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Should I Upgrade my MBP?

chriscrk

chriscrk

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 14, 2011
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Planet Earth (?)
I currently own an early 2011 MBP (Purchased at the end of 2011 though), it runs well, however my battery is really worn out (I get the "Condition: Replace Now" notice), and the rubber on the charger is also wearing off.

I don't know whether to spend money getting a new battery + charger and keep it, or get those and sell it and buy a rMBP, or try selling it as it is.

Any suggestions?

(It's barely going to be 3 years since I got it now, and I'm under the impression compute life spans are longer than that... But I'm afraid waiting too long to sell it will just make it lose value and I won't be able to sell it for much in the future)
 
Replacing the battery on the non-Retina unibody isn't hard. You can get a battery off iFixit for $100. If you don't want to do the work, Apple will do it for not much more than that. A charger would be another 80 I guess.

If it still meets your need, I wouldn't upgrade. I have mid 2009 13", and it's still a great machine. Just changed out the battery. I will be upgrading in the near future, but it's because my needs have outgrown mine.

If I was in your shoes and going to sell mine or give it to someone else, I would change the battery and get a new charger.
 
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I would say you've still got a couple of years left in that MBP. A replacement battery is a lot cheaper than a brand new computer.
 
2011 MBPs rock.


My wife got her 13" model new, and since then I've put a 256Gb SSD and doubled the RAM to 8Gb. Regular cleaning using CleanMyMac and Onyx keep it running fast and smooth too.

The only thing that needed changing was the trackpad. Oh, and it's on it's third Magsafe charger. Pieces of crap...


The battery is showing around 70% health now and is easy to change if we ever need to. She mostly runs it on mains anyway.


It runs Mavericks as fast as my late 2013 15" rMBP and is easy to work on unlike mine which has soldered everything and NEEDS Apple Care.



So throw some money at the old girl (SSD, RAM, new battery), give her a clean install, and marvel at how fast she'll be after all these years.


If you need another example of an old Mac just needing some TLC to bring it into 2014, I just installed Yosemite into my 2006 Mac Pro with help from the peeps on this forum, and I can't believe how fast and smooth it is.

If my 8 year old Mac Pro can run be brought up to spec, so can your 3 year old MBP.


Keep it, upgrade it, love it.
 
Personally, I'd sell the computer and replace it sooner then later, due to radeongate. Get an iGPU based MBP at this time, as Apple's track record for discrete GPUs is horrible.
 
chriscrk said:
I currently own an early 2011 MBP (Purchased at the end of 2011 though), it runs well, however my battery is really worn out (I get the "Condition: Replace Now" notice), and the rubber on the charger is also wearing off.

I don't know whether to spend money getting a new battery + charger and keep it, or get those and sell it and buy a rMBP, or try selling it as it is.

Any suggestions?

(It's barely going to be 3 years since I got it now, and I'm under the impression compute life spans are longer than that... But I'm afraid waiting too long to sell it will just make it lose value and I won't be able to sell it for much in the future)
Click to expand...

I had the same problem with mine just as I was approaching 3 years of ownership (around August/September last year). They replaced both (the battery and the charger) for me under AppleCare, and also the SuperDrive which had been acting up. So all in all, my AppleCare investment paid off.
 
chriscrk said:
I currently own an early 2011 MBP (Purchased at the end of 2011 though), it runs well, however my battery is really worn out (I get the "Condition: Replace Now" notice), and the rubber on the charger is also wearing off.

I don't know whether to spend money getting a new battery + charger and keep it, or get those and sell it and buy a rMBP, or try selling it as it is.

Any suggestions?

(It's barely going to be 3 years since I got it now, and I'm under the impression compute life spans are longer than that... But I'm afraid waiting too long to sell it will just make it lose value and I won't be able to sell it for much in the future)
Click to expand...

Sell it off as fast as you can and get an rMBP. Your model is one of those affected by Radeongate (if it's a 15"/17" model with a Radeon GPU).
 
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