mid 2010 MBP - upgrade or replace?

The machine is 7 years old this year, it's time to let go (IMHO).

Spending money to ugprade a 7 year old machine only to have something on the motherboard die would suck.

That said, the only upgrade I'd consider would be a 256 GB SSD.

Why? Because 256 gig drives are obtainable cheap (like, well under a hundred bucks), and any recent 256 GB SSD will give you a massive performance improvement.

 

Woah, woah, woah. There's still plenty meat on that bone. Now you take that home, add some extra RAM, an SSD, a new battery... baby, you got a stew going.

Even a replacement battery will make a positive impact. Macs throttle the CPU heavily when the battery is dead. An SSD will mean it'll run very quickly and the extra RAM is dirt cheap, so you might as well do that too. It wouldn't cost you anywhere near the price of a refurb system and it might even run quicker than a refurb (assuming the refurb doesn't have an SSD from stock).

It is still a very capable machine as it can still run the latest iteration of Mac OS. It would be a shame to bin it. Of course if it transpires that the cost would approach that of a refurb, there's little point in upgrading it and you might as well get a new one. Otherwise, upgrade it!

 

New battery, new RAM and an SSD and you're halfway to the cost of a few year old Macbook Air (or maybe 13" retina) which will be faster and supported longer... and outperform it in all respects. Especially CPU/GPU, battery life, SSD speed, etc.

 

I was exactly in the same position as you a few weeks ago. MBP 2010, battery dying, the works.

I chose to buy a new computer. I needed a working one immediately, so that was the way to go for me. Still have the old one, and on Monday I'm selling it to someone who for some reason is willing to pay handsomely for it.

But if your machine is in otherwise working order (and does everything you need it to do), I'd juice it up. Battery, SSD and RAM upgrade do wonders even for an older laptop, so that will extend the computer's life expectancy by quite a bit.

 

what are you doing with your machine? Just basic internet, word processing?

 

An SSD would help performance a lot, and a RAM upgrade would help noticeably too.

It's a tricky situation. I think Core 2 Duo is a bit old at this point, but it really depends entirely on what tasks and software you use.

I have a 2010 17" with the i5 (first-gen), SSD, and 8 GB RAM. It runs well still for what I do, though OSX doesn't run that great on it (especially Safari). But when I boot Windows or Linux, it runs very, very well. When a computer starts to get old, the software starts to really matter.

If you can get an SSD for low cost, I'd consider doing that. That gives the biggest performance jump of all the upgrades, IMO. It's easy to do and you can get a decent one for under $100.

I just did a Core 2 2010 MBP upgrade for a family member last year and they've been happy with it since.

 

I just upgraded from that machine, although I had an SSD in it. The SSD will make it feel "modern," but holy hell did I love upgrading because retina screens are oh so nice.

The thing is, even if an upgraded machine fits your needs, there's a very real chance it won't be able to run 10.13 or 10.14. Apple is already making machines of that year obsolete. So for that reason alone I'd be hesitant to sink more money into it.