I've commented a couple of times recently on the butterfly keyboard threads to idly joke about the fact that my 2009 MBP's keyboard is still fine... and it got me thinking about what a great computer the whole thing still is.
The mac I'm typing on now is a mid 2009 Macbook Pro 13". I bought it new in October 2009 and chose the slowest processor option - a 2.26 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, but the most RAM you could buy from Apple at the time - 4GB - and the biggest 500GB hard drive, all running Snow Leopard. It was my first mac, and was meant to replace both our doddery old laptop and my desktop tower as the main and only family computer, for work, itunes, browsing etc. Things like gaming and video editing were never on the cards and still aren't, but I wanted a good fast machine for general use that was going to last some years and not fall apart, and that's exactly what I got.
As the years passed and Apple first started selling OS X updates cheaply, and later giving them away for free, I always kept up to date, always installing the new OS over the old - this machine hasn't seen a clean install since 2009. Naturally enough things started to lag and creak as newer software demanded more power. In 2016 I finally succumbed to a hardware upgrade and doubled the ram to 8GB and swapped in a 512GB SSD, cloning the old drive across seamlessly. Immediately the speed of everything increased tenfold and it genuinely booted, loaded apps and multitasked faster and better than it had ever done.
That pretty much brings us up till this past weekend when, finally tired of the annoying little limitations in El Capitan (the last officially supported OS) I went unofficial and used dosdude's tool to install High Sierra. Once again I'm running the latest iWork and Office 365 apps, latest Safari, etc etc - and this machine is running them all well.
So here's a machine with a ten year, 100% reliability record. Its keyboard is perfect. The unibody enclosure, the trackpad, all absolutely perfect and as solid as the day they were made. The screen still looks great to me and the Geforce graphics never had a recall. The ten year old battery, which I tested today, still goes for 2.5 hours - which is about what most ordinary laptop batteries lasted in 2009. Thanks to the non-soldered design it has twice the memory that Apple would even fit in 2009, and a storage medium that's many times faster than any computer made then. Then there's the other differences to modern day macs - it still has a Superdrive meaning I can burn CDs and DVDs, it still has Magsafe for when the kids trip over the lead - kids who are younger than the MBP I should add. It has a relatively slow but universally acceptable USB 2 port (two of them), it has an SD card reader right there on the side. It even has function keys. So... is it possible that this is the best MBP Apple ever made?
The mac I'm typing on now is a mid 2009 Macbook Pro 13". I bought it new in October 2009 and chose the slowest processor option - a 2.26 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, but the most RAM you could buy from Apple at the time - 4GB - and the biggest 500GB hard drive, all running Snow Leopard. It was my first mac, and was meant to replace both our doddery old laptop and my desktop tower as the main and only family computer, for work, itunes, browsing etc. Things like gaming and video editing were never on the cards and still aren't, but I wanted a good fast machine for general use that was going to last some years and not fall apart, and that's exactly what I got.
As the years passed and Apple first started selling OS X updates cheaply, and later giving them away for free, I always kept up to date, always installing the new OS over the old - this machine hasn't seen a clean install since 2009. Naturally enough things started to lag and creak as newer software demanded more power. In 2016 I finally succumbed to a hardware upgrade and doubled the ram to 8GB and swapped in a 512GB SSD, cloning the old drive across seamlessly. Immediately the speed of everything increased tenfold and it genuinely booted, loaded apps and multitasked faster and better than it had ever done.
That pretty much brings us up till this past weekend when, finally tired of the annoying little limitations in El Capitan (the last officially supported OS) I went unofficial and used dosdude's tool to install High Sierra. Once again I'm running the latest iWork and Office 365 apps, latest Safari, etc etc - and this machine is running them all well.
So here's a machine with a ten year, 100% reliability record. Its keyboard is perfect. The unibody enclosure, the trackpad, all absolutely perfect and as solid as the day they were made. The screen still looks great to me and the Geforce graphics never had a recall. The ten year old battery, which I tested today, still goes for 2.5 hours - which is about what most ordinary laptop batteries lasted in 2009. Thanks to the non-soldered design it has twice the memory that Apple would even fit in 2009, and a storage medium that's many times faster than any computer made then. Then there's the other differences to modern day macs - it still has a Superdrive meaning I can burn CDs and DVDs, it still has Magsafe for when the kids trip over the lead - kids who are younger than the MBP I should add. It has a relatively slow but universally acceptable USB 2 port (two of them), it has an SD card reader right there on the side. It even has function keys. So... is it possible that this is the best MBP Apple ever made?
