my main machine, but I wanted another laptop that I could just do some light browsing / document creation but I don't wanna bring my main machine on a plane / train or something.
 
I have this MBP, 2 of them actually. Replace the hard drive with a SSD. I used a Crucial MX500, 500gb, that run about $70 in the US. I put in 16gb ram because I photo edit and do a little video editing. If you are just web browsing, email or documents, 8gb ram is fine. I bought 16gb used ram on ebay for $48. I prefer OWC, Kingston, Micron brands. Replacing the SATA cable would be a good idea, they run about $12-14 and are known to go bad in that 13 inch model.

I stopped at Mojave for the operating system. It will still run 32 bit programs and is very stable.
 
Happily the SATA cable in my wife's MacBook Pro remained – and remains – functional so I didn't need to replace it. One less thing to contend with if one hasn't done these upgrades before. If my SSD and memory upgrades hadn't worked successfully then my subsequent troubleshooting may well have resulted in my replacing the SATA cable. Luckily there was no need to do so in this instance.

You will have to ensure that you get Mojave (or the OS of your choice) installed on your new SSD. To get to that point, for my case requirement I used Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) backup software. I bought a USB 3.0 to SATA adaptor, plugged in the new SSD to an external USB port on the MacBook Pro and, after formatting the SSD, copied across the entire contents of the MacBook Pro's hard drive via CCC. Then I installed the SSD in the laptop, replacing the hard drive. The laptop was thus good to go and booted up perfectly. Updating its OS to Mojave is still on my to-do list, however.

Note that you will also need two different screwdrivers specific to your MacBook Pro model in order to do the physical upgrades. Bear that in mind. As I said earlier, the various YouTube videos are good for guidance and reassurance if such upgrades are new to you (as they were to me). Good luck!
 
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