I'm trying to decide whether to put an SSD into a mid-2012 MBP or just get a newer MBA now that the warranty is finally over on the MBP. I had bought it in 2016 as an Apple refurb and put Apple Care on it so it was covered until late last summer.
The decision tree is compounded by the fact that I accidentally looped a power cable around a vase on a pedestal above my coffee table one day after detaching the cable from the laptop... and brought that vase tumbling down on the kb of the MBP as if it were a 500 pound bomb, completely destroying the L key and its underpinnings and also disabling a raft of adjacent keys which kept their keycaps but not any sense of what they existed for. I've been using the thing with an original magic kb parked on top of the internal kb.
Just opening the case on an out of warranty machine is expensive so I dunno. Then the drive replacement and the kb replacement.... sounds like the base price of a new laptop almost.
Another issue is that the SATA in the MBP is 1TB and I probably don't want to spring for a MacBook Air with that size drive but will miss the self-contained portability of so much of my music and video stuff... and the internal optical drive which I do use pretty often to watch DVDs.
I guess I'll just keep using the MBP the way it is as a Mojave-capable (but slow, jeez) spare, and get a newish MBA as a refurb sometime. That can replace the mid-2010 updated MacBook that is now my spare machine. I've always had two functional laptops in the house and dislike giving that up. I do love using an XR or my iPad Pro for news and magazine apps respectively, but when using a browser I prefer a laptop.
Anyway I'm resisting just shipping this MBP out to have it spruced up. Waiting to see what the next MBAs are like, and then a little longer since I do always get refurbs from Apple and then put Apple Care on them.
I have all the time in the world to rethink my wait-a-while decision every time I need to reboot the MBP with its slooooooowwwww SATA drive. I can read half the NYT on an iPad while the MBP gets its act together.