So yesterday I got another laptop for my little collection of older Macs from the electronics recycling/reselling company I work at...
A mid-2012 13" unibody MacBook Pro, the popular 2.5 GHz Core i5 model that Apple made for four years straight as an affordable laptop option for those that wanted more processing power but didn't want to spring for the pricier Retina Display models. Because these were also pretty popular with educational institutions (in addition to some school districts purchasing these in bulk, I'd see a LOT of college students when going for my I.T. degree with them), we often get a lot of these to recycle or resell, and so I'd often either pull out or reinstall hard drives and RAM in these). My supervisors said because of that factor and my Mac hobby, I could keep one of them for my collection, and so I popped a 1 TB SSD into it and bumped up the RAM from 4 to 8 GB and installed Mac OS 10.15 Catalina on it! The battery needs to be replaced, but that's something I could do without much hassle, as I've had to replace bad batteries from unibody pre-Retina MacBooks before on this job. And I plan to also soon max out the RAM to 16 GB.
Running the latest version of Final Cut Pro on it. I'm sure it'll perform a lot better once I upgrade the RAM to 16 GB.
Just for a fun project, I swapped the 1 TB Catalina SSD with my 512 GB SSD with Mac OS X El Capitan installed on it, so I can run older 32-bit applications on this MacBook Pro...
...like the classic iMovie. While nowadays I definitely prefer Final Cut Pro for similar edits (and the current iMovie for simpler projects), it's a fun throwback once in a while. I can even capture footage from my MiniDV, HDV and Digital8 camcorders via FireWire into the MacBook Pro! (A story about the iMovie HD project there; in late 2018 when I was finally able to have a MiniDV tape removed from my dead Canon Optura 50 camcorder that kicked the bucket on an outing in 2013, I actually ended up capturing the tape into iMovie HD here, as this was before I found out how I could import DV footage via FireWire into the newer versions of iMovie and Final Cut Pro on Mac OS 10.14 Mojave and higher with the sound going through. It was a fun throwback editing on iMovie HD 6, but it did take noticeably longer than if I edited the movie on iMovie 10 or Final Cut Pro X.)
Running Final Cut Express 4 on the MacBook Pro with the El Capitan SSD installed. It does have kind of an old-school charm.
And because the internal SuperDrive still works, another useful thing for this MacBook Pro is that I can use it as a DVD-authoring machine, running iDVD 7.1.2 for burning home movies onto elegant-looking DVD discs! (They sure do look nicer than the DVD and Blu-Ray menus on Roxio Toast and whatnot.)
This could definitely make for a nice secondary laptop for me (compared to my more powerful M1 MacBook Air I've been using a lot lately), especially since I've always thought a mid-2012 13" MacBook Pro would be nice to have, especially with the Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 ports and SDXC card slot and a working SuperDrive, but I previously could not afford even a secondhand one like this. Ahh, the upsides of working for an electronics recycling/reselling company and being the Apple expert there!
Once I get my next paycheck later this week, I'll be ordering the RAM upgrade and maybe the new battery for this! (Or I might wait until next week for the battery.) I've even installed VMWare Fusion on the Catalina drive, so I can make a couple of Windows virtual machines (a Windows XP one for old games, of course, and maybe a Windows 10 virtual machine for running certain Windows-only applications.)
A mid-2012 13" unibody MacBook Pro, the popular 2.5 GHz Core i5 model that Apple made for four years straight as an affordable laptop option for those that wanted more processing power but didn't want to spring for the pricier Retina Display models. Because these were also pretty popular with educational institutions (in addition to some school districts purchasing these in bulk, I'd see a LOT of college students when going for my I.T. degree with them), we often get a lot of these to recycle or resell, and so I'd often either pull out or reinstall hard drives and RAM in these). My supervisors said because of that factor and my Mac hobby, I could keep one of them for my collection, and so I popped a 1 TB SSD into it and bumped up the RAM from 4 to 8 GB and installed Mac OS 10.15 Catalina on it! The battery needs to be replaced, but that's something I could do without much hassle, as I've had to replace bad batteries from unibody pre-Retina MacBooks before on this job. And I plan to also soon max out the RAM to 16 GB.
Running the latest version of Final Cut Pro on it. I'm sure it'll perform a lot better once I upgrade the RAM to 16 GB.
Just for a fun project, I swapped the 1 TB Catalina SSD with my 512 GB SSD with Mac OS X El Capitan installed on it, so I can run older 32-bit applications on this MacBook Pro...
...like the classic iMovie. While nowadays I definitely prefer Final Cut Pro for similar edits (and the current iMovie for simpler projects), it's a fun throwback once in a while. I can even capture footage from my MiniDV, HDV and Digital8 camcorders via FireWire into the MacBook Pro! (A story about the iMovie HD project there; in late 2018 when I was finally able to have a MiniDV tape removed from my dead Canon Optura 50 camcorder that kicked the bucket on an outing in 2013, I actually ended up capturing the tape into iMovie HD here, as this was before I found out how I could import DV footage via FireWire into the newer versions of iMovie and Final Cut Pro on Mac OS 10.14 Mojave and higher with the sound going through. It was a fun throwback editing on iMovie HD 6, but it did take noticeably longer than if I edited the movie on iMovie 10 or Final Cut Pro X.)
Running Final Cut Express 4 on the MacBook Pro with the El Capitan SSD installed. It does have kind of an old-school charm.
And because the internal SuperDrive still works, another useful thing for this MacBook Pro is that I can use it as a DVD-authoring machine, running iDVD 7.1.2 for burning home movies onto elegant-looking DVD discs! (They sure do look nicer than the DVD and Blu-Ray menus on Roxio Toast and whatnot.)
This could definitely make for a nice secondary laptop for me (compared to my more powerful M1 MacBook Air I've been using a lot lately), especially since I've always thought a mid-2012 13" MacBook Pro would be nice to have, especially with the Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 ports and SDXC card slot and a working SuperDrive, but I previously could not afford even a secondhand one like this. Ahh, the upsides of working for an electronics recycling/reselling company and being the Apple expert there!
Once I get my next paycheck later this week, I'll be ordering the RAM upgrade and maybe the new battery for this! (Or I might wait until next week for the battery.) I've even installed VMWare Fusion on the Catalina drive, so I can make a couple of Windows virtual machines (a Windows XP one for old games, of course, and maybe a Windows 10 virtual machine for running certain Windows-only applications.)
Last edited:
