Typing this on a mid 2009 15" MacBook Pro bought more than 8 years ago and used pretty much every day ever since. The screen starts to go bad, the DVD drive never worked correctly (not that I needed it the past five or so years) and the SD card reader does not support SDXC, rendering that port useless, but it's still working. The keyboard and trackpad are still great, so yes, those machines are still great web surfing and typing notebooks.