I am looking for a used or refurbished older MacBook Pro for mainly music production with logic and some light gaming and computing stuff. My only real condition is that it have the Retina display and it be decently fast. Can anything be had for around the 500-600 range? I’m mainly a pc guy so my usage of this laptop will be for those specifics and I think any new model would be too expensive and overkill for me. Thanks
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Which old MacBook Pro should I get.
- Thread starter Danknasty
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500-600 what? Where do you live?? check out ebay and see what the latest sold MacBook pro's have gone for. You don't really want anything less than a 2013 13 inch machine because the integrated graphics got a fair boost at that point and the HD4000 in the 2012 13 inch retina was a bit rubbish to be honest.
Oh sorry I’m American so dollars. I checked and in the 500-600 range on eBay I’m finding basically what you are telling me to avoid or “preretina” laptops. Is a refurb a better deal?
Refurbs are great from apple and they have all the warranties of a new machines available, however you are only looking at around $300 saving on the latest models maybe a touch more on a 2016 or 2015 15 inch.
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That's about exactly what I would expect, I live in the UK and it would be more here, but that's what I would expect in the US market for that machine $700-$800.
I was able to find a used one on amazon for 629. It is in acceptable condition which is basically their worst but it really doesn’t ha e to be pretty as long as the screen is fine. It’s the MGX72LL/A. Which is the 13” retina 8 gifs ram i5 iris 5100. I watched a few YouTube’s seems to game minimally at low specs. Can ram be added to these laptops? Or storage?
No they cannot be upgraded at all in any meaningful fashion, RAM is soldered and the ssd is connected using a proprietry connector, upgrading it will cost more than buying it with the drive you want. I just use tiny USB 3 drives for extra media storage when needed, and the sd card slot can become permanent storage as well.
Iris graphics in a thin light 13 inch machine is the best you will get I'm afraid unless you shell out the $2000 plus for a surface book with dGPU. Laptops are rubbish for gaming or they are rubbish at being a laptop there is no good compromise for gaming on a laptop.
I have a 2013 machine i5 and 512gb its a great little laptop, it will run logic great and all your apps with aplomb mine feels as good as the day I bought it to be honest. Gaming I do a little star wars knights of the old republic and some old baldurs gate games and they run great on it. Windows 8 runs fine on bootcamp (well as good as it ever does).
Yea I really wasn’t looking for this as my main gaming rig I have two really fast PCs. My main concern was logic and reasonable quickness. Being able to play some league or something would be a nice perk. Also streaming video and some video editing. My current pc has a 1070 in it so I’m really not sweating the games too much. Been out of the apple scene for a while but always love the interface and smoothness of their os. Is there a huge difference between the ones running iris 5100 and 6100? It’s like $100 diff.
Ok so its casual on the go gaming thats cool should be okay fopr that. Not a huge difference with the 6100 to be honest its a little newer and it may be worth a hundred dollars for a year newer machine though.
I ended up getting the 2014 with the 5100. This is just to hold me over till I purchase a brand new MacBook Pro anyway so I’ll see how it goes. Also bought off prime so returning it shouldn’t be an issue. I’ll let you know how this goes. Thanks for all the help.
I just purchase a 17 in MBP off Ebay for $425 in mint condition..seems high but I searched for several months..
https://support.apple.com/kb/sp581?locale=en_US
https://support.apple.com/kb/sp581?locale=en_US
Thanks for the help guys. I went with the 2014 in “acceptable” condition. It was around 630. The next year up would have been atleast a hundred or so more and refurbished tack on another hundred. I did end up with some hidden surprises a scratch on the display but it’s surprisingly not too much of a bother. I’ve yet to game on it but using it for basic tasks reminds me what I love about macs. How fluid and seamless everything is. The touchpad the navigation everything is Apple quality and I’ve yet to see a pc laptop come close enough. I’m just saying this to say that this will likely hold me over till I’m ready to take the plunge and get a newer 15” mbp. The 13 is a bit small for me (video chat sites are very tiny) and these are also a bit heavy.