WOYS Discord! Really excited to talk about Macs, upgrades, accessories and repairs with you guys. Hop in and tell me about your Mac setup… discord.gg/ZMpSk875qN
2012 macbook pro owner here, running sonoma and upgraded to 16GB of ram and 1TB SSD. Still on it's original battery too, although it's nearing 900 cycles.
Thanks a bunch! Yeah I probably should have talked more about them. Only issue is their heat problems, and lack of huge improvements over the 5,1. Still a nice price these days
Yup, I used the 2013 Mac Pro as a plex server for a couple years before getting a gaming pc. I literary sold the 2013 for a bit more than I paid for and used it for more than 2 years lol
Speaking of the 2013 Mac Pro, I'm actually thinking about grabbing myself one to use for web browsing and creative stuff using older (but more reliable) iLife software. Once my paycheck comes in, I'll definitely invest in a secondhand one.
Im more worried about the software. If Apple stops rolling out Updates to any Intel-based mashine, you'll not be able to install the newer OS on unsupported devices due to the different CPU-architechtures. Opencore will die evenuelly and there is nothing we can do about it. You'll need to buy the newest tech if you want to run MacOS, where hte RAM and SSD's are soldered to the board and Apple just messes with the consumer market, by charging absurd prices for fixing dead SSD's. Anyway, you still did a good job explainung the pros and cons when buying Intel-based Macs.
Very good points. That’s the main thing holding Intel Mac Pro users back these days. It’s akin to the PowerPC obsolescence. Only a matter of time. Thanks a lot for watching!
Post Sonoma Mac OS shall still be intel capable (this give in theory 3 years of security update) putting us in theory in 2027 Then indeed Switch to Linux or Windows will become the only viable way to continue safe usage I personally put my hope into Linux which is okay for casual usage and works well on most Intel Macs
@@Tigerex966 you’d be paying for things like the T2 chip, the airport card and more that you’d never use to their full extent. Seems like a really poor move to buy a $5k Mac to run windows lol
Intel Mac can run older macOS ( games-app 32/64) and dual boot, can run 3 or more display. I’m allow to upgrade my own GPU, HD/SSD/PCI slot PCI.. Intel Mac have Blu ray drives
I bought last year a 2019 16” MacBook Pro for the reason that all engineering apps are only available on windows. I’m talking about Revit, autocad plant 3D, aveva e3D etc. It’s noisy and battery life is not great, but the build quality and the possibility to boot both in macOS and windows is priceless. If I had the possibility to run my engineering apps on the new Mac’s I would switch immediately. And parallels is not a solution, I need hardware accelerated graphics.
Bro bought inferior 5 years old macbook to run windows on it. New midrange windows laptop outperforms it and is upgradeable for much lower price lol. What was the point? Intel macbooks are dead. Forgotten. They still cost a lot and offer literally nothing. Just buy a M2 Air instead of any intel macbook, that passively cooled M2 Air will outperform the older i9...
I have a BTO 2015 15” MBP. Fantastic machine hobbled only by its aging battery (and if I’m honest, the fans crank up all the time). And the design has aged incredibly well…looks right at home next to my M2 MBP and Studio Display.
Also have 2015 MBP. Battery needs to be replaced. Thinking loud fans happen Bec of poor battery. Love all the ports. I was thinking of replacing battery to use a lil longer as daily laptop but got tempted with MBA M2 15 16/1tb at $1499.
@@JimmyDoresHairDyeI have the same laptop and my fans used to go up all the time, one hardware fix helps: putting in new thermal paste between the CPU and vapour tube (you'll find tutorials online, it's easy). Also don't open too many tabs on your browser and no 60 fps videos on youtube...(just chose a lower frame rate/resolution)
i currently use a 2015 27 inch 5k imac in my office. let me tell you, they dont make them like this anymore, this thing is a work of art. windows guys just dont get how we could be happy with 10 year old machines. its becasue with windows 10 year old machines are as good as junk. with apple, this shit just lasts. they just dont get it.
i sold my M1 TB 13" MacBook Pro back in 2023 and bought a 16" i9 TB MacBook Pro... i loved the performance of the M1 in Luminar or FCPX but for i really wanted that bigger screen size! A Thin but still decent sized, portable Mac... I started to see the REAL benefit of the Intels by a couple of Weeks and Months, for me it is surprisingly the Touchbar is what holds me back from upgrading, also the phenomenal Speakers on this thing! Never heard such good speakers in any laptop. Also the Quad Thunderbolt Port selection is a major point for me, i personally never use HDMI or a SD card reader... I mean yes it gets burning hot when cutting Video, Editing Photos or just putting it under a heavy workload BUT it still runs perfectly in alomost any condition performance wise! I could go on and on why i still love my i9 Mac :)
I upgraded my mothers 5k iMac (2015) with 16gb of RAM, changed the Fusion Drive for a SSD and renewed its thermal paste. Having the capability of upgrading is something I miss about the ARM Macs because its kind of a hobby. I did this to several iMacs and changed the battery on a retina MacBook Pro.
@@Warp2090 It’s called Fusion Drive because it contains a HDD but also SSD. First Apple used a 128gb PCI SSD and a HDD for fusion drives and those were pretty good but they changed it for the 5k iMac. Only models with 2tb or more get a 128 ssd for their fusion drives, if you only have 1 TB you get a 24gb flash storage and 24gb is nothing. Unfortunately my mother has the 1 TB version and I didn’t knew it when we bought it, I thought it was the same as in my 2013 iMac
recently replaced battery of my MacBook Pro 2014, cleaned up dusty inside and added new thermal paste. running smoothly again, not bad for a 10 year old laptop.
I have a 13" 2016 Macbook pro, with 16 GB of RAM and I upgraded the ssd to 2 TB. I have it plugged into a doc and use it as a desktop machine, and it works great. Additionally, I have made a Dell Latitude into a hackintosh, running Sonoma 14.3 with a 1 TB SSD and 32 GB of RAM. It runs incredibly fast. I have no desire to pay for Apple's M1 or higher, can't be upgraded, Macintrashes until I am forced to, and my machines become unusable.
The Dell sounds like a really interesting machine. What’s the model name at base? The 2016 sounds good but I would worry about thermal performance. Docked I’m sure it’s no big issue, though. Thanks for watching!
@@jameszaccardo1520 I have a M3 Macbook pro, at work, and yes, it is amazing. However, not ready to pay the apple tax, for a new one, when I can still use my ones that are paid for.
i bought a refurb late 2015 5k iMac right before c*vid hit in 2020, then didn't need it. just pulled it out of the box a few months ago and stuck 64 gigs in it. probably won't upgrade the OS past Sonoma. fantastic machine.
I work in IT, and I have a 2019 MBP with Windows and macOS.I tend to favor macOS, but I do have Windows for support or running various other tools if needed.
I still use a PowerBook from early 2011- the LAST 17" screen model. It was my dad's old work laptop (he personally bought it)... and I moved it to Fedora 39 a while back, it's amazing for it's age. I need to get a 2.5" solid state drive to really get more out of it, but for it's age and size... it's really nice... And with Linux it even gets modern updates and security. Not a bad machine honestly. BEST OF ALL... people using older machines that are capable for the common tasks online and such... it prevents E-waste and throwing are GOOD hardware.
I run my 2015 Macbook Pro tri-boot. Win11, Ubuntu 22 and that other OS. All apple has is the NeXT unified smart copy+paste buffer everything else is passé.
I recently had a phone call with a co-worker about a software problem. He was on the latest Intel Mac generation, I was on a Macbook M2 Pro. We both fired up XCode at the same time to look into the source code. On my machine, XCode was up in a few seconds on the project. On the other end of the call it took minutes.....
The big problem with the last few Intel MacBook pros that Apple made is the fact that they were too thin and the CPU could not be cooled properly. This culminated in one model year being slower than the one that proceeded it because the CPU would thermal throttle and as a result perform slower than the last generation MacBook. The fact is that the Intel MacBook became far too thin and they could not dissipate heat effectively, compounded with the fact that the design never could dissipate heat all that well in the first place. My favorite thing about my M2 MacBook Pro is the fact that I can use it on my lap without cooking my legs, like I had done for so many years…
I have a 2009 cMP that’s been upgraded as much as it reasonably can be (dual 3.33 6 core xeons, 1080 GTX, 32GB RAM, NVME storage) but my M2 MBP runs circles around it, and works flawlessly with my studio display, and can be taken on the road, etc. If it wasn’t for the fact that I occasionally need a windows machine, I’d have no use for it (though I will NEVER get rid of it) It’s a brilliant machine that has remained useful way longer than it has any right to but it’s now 15 years old and that’s practically prehistoric in computer years. I wish there was a way to get a modern Intel motherboard in there along with modern GPUs (you can run modern GPUs in the old cMP but you’re going to experience massive CPU bottlenecks, negating any kind of performance advantage), RAM, Thunderbolt, etc. The cMP still remains the one of the best cases ever - it still looks fantastic and fresh today. If only we could get modern hardware and macOS running on it. That said, anyone know how to make a cMP form factor logic board based on 2024 architecture? :-D
My everyday work and gaming computer is an M1 Max Mac Studio, which I'm extremely happy with (and before that, an M1 Mac Mini), but I have a growing collection of Intel and PowerPC Macs, many of which see frequent use. I use a mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro or an 11-inch 2013 MacBook Air as my work commute laptop, I use a 2013 trashcan Mac Pro for Mac games (mostly 32-bit games) and Photoshop, and I often use a Pismo PowerBook G3 or a Titanium PowerBook G4 to revisit games from my childhood. My vintage Macs, and the Intel Macs especially, are still very useful and feel fast and capable for light-to-medium tasks and even gaming, and they've been very fulfilling upgrade projects. My 2010 cheesegrater Mac Pro, in particular, is a screamer: a 3.46 GHz six-core CPU; 48 GB of RAM; a 1 TB NVMe drive; an RX 580; a USB C/3 combo card; two Blu Ray drives.
A good collection of machines! Glad to see lots of them still see use, especially on the oft forgot PowerBooks... I’m especially fond of the 5,1, which half of my videos are about, to be fair.
@@montaguebarnabasltd Thanks. :) Funnily enough, I've only ever bought a brand new computer twice in my life: the M1 Mini and the Mac Studio. Every other computer I've ever owned was/is second-hand. I bought the M1 Mac Mini to replace my heavily-upgraded 2008 Mac Pro, which was a great everyday work and gaming machine for several years until it died in early 2021.
There are a few Macs in my collection that I'm rather proud of. I've upgraded my trashcan Mac Pro with 64 GB of RAM and a 2 TB NVMe drive. I recently acquired a 17-inch PowerBook G4 and upgraded it with 1 GB of RAM (it can't see 2 GB for some reason, but 1 GB is plenty) and a 500 GB M.2 SSD. :D I also acquired a 15-inch aluminium PowerBook G4 and upgraded it with 2 GB of RAM and a 250 GB mSATA SSD. I installed a 500 GB M.2 SSD in a G4 Mac Mini, and installed a modified fully-bootable version of Mac OS 9. I semi-retired my G4 Cube after the FireWire ports died, but it's still an impressive machine with dual SSDs (an 128 GB mSATA and a CF card), 1.5 GB of RAM, a cooling fan and a GeForce 2 MX card. I think I'm most proud of my Pismo PowerBook G3, which has a 128 GB Compact Flash card for a hard-drive, 1 GB of RAM, a USB 2.0 card, new thermal paste and a slot-loading optical drive.
@@QUANTUMJOKER the 17” PowerBook with an NVMe drive is ridiculous. Great stuff though. I’d be proud of the Pismo too. They might not be powerful with their main components, but flash storage speeds their OSes up considerably.
I just bought a 2017 iMac Pro the base option which has 1TB/32gb Ram/8 core cpu/Radeon Pro Vega 8GB etc for $1,600 refurbished from Best Buy. Flawless panel, basically zero damage at all to the body, runs the latest Mac OS with ease, and came with 24 month warranty with my total tech membership. I always wanted one and I couldn’t be more satisfied for what I’ll be using it for. I have a couple apple silicon Macs as well as a 2020 27 i7 iMac and this 2017 iMac Pro handles everything even on the latest Mac OS Sonoma effortlessly
@@montaguebarnabasltdthanks! I was very interested to see how it handled Sonoma and I’ve been so impressed with it! It’s snappy and quick at doing everything which I wasn’t totally expecting to be honest
big fkn deal. bro we dont give a fk about saving a little bit of money. not everyone is looking for a deal. not everyone has a scarcity mentality when it comes to money like you do @@Imskyhighy
Loving my 2012 MBP in 2024. High Sierra,16G RAM, fast SSD, runs all I need and more. Full multimedia & digital art studio w basic 1080p video editing no prob. Workhorse. If you take care of your tools they'll take care of you.
I got an 2020 macboook Pro Intel i5 with 16gb RAM from work for $260, because they're moving over to M1. This Intel exports 4k video in resolve faster than real time and from what I can see it operates as fast as an M1 in most areas AND most importantly has 4 thunderbolt ports. M1 is great and all, but I thing I got a deal of the decade.
Well, I have upgraded several old basic macbooks (maxing the memory and installing a SSD) along with a few 2012 15" Macbook Pros. From what I see with a more typical Apple Mac user, they basically use it for Internet, and the occasional office application. So, an upgraded Pro does quite well for them. I just bought one for $100 to have as a swap out for future upgrades (Some in my family are Apple fans, don't know why, but they are.) for family members.
I got a refurbished late 2014 MBP 16/512GB and I have side loaded the newest MacBook OS(Sonoma). It looks amazing and has works perfectly. As much as I like the newest MBP in midnight, I can’t justify the ridiculous prices they cost. And the hardware is nowhere near as durable these days as it used to be in the mid 2010’s.
I picked up a late 2012 MBP (Catalina) for $130 CDN for the single purpose of running REW and miniDSP Device Console to fine tune DSP setting on 2x4HD on two separate multichannel audio systems. While the MIDI controller won’t properly map more than 7.1 surround ( i.e. Atmos, etc) , and a mini display port to HDMI adapter is required to connect to my surround receiver, it works like a charm. The budget priced Dayton calibrated microphone and stand cost more than the MBP, so for a total investment of less than $300, my use case is fully satisfied.
@@montaguebarnabasltd Other than a small documented bug in one of the apps that occasionally requires a forced quit and restart, it’s worked like a charm. I’d previously done this job in main audio system with a Mini of approximately the same age - also running Catalina - but the portability of the MBP for this function is a huge benefit. Only remaining question is whether I’d be well served long run in upgrading to Sonoma via the Open Core Patcher app on which I’ve seen several very detailed YT videos?
@@fonkenful I found myself going back to Catalina simply because it was slightly cooler running and smoother than Sonoma on the 2012. If you need a certain feature or support, update using OCLP. If not, don’t.
@@montaguebarnabasltd Tbh Mac OS may be seamless and whatever but one thing that is a fact is that Windows or Linux PC's are simply so much better in terms of user friendliness, they can be repaired and upgraded very easily. Windows may not be perfect but most of the issue it has can easily be fixed
@@Warp2090 generally it’s a matter of use case. Like this guy said, audio production is a better experience on macOS. Other stuff, Windows can surely beat it on!
I use my 2011 MacBook Pro because it’s actually modifiable and I only use it for college coursework, which consists of using Canvas, making and using Google docs, sheets, using visual studio code, anki, and mainly using Firefox as the web browser with various web browser sites like ChatGPT and TH-cam, I also use windows natively but love how the MacBook connects to my Apple products
I was surprised that there was no mention of 2014-2020 iMacs, particularly the 2014 and 2015 models. 2014s can be had for under $200 and 2015s for under $300. I bought my 2015 iMac 27 five months ago. It has an i5, came with 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB hard drive. I added an external SSD from my parts box and it's perfectly fine for running my office programs. So $200 for a 5k monitor, great speakers, webcam, and microphones, Apple keyboard and mouse. I was looking to buy a Dell Ultrasharp 4k 27 inch but those are around $500-$600.
I don’t have space to buy iMacs unfortunately. Have never had one so they get an unfair amount of mentions compared to other computers on this channel I think, yeah. Might do a video in the future talking about some of those deals. The 2015 does sound like a good buy!
iMacs seem to be overlooked by Apple fans, but I've always loved them despite being a lifelong Unix/Windows user. I own a 2012 iMac and the screen is still breathtaking. iMacs are an amazing package. Small form factor with great screen.
Interesting topic. Just 2 additional tips - with an OpenCore OCLP installer, 2012-17 macs can run the most recent OS Sonoma almost perfectly. Also for eGPU a great use case is for local AI training with a Nvidia GPU (from 3060 and up) - under Win/Linux, if you don’t want to build a brand new box. Many Windows laptop/mini/sff models lack Thunderbolt, and therefore does not eGPU. Mac Mini 2018 is the most cost effective model to run this. And AI on m1/2/3 is still under early development.
Thanks for watching! Yeah OCLP is something I take as read on this channel in some ways. I probably should have highlighted it more in the video. I’m honestly not very interested in eGPU setups, but that sounds quite cutting edge. Interested to see how it develops…
I have a maxed out 2012 MBP and a pretty high end 2019 MBP. The only downside of running Windows on them (native or VM) is that it runs hotter, so MacFansControl app is important.
The switch to Apple Silicon was the motivation for me to switch back to Windows. They made me choose between the operating system I loved for 11 years, and my 33 years of PC gaming. I intend to keep gaming till the day I die, so Apple basically said said they don't want my money. I guess Tim Cook is a game-o-phobe.
I have a 2017 MacBook Pro. Apple replaced the keyboard, battery and top case a year ago. The machine is a dream to use. This MacBook is only used for productivity purposes and it fulfills that role perfectly. At some point down the road, I'll get a Silicon Mac but not right now.
For a Musician with tones of Plugins and Virtual instruments not compatible with Silicone Macs it was just absolutely a downgrade for me to upgrade. Now what i did is I got the last Imac 2020 27 inch with 3.8ghz 8 core i7 and 8gb GPU with 16 GB of Ram but i upgraded to 64GB.I Bought the Imac and the ram on my local bestbuy for less than $1k this was new on clearance and this was to replace my 2013 Imac that was already struggling even after i did a few upgrades including morr ram an ssd. The 2020 Imac was the best decision for me I keept all my Plugins and VSTs. This thing is a monster so fast on logic pro where RAM is the most important thing. No regrets.
That last Intel iMac seems like a bit of a beast, yeah. I’ve heard musicians get a lot better performance out of Intel Macs, so will take that into account in my next videos…
I was happy with my 2012 MBP, but by 2018 I needed something more current that I could upgrade too. After a lot of internal debate, I went back to a Windows based PC and laptop. Doubled the ram on the laptop, and I put in two 2 TB m.2 nvme SSDs. It was easy peasy with no painful decisions that I had to live with because the specs could never change. Every once in awhile I think about an M2 Max or even an Ultra, but what I have now is cheaper and does what I need it to do. Apple makes appliances, and I need a computer. It's just one of those things.
I was personally close to give up on my MacBook Pro 2010 which I’ve upgraded to the max possible mentioned in the video (matte / i7 / SSD / 8gb ram) Overall Sonoma works okay for basic tasks and and I ended up buying a new battery. In case Mac OS 15 is the last open core can patch, it will still extend his lifetime until technically 2027 for security updates. If it manages to survive, I will likely end up putting some Linux. They are still power pc distro maintained around so I’m not worried to find one for intel i7 even in 3 years. I guess it strongly depends of the usage everyone wants to make. In my case I’m already happy to have a 14 years MacBook still beating apple obsolescence.
Disable the iOS widget and the new screen saver you won’t feel any lag under normal use for 2010-12 models. And, disable/minimize iCloud sync services - drive, music, photos calendar etc also helps.
Thanks for this! I am a vintage Mac user, from 2008 and 2012I they are long past OS upgrades, but they are the most reliable of machines. Since I retired, they are just fun machines now. If I need a battery or a part or two, IFixit is just a call away.
I’m a pretty big Intel Mac guy but one of the things Apple has done that’s kinda ended Intel Macs is not adding AMD 7000 support. Kinda makes my 2019 not worth it
That’s certainly something I should’ve gone over properly in the video. Very disappointing to see how the 2019 was snubbed. PS. I’m a big, big fan of your content. Have probably read every word in your 5,1 guide. Means a lot to have you watch my video!
I have an iMac Pro with a Vega 56, plus, 3 eGPU: a 6800 and two 6900. I use it for Redshift and its quite, quite fast. Electricity bill is a thing, but still, not a complain. And also, if you can get a MacBook Pro with a 5600 GPU plus an extra eGPU with the 6900 AMD card, you still have a great machine nowadays.
That’s a great great mac. One of my all time faves. Pity about the power draw, but honestly for a desktop the Intel Macs can all make some really solid machines with the right setup.
You can bench mark all you want. In real use case scenarios with video editing and audio production, my 2018 i9 Macbook Pro outpreforms my M2 Mac Studio hands down in every way.
I still use a 2013 Intel MBA. I’ve upgraded the RAM, replaced the battery and keyboard, and replaced the original SSD with a fast nve drive. With OpenCore it runs Monterey perfectly. The ARM MBA is very nice but with no fan it thermal throttles under sustained load, which I need (compiling). This is not an issue on the Intel as I can control the fan. And it’s difficult to justify buying a machine that will become e-waste WHEN its proprietary non-replaceable SSD dies. This is especially true of used machines with just 8GB of RAM. A LOT of these Silicon macs will start dying in the next five years and there will be no way to fix them.
Yeah the ARMs are not exclusively a step forward. There’s a lot I’d prefer to use my Intel machines for, were it not for their less efficient CPU hardware.
Apple Silicon Macs are incredible. I bought a Mac Mini M2 Pro a month ago and it is a total beast. But a year ago I also bought a Macbook Pro 13 2017 inch without touch bar for approx. 500 euros used in very good condition and it is still incredibly good for HomeOffice and even video editing.
I upgraded my friend's early 2015 macbook air from macos monterey to vanilla windows 10. While in MacOS, the computer estimated 3 DAYS for a simple folder copy of an app. (App's size was 64 mb) Now in Win10 with drivers installed, it preserved its former glory when it was fast and well optimized on MacOS. I also did this to an Early 2014 MBA and it also performs very well. To be concise, Windows is a very well optimized OS for everything you can imagine. Just go with windows if you have problems with macos or perhaps linux, in my case I did.
I wanted to buy the macbook pro 2019 16 for my engineering degree and run windows on it thinking the battery life will outperform any windows out there in its price range, or am i wrong on this? The budget is 700 euros
Still have my original Macbook 2008 where I upgraded the memory to 8GB and 1TB SSD. It have multiple versions of Windows using Parallel and it is an amazing machine. I would only get an M? Macbook if I get a crazy deal from it probably after the M4 comes out.
The only reason I would get intel macbook pro, would be the price and piece of mind. Being a photographer(no video editing) that travels, the potential of damaging the computer is actually real. $500 or less provides you with a decent machine in terms of RAM and storage to take care of your basic needs on the road with an amazing screen. If you buy the last ones of the breed you have another 5-6 years of updates for a very small monetary outlay.
I just bought a 2019 intel mac with 32 gb ram for $200 USD. It works amazingly well and if I wanted to, I can dual boot it with linux, even install linux or Windows on an external SSD. It runs very fast, as long as I use Catalina on it. I don't use it for gaming, but for what I use it for, it boots up fast and works very well. Why would I spend $4k for a new macbook pro?
I have a 2019 intel equipped mbp and a 2022 (I think) m1 mba. I mostly work in macOS, so I don’t worry about other OSs. I love the MBA. It’s light, battery is amazing and it just feels faster in all of my day-to-day uses. But the thing that my intel powered laptop can do far better than the newer Apple silicon powered laptop is drive external monitors. Apple really dropped the ball with that imo. The intel MacBook Pro feels like a desktop replacement when paired with a thunderbolt dock and some external monitors. The Apple powered MacBook Air never feels like anything more than a very, very, good laptop which sometimes has an external monitor hooked up.
You’re absolutely right about the monitors. Apple could very easily engineer the ability to support more monitors better into their M chip MacBooks, but I think they’d rather leave that for the desktops in order to push people to make another purchase. Both of those are nice laptops, anyway.
software developer with only one computer? come on bro step your game up. i as an accountant have 2 intel macs and 2 apple silicon macs. all have different use cases
I gave my grandson my intel macbook pro which he still uses. I have a 27 inch imac with 32 gigs of memory. You could not ask for a better looking screen and I could easily upgrade the harddrive to a ssd, the memory to 64 gigs of memory and other upgrades. A beautiful machine. Allow me to mention that I realize that I cannot update the OS anymore, however if it should come to it I understand that Linux would run brilliantly on it.
Those are some really nice screens. Love the upgradeability factor on them! I can’t work out whether Linux is worth learning about yet. For me it may never be, but we’ll see.
I do have an 2020 M1 MacBook Air base model, it’s crazy that it beats my i7-7700k workstation by like 1000 point on Cinebench! I mainly use my systems for cpu intensive tasks so graphics is different story. I don’t even play any games so i dont care about the graphics card too much on any of my machines. I bought the Air to replace my old MacBook Pro Late 2011 and the performance difference is huge! 😂 I do still use my old for sd cards and usb drives etc cause i dont have any dongles yet.
We re paid apple hundreds of dollars to make them better and thinner then they remove necessary ports so lots of people carries dongle mayhem in their bag (including myself). Such an idiotic circumstance…
@@berkinerengurman1401 Yeah you are absolutly right! I still love their stuff tho XD But i really hope that they bring atleast few ports back, atleast the sd and usb a. I am not sure about the pro etc models but i am not fan of that usb c charging at all, i liked the magsafe alot.
talking about local prices, my 2015 macbook air was $150 and I could put a ridiculous 2TB SSD upgrade on it, an M1 macbook air is $800, $150 dollars was already a big enough expense, can't justify $800 when that's like 3 months of work
Watching this on my mid 2009 MacBook Pro running El Capitan with maxed out 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD that I recently installed after my third failed HDD. I've thought about buying something newer for a long long time now, but it's so discouraging to see that all of the upgrades for the new Macs these days have to be bought upfront for crazy prices and that there's no way to upgrade them later on. This video really affirmed my feelings towards the whole thing. Until my laptop literally quits booting up one day, or I actually need something more powerful, I just can't justify paying thousands for a machine that will be outdated in a few years, although it can be very tempting seeing how slim, lightweight, fast and pretty the new MacBooks are! Was considering maybe taking a middle ground and finding a newer used intel i7 or i9 iMac and maxing out the internals instead....
Happy to hear the video meant something to you Yeah if it ain’t broke… I think as long as it performs tasks you need it to you might as well hold off upgrading. If you’re wondering which newer Mac to get though, my next video covers how long each will last ;)
I have a 2012 Macbook Pro and 2012 cMP tower. The fastest unibody you can get on the old style, upgrade friendly chassis is Ivy Bridge based. The 2012 cMP can take up to dual x5960s and 128 GB RAM. If you run it in the 96 GB configuration (memory controller quirk) and leave the sockets near each CPU empty, the system can use all three memory channels fully and you will gain something like 20% performance. Throw in a NVME drive on a PCIe card and it is still a very quick / usable machine once you get rid of the bottlenecks Can't stand the thought of a fully locked down system. I've had very little hardware fail, but it irks me to not be able to replace wear items (SSD / battery) easily. It's very much a tactic to destroy the used Mac market
All your points make me quite happy to be a big box PC guy. This is not a dis at Apple or MacOS, this is a dis at the fact the systems are now entirely locked in. What you see is what you'll get, and that's it forever.
I had an old mbp late 2011 fully maxed out. I’m a mobile software engineer, when I made the first upgrade to m1 iMac man did it feel really good. I then upgraded to M1 Max a year later (and I only lost about maybe $100-$200 when reselling the maxed out iMac) and wow I can’t even look back. The only thing that sucks is that wine doesn’t work on some old retro games, but I got a Win 11 VM that actually does work with those games. Just 1 quirk on the Star Wars rebellion space battles. Other than that I’ve been very pleased. Of course not everyone is like me though. I play the retro game consoles on my iOS/iPadOS/tvOS in their respective apps. Only windows retro games I play on my Mac
My "ohh shit everythings dead" sailing navigation solution is a 2008 Macbook running OpenCPN and any iphone running gps2ip. That gives me Sailing charts and GPS location. I have a couple of Polycarbonate 2009 as "spares". Sailing life is exceptionally hard on electronics. Just makes more sense to use something i can replace for less than £100 than a £1000 M1 device.
As someone in the market for a MacBook, you have been brilliant. These videos have helped me decide. I was close to an Intel Mac, but think I’m going with a MacBook Air M1 now!
Intel: 1. Native Windows Support (BootCamp) 2. Native Linux support (Dual OS) 3. Upgradability (Especially on Desktop Computers) 4. eGPU Support (in macOS and Windows)
Just picked up a 2015 MacBook Air with 8 GB of RAM and 512GB for $190. Big Sur still works great for email, TH-cam, and most web surfing, especially with FireFox. I can still upgrade to Monterey if need be.
dont have mac but damn that chip is fast if the gpu cores can mach 4060 ti and still have cpu cores to do other things. Is that machine noisy when do anything heavy?
Remarkably quiet. They’re notably a lot bigger than Intel processors, but still can pack a hell of a punch. If only they were more able to support native windows workloads and games I suppose.
Have a 2018 Mini that you'd have to pry out of my cold, dead hands. (On it right now, as a matter of fact.) It runs a couple of monitors, is fine at web browsing and does the Affinity Suite with no problem. But its real advantage is I can still run 32-bit apps if I boot it into Mojave (which I have on an external drive). Have a few apps I still use that'll never be recompiled to 64-bit.
I just bought second handed Macbook Pro 2016 touchbar for my daily drive work and I happy how it still can run smoothly in 2024. Might change to silicon once this 2016 total obsolete
Points highlighted are pretty much why I have invested heavily on MacBook Pros such as Boot Camp although I never go for the eGPU setup. I'm still keeping my following MacBook Pro 15 2019 (Personal) and MacBook Pro 16 2019 (Professional). Use case is VMware Fusion running Windows Server and RHEL/Ubuntu x86 based for test bed for system application. Enterprise applications are mostly running x86. The only fear now is that I have is Apple drop OS support entirely for Intel Macs entirely.
Just bought an old Macbook Pro Late 2013 15inch with 2.3Ghz i7 16GB RAM and Nvidia Gt750M. It runs very smooth and is nicely usable. I use it next to my Dell XPS 15 9510 with OLED and RTX3050ti. The old Macbook can still hold up very well in most basic things. I love it.
2013 Mac Pros are still great for Pro Tools for almost no money. I've compared my 10 core 2013 to a new M2 max studio and although the M2 was maybe a little quicker there wasn't much in it!
Apple Silicon doesn't run x86 Virtual Machines. I've tried setting up a solidworks VM in parallels desktop, but it just doesn't work. UMT is sort of working, but getting the Emulated VM to share a folder with the host system... still hasn't worked out for me. I bought a new 18 inch laptop so that i could have a decent mobile CAD workstation...
i got a second hand Alienware 18 R5. it's a beast of a tank but it's really supposed to be my desktop replacement...and for when i need to be slightly mobile, i can fold it up and go @@montaguebarnabasltd
~4:05. This may not have a big impact on old intel machines, but the discussion was kinda getting into Apple silicon at this point. You said you "don't think there's a market for developing games on Macs right now." Did you see the announcements from WWDC23? I'm sad you didn't include a discussion of the Game Porting Toolkit (GPTK). That is the actual solution. Andrew Tsai has some great videos illustrating the power of GPTK. It doesn't require a "huge incentive" for developers. I'm running DirectX titles directly on MacOS Sonoma on a M1 Pro (currently playing Kenshi atm). It's not perfect yet, but holy crap what a big leap for the Mac! Apple took the time to show it off at WWDC last year, and I think there's a reason why Apple included hardware-based ray tracing for the A17 Pro & M3-series chips. This empowers developers with the tools they need to get games running on Apple silicon.
Thanks for getting into detail on this. I remembered there being a big announcement regarding gaming at one of the events while making the vid, but never came back to the GPTK. Should’ve covered it more, and no doubt will in a later video. I don’t think it’s necessarily a full solution to the problem. There’s not a huge demand for games on MacOS, which doesn’t help people spread info about this sort of stuff, or take action. Obviously it’s not the same as having a full release, too. Either way, big leap without a doubt, and should’ve talked about that more!
my 15" 2015 maxed out macbook pro died on me so i upgraded to a 16" m3max macbook pro and am really happy with it. (upgradability and repairability would be nice tough)
I bought the last ever one in 2021 when they started getting phased out and it’s abysmal how hot it gets under strenuous loads. I tried selling mine with original packaging but everyone lowballed for far less than I paid with my college discount
@@montaguebarnabasltd I'd say it holds up better than the crappy Walmart gaming laptop on an ever-decreasing clearance sale which I bought originally for about the price of what I was hoping to sell that MacBook several years ago. No wonder it was at that one completely crumbled in build quality after the years and eventually developed an unfixable issue with the keyboard spamming keys and working only intermittently even after being swapped, luckily the repair guy I gave that laptop to was able to issue a return with the eBay seller and so he didn't charge us at all to recuperate any lost amount. Meanwhile the MacBook does have a pretty solid build quality, while being equivalent in it's specs and so it ran Windows 10 & 11 even pretty well through Bootcamp as a point you made in the video amongst the other reasonings with virtual machine compatibility. To each their own I suppose, I put off on selling it just for now for the time being.
Just recently bought a late 2011 Macbook Pro with 17" non-glare screen for 250€ because my old one broke down and I simplay swapped the 2TB SSD, 16GB RAM, Blu-Ray writer and internal Wifi/BT card (for Continuity and AirDrop) to the new device. Try that with a newer Mac lol.... This is the best FCP and Logic Pro machine ever!
I haven't bought a mac in a while I just got a Dell vostro and turned it into a hackintosh but do want to get the apple silicon mac this year and all I'm going to complain about is the upgradability
ARM64 was set to replace x86 long before M1 released, Apple were just the first to implement it in a consumer laptop. The whole point of technology is that it gets better each year. It’s better to sell your device after a couple years and buy the latest.
Great video buddy, and I must say I am a big fan of the apple silicon macs however, I do see the value in the Intel ones and I do actually sell quite a lot of them on my eBay store so there is obviously a demand
2018 Mac Mini i5, 32GB of RAM, TB3 eGPU RX 570 XT. I think it performs better than an M1 Mac Mini. I also made the eGPU work on my 2012 Mac Mini quad i7 with good results, despite the Thunderbolt 1 bus. Some problems on a rMBP 2012 with dGPU, so if you're planning to use an eGPU, prefer Intel Macs without a dGPU.
I use a 2015 MBP (a 2.8GHz CPU version with 16GB RAM and a 2TB SSD, running Sonoma), got spare ones of those (less than 120 USD's each) and I also have 2012 MBP's (with the HDD replaced by SSD). I don't use windows and I don't customize that much. And I destroyed more than one M2 MBP, although technically one was bitten into. In Apple's quest to make nice thin light laptops, they made ones that are a bit more fragile. As a photographer and writer I don't need a powerful laptop, not does it have to be a small one. I need a laptop that's durable, cheap to replace if something goes wrong, offering enough storage capacity without working with external drives, powerful enough to edit my photos and be a Mac (for several reasons). The old MBP is just the thing I need. I don't like the risk of having a really expensive machine with me, knowing the sort of conditions it will be in. My 2015 MBP is a rather cheap machine that still packs a punch and can do everything I need. It survived arctic and tropical conditions. And it being technically the 2nd one, because the first one eventually died after I tried to build a usb-c port IN it (which did work on number 2). I have a newer MacBook. However, I use the 2015 one more and I absolutely love it more, even with its shortcomings.
Your comment leaves me with a lot of questions, but first, congrats on finding a very suitable set of machines for your workflow. The 2.8 2015s are very solid. Now… - Can we see the USB-C 2015 Pro? - How did your laptop get… bitten into…? - where did you find 2015s for 120 bucks a piece?? Thanks for watching :)
I use an older intel mac because it lets me do everything I need under macOS, windows and linux. Loosing the ability to dual boot windows and linux on the M1 is just too much to give up for my use case.
I’m running Mac OS SONOMA on my 2013 MBP 15. Runs better now then it did on Sonoma then it original Mac OS mavericks. Oh and the case has never been opened.
I personally think the only Apple Silicon Macs that are worth buying are the laptops. The Mac Studio and M2 Mac Pro can hardly count as upgradeable as the SSDs in both are tied to the SoC, and I guess you can put in PCIe SSDs into the M2 Mac Pro but it's just not worth what Apple are asking for, and the iMac is just stupid, so really the only options that are worth getting are a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with a dock of some kind to use as a desktop. You get the best of both worlds then, a desktop when you want it and a laptop when you need it, that's how I do it at the moment, current setup is a 14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro 10-core, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD connected to a Lenovo USB-C dock with two DisplayPort monitors and all the peripherals I used on my old desktop PC. It works pretty well, super fast, runs cool and I only ever hear the fan running when HandBrake is compressing video, it's dead silent otherwise.
Honestly, good take. I agree with most of that. I do worry the GPUs in the laptops are gonna age a lot quicker than the rest of the parts, since the industry moves on so quickly.
I still have a 2012 MacBook pro retina i7 and I think it time to upgrade, I've changed the thermal paste and cleaned its fans but it won't stop heating up, I guess its now time to change it!!
WOYS Discord!
Really excited to talk about Macs, upgrades, accessories and repairs with you guys.
Hop in and tell me about your Mac setup…
discord.gg/ZMpSk875qN
2012 macbook pro owner here, running sonoma and upgraded to 16GB of ram and 1TB SSD. Still on it's original battery too, although it's nearing 900 cycles.
How did you get macOS Sanoma to run natively on a 2012 Mac?
@@randomdude1053 through opencore.
@@randomdude1053 opencore legacy patcher. I updated mine last week and impressed with the results. Happy Hackintoshing 😊
@@randomdude1053 OCLP is your friend
I thought my 2015 MBP was old enough 😂 thanks for letting me know how wrong I am 😂🎉
All valid points, I think the Mac Pro 2013 deserves an honorable mention as a hobby PC due to the prices falling as they should have long ago.
Thanks a bunch!
Yeah I probably should have talked more about them. Only issue is their heat problems, and lack of huge improvements over the 5,1. Still a nice price these days
Yup, I used the 2013 Mac Pro as a plex server for a couple years before getting a gaming pc. I literary sold the 2013 for a bit more than I paid for and used it for more than 2 years lol
I’m still using my 2 Mac Pro 2010 and Mac Pro 2013 , Mac Pro 2013 has a eGpu connected with a Radeon Vega 56.
Speaking of the 2013 Mac Pro, I'm actually thinking about grabbing myself one to use for web browsing and creative stuff using older (but more reliable) iLife software.
Once my paycheck comes in, I'll definitely invest in a secondhand one.
@@TheBalkanSpyI’m curious how you went about making it a pled server, just got my hands on a 2009 Max Pro and was thinking about making it a server
Im more worried about the software. If Apple stops rolling out Updates to any Intel-based mashine, you'll not be able to install the newer OS on unsupported devices due to the different CPU-architechtures. Opencore will die evenuelly and there is nothing we can do about it. You'll need to buy the newest tech if you want to run MacOS, where hte RAM and SSD's are soldered to the board and Apple just messes with the consumer market, by charging absurd prices for fixing dead SSD's. Anyway, you still did a good job explainung the pros and cons when buying Intel-based Macs.
Very good points. That’s the main thing holding Intel Mac Pro users back these days. It’s akin to the PowerPC obsolescence. Only a matter of time.
Thanks a lot for watching!
Post Sonoma Mac OS shall still be intel capable (this give in theory 3 years of security update) putting us in theory in 2027
Then indeed Switch to Linux or Windows will become the only viable way to continue safe usage I personally put my hope into Linux which is okay for casual usage and works well on most Intel Macs
That's what windows and Linux is for🤔
A used 2019 is the best buy with used AMD 6950 and third party memory and pcie SSD and run windows orinic
@@Tigerex966 you’d be paying for things like the T2 chip, the airport card and more that you’d never use to their full extent. Seems like a really poor move to buy a $5k Mac to run windows lol
Intel Mac can run older macOS ( games-app 32/64) and dual boot, can run 3 or more display. I’m allow to upgrade my own GPU, HD/SSD/PCI slot PCI.. Intel Mac have Blu ray drives
A lot of which I covered in my video, lol. Thanks for watching ❤️
The 2012 imac is my favorite, its one of the last repairable and reliable macs
@@Warp2090 Isn't that the 2011? I'm pretty sure the 2012 was the new thin form
@@jeffreyvai6750 I meant macbook pro sorry
I bought last year a 2019 16” MacBook Pro for the reason that all engineering apps are only available on windows. I’m talking about Revit, autocad plant 3D, aveva e3D etc.
It’s noisy and battery life is not great, but the build quality and the possibility to boot both in macOS and windows is priceless. If I had the possibility to run my engineering apps on the new Mac’s I would switch immediately. And parallels is not a solution, I need hardware accelerated graphics.
I’d heard about that, yeah. There definitely are still strong incentives to buy x86 despite what people say. Thanks for the insight!
Lmao, you could have gotten something other than a Mac, like a ThinkPad!
why are you even using a mac then? you should have a windows gaming laptop with an nvidia graphics card for what you are doing.
Just get a windows machine. You probably paid on that Mac the price for a very capable windows machine.
Bro bought inferior 5 years old macbook to run windows on it. New midrange windows laptop outperforms it and is upgradeable for much lower price lol. What was the point? Intel macbooks are dead. Forgotten. They still cost a lot and offer literally nothing. Just buy a M2 Air instead of any intel macbook, that passively cooled M2 Air will outperform the older i9...
I'm still using a Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015 and I love it. It's still my go-to laptop despite also having a 14" 2021 Pro machine as well.
I have a BTO 2015 15” MBP. Fantastic machine hobbled only by its aging battery (and if I’m honest, the fans crank up all the time).
And the design has aged incredibly well…looks right at home next to my M2 MBP and Studio Display.
Also have 2015 MBP. Battery needs to be replaced. Thinking loud fans happen Bec of poor battery. Love all the ports. I was thinking of replacing battery to use a lil longer as daily laptop but got tempted with MBA M2 15 16/1tb at $1499.
@@JimmyDoresHairDyeI have the same laptop and my fans used to go up all the time, one hardware fix helps: putting in new thermal paste between the CPU and vapour tube (you'll find tutorials online, it's easy). Also don't open too many tabs on your browser and no 60 fps videos on youtube...(just chose a lower frame rate/resolution)
Mine runs hot like a toaster, can't even put on lap after 10 mins.
Apple M chips are way way better
i currently use a 2015 27 inch 5k imac in my office. let me tell you, they dont make them like this anymore, this thing is a work of art. windows guys just dont get how we could be happy with 10 year old machines. its becasue with windows 10 year old machines are as good as junk. with apple, this shit just lasts. they just dont get it.
i sold my M1 TB 13" MacBook Pro back in 2023 and bought a 16" i9 TB MacBook Pro... i loved the performance of the M1 in Luminar or FCPX but for i really wanted that bigger screen size! A Thin but still decent sized, portable Mac... I started to see the REAL benefit of the Intels by a couple of Weeks and Months, for me it is surprisingly the Touchbar is what holds me back from upgrading, also the phenomenal Speakers on this thing! Never heard such good speakers in any laptop. Also the Quad Thunderbolt Port selection is a major point for me, i personally never use HDMI or a SD card reader... I mean yes it gets burning hot when cutting Video, Editing Photos or just putting it under a heavy workload BUT it still runs perfectly in alomost any condition performance wise! I could go on and on why i still love my i9 Mac :)
Yeah I don’t believe you at all lmaoo, no way you convinced yourself to downgrade that bad. What a terrible decision
I upgraded my mothers 5k iMac (2015) with 16gb of RAM, changed the Fusion Drive for a SSD and renewed its thermal paste. Having the capability of upgrading is something I miss about the ARM Macs because its kind of a hobby. I did this to several iMacs and changed the battery on a retina MacBook Pro.
why did they call it a fusion drive not a hard drive 😂 typical apple trying to be special
@@Warp2090 It’s called Fusion Drive because it contains a HDD but also SSD. First Apple used a 128gb PCI SSD and a HDD for fusion drives and those were pretty good but they changed it for the 5k iMac. Only models with 2tb or more get a 128 ssd for their fusion drives, if you only have 1 TB you get a 24gb flash storage and 24gb is nothing. Unfortunately my mother has the 1 TB version and I didn’t knew it when we bought it, I thought it was the same as in my 2013 iMac
@@gockelxxxxxl9584 ohh I see
@@Warp2090 It was a beefed up SSHDD
recently replaced battery of my MacBook Pro 2014, cleaned up dusty inside and added new thermal paste.
running smoothly again, not bad for a 10 year old laptop.
I have a 13" 2016 Macbook pro, with 16 GB of RAM and I upgraded the ssd to 2 TB. I have it plugged into a doc and use it as a desktop machine, and it works great. Additionally, I have made a Dell Latitude into a hackintosh, running Sonoma 14.3 with a 1 TB SSD and 32 GB of RAM. It runs incredibly fast. I have no desire to pay for Apple's M1 or higher, can't be upgraded, Macintrashes until I am forced to, and my machines become unusable.
The Dell sounds like a really interesting machine. What’s the model name at base?
The 2016 sounds good but I would worry about thermal performance. Docked I’m sure it’s no big issue, though.
Thanks for watching!
if you tried an m2 pro or similar it would blow you away with how much faster it is than what you are using.
@@montaguebarnabasltd It's a Dell Latitude 5480
@@jameszaccardo1520 I have a M3 Macbook pro, at work, and yes, it is amazing. However, not ready to pay the apple tax, for a new one, when I can still use my ones that are paid for.
@@paulwaldrop the m3 was the rip off one. i mean, they are all rip offs. but with the m3 they really decided to take it up a notch.
i bought a refurb late 2015 5k iMac right before c*vid hit in 2020, then didn't need it. just pulled it out of the box a few months ago and stuck 64 gigs in it. probably won't upgrade the OS past Sonoma. fantastic machine.
I work in IT, and I have a 2019 MBP with Windows and macOS.I tend to favor macOS, but I do have Windows for support or running various other tools if needed.
You should do intel book too, why both in one ?
@@lucasrem Much easier to have one laptop in my bag than 2. When Mac OS stops supporting the i9 chip, then I will have to change.
virtual machine support also seems to much better which is great for cybersecurity
I still use a PowerBook from early 2011- the LAST 17" screen model. It was my dad's old work laptop (he personally bought it)... and I moved it to Fedora 39 a while back, it's amazing for it's age.
I need to get a 2.5" solid state drive to really get more out of it, but for it's age and size... it's really nice... And with Linux it even gets modern updates and security. Not a bad machine honestly.
BEST OF ALL... people using older machines that are capable for the common tasks online and such... it prevents E-waste and throwing are GOOD hardware.
Hell yeah!! Really glad you’re finding a use for it. Loved the 17” a lot.
Agree with your last point, too.
I run my 2015 Macbook Pro tri-boot. Win11, Ubuntu 22 and that other OS. All apple has is the NeXT unified smart copy+paste buffer everything else is passé.
I recently had a phone call with a co-worker about a software problem. He was on the latest Intel Mac generation, I was on a Macbook M2 Pro. We both fired up XCode at the same time to look into the source code. On my machine, XCode was up in a few seconds on the project. On the other end of the call it took minutes.....
The big problem with the last few Intel MacBook pros that Apple made is the fact that they were too thin and the CPU could not be cooled properly. This culminated in one model year being slower than the one that proceeded it because the CPU would thermal throttle and as a result perform slower than the last generation MacBook. The fact is that the Intel MacBook became far too thin and they could not dissipate heat effectively, compounded with the fact that the design never could dissipate heat all that well in the first place.
My favorite thing about my M2 MacBook Pro is the fact that I can use it on my lap without cooking my legs, like I had done for so many years…
I have a 2009 cMP that’s been upgraded as much as it reasonably can be (dual 3.33 6 core xeons, 1080 GTX, 32GB RAM, NVME storage) but my M2 MBP runs circles around it, and works flawlessly with my studio display, and can be taken on the road, etc. If it wasn’t for the fact that I occasionally need a windows machine, I’d have no use for it (though I will NEVER get rid of it)
It’s a brilliant machine that has remained useful way longer than it has any right to but it’s now 15 years old and that’s practically prehistoric in computer years.
I wish there was a way to get a modern Intel motherboard in there along with modern GPUs (you can run modern GPUs in the old cMP but you’re going to experience massive CPU bottlenecks, negating any kind of performance advantage), RAM, Thunderbolt, etc. The cMP still remains the one of the best cases ever - it still looks fantastic and fresh today. If only we could get modern hardware and macOS running on it.
That said, anyone know how to make a cMP form factor logic board based on 2024 architecture? :-D
ofc its gonna run miles around it
Payed $20 for a mid 2012 MacBook pro, non rentna. Best $20 I've ever spent.
My old Macbook 2012 was great at running Linux,I was sorry when it finally gave up the ghost as it gave great service as a Linux machine.
My everyday work and gaming computer is an M1 Max Mac Studio, which I'm extremely happy with (and before that, an M1 Mac Mini), but I have a growing collection of Intel and PowerPC Macs, many of which see frequent use.
I use a mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro or an 11-inch 2013 MacBook Air as my work commute laptop, I use a 2013 trashcan Mac Pro for Mac games (mostly 32-bit games) and Photoshop, and I often use a Pismo PowerBook G3 or a Titanium PowerBook G4 to revisit games from my childhood.
My vintage Macs, and the Intel Macs especially, are still very useful and feel fast and capable for light-to-medium tasks and even gaming, and they've been very fulfilling upgrade projects.
My 2010 cheesegrater Mac Pro, in particular, is a screamer: a 3.46 GHz six-core CPU; 48 GB of RAM; a 1 TB NVMe drive; an RX 580; a USB C/3 combo card; two Blu Ray drives.
A good collection of machines! Glad to see lots of them still see use, especially on the oft forgot PowerBooks... I’m especially fond of the 5,1, which half of my videos are about, to be fair.
@@montaguebarnabasltd
Thanks. :)
Funnily enough, I've only ever bought a brand new computer twice in my life: the M1 Mini and the Mac Studio. Every other computer I've ever owned was/is second-hand.
I bought the M1 Mac Mini to replace my heavily-upgraded 2008 Mac Pro, which was a great everyday work and gaming machine for several years until it died in early 2021.
There are a few Macs in my collection that I'm rather proud of.
I've upgraded my trashcan Mac Pro with 64 GB of RAM and a 2 TB NVMe drive.
I recently acquired a 17-inch PowerBook G4 and upgraded it with 1 GB of RAM (it can't see 2 GB for some reason, but 1 GB is plenty) and a 500 GB M.2 SSD. :D
I also acquired a 15-inch aluminium PowerBook G4 and upgraded it with 2 GB of RAM and a 250 GB mSATA SSD.
I installed a 500 GB M.2 SSD in a G4 Mac Mini, and installed a modified fully-bootable version of Mac OS 9.
I semi-retired my G4 Cube after the FireWire ports died, but it's still an impressive machine with dual SSDs (an 128 GB mSATA and a CF card), 1.5 GB of RAM, a cooling fan and a GeForce 2 MX card.
I think I'm most proud of my Pismo PowerBook G3, which has a 128 GB Compact Flash card for a hard-drive, 1 GB of RAM, a USB 2.0 card, new thermal paste and a slot-loading optical drive.
@@QUANTUMJOKER the 17” PowerBook with an NVMe drive is ridiculous. Great stuff though.
I’d be proud of the Pismo too. They might not be powerful with their main components, but flash storage speeds their OSes up considerably.
Bravo.
I love the Apple Logo led light. I really hope they will bring it back.
I doubt that’ll happen in this decade. We’ll see though!
I just bought a 2017 iMac Pro the base option which has 1TB/32gb Ram/8 core cpu/Radeon Pro Vega 8GB etc for $1,600 refurbished from Best Buy. Flawless panel, basically zero damage at all to the body, runs the latest Mac OS with ease, and came with 24 month warranty with my total tech membership.
I always wanted one and I couldn’t be more satisfied for what I’ll be using it for. I have a couple apple silicon Macs as well as a 2020 27 i7 iMac and this 2017 iMac Pro handles everything even on the latest Mac OS Sonoma effortlessly
Honestly do wish I could try one of those. They might not get many more OS updates, but they’re pretty damn powerful to this day. Good buy!
@@montaguebarnabasltdthanks! I was very interested to see how it handled Sonoma and I’ve been so impressed with it! It’s snappy and quick at doing everything which I wasn’t totally expecting to be honest
Over spent I got the same computer with 64 gbs for 800
theres a 27 inch 5k m1 imac out there?
big fkn deal. bro we dont give a fk about saving a little bit of money. not everyone is looking for a deal. not everyone has a scarcity mentality when it comes to money like you do @@Imskyhighy
Loving my 2012 MBP in 2024. High Sierra,16G RAM, fast SSD, runs all I need and more. Full multimedia & digital art studio w basic 1080p video editing no prob. Workhorse. If you take care of your tools they'll take care of you.
I got an 2020 macboook Pro Intel i5 with 16gb RAM from work for $260, because they're moving over to M1. This Intel exports 4k video in resolve faster than real time and from what I can see it operates as fast as an M1 in most areas AND most importantly has 4 thunderbolt ports. M1 is great and all, but I thing I got a deal of the decade.
Well, I have upgraded several old basic macbooks (maxing the memory and installing a SSD) along with a few 2012 15" Macbook Pros. From what I see with a more typical Apple Mac user, they basically use it for Internet, and the occasional office application. So, an upgraded Pro does quite well for them. I just bought one for $100 to have as a swap out for future upgrades (Some in my family are Apple fans, don't know why, but they are.) for family members.
>8 gb ram, swap kill ssd
>ssd and ram soldered to board
>OVERPRICE
I got a refurbished late 2014 MBP 16/512GB and I have side loaded the newest MacBook OS(Sonoma).
It looks amazing and has works perfectly.
As much as I like the newest MBP in midnight, I can’t justify the ridiculous prices they cost. And the hardware is nowhere near as durable these days as it used to be in the mid 2010’s.
Glad youre finding use from the old machine! Yeah there’s no need to upgrade for that kind of money, if you don’t need it.
And the 17" has very good screen realestate and good quality of image for when it was built.
I intend to make a video on that asap. Miss the 17” size still
Upgrade-ability, repaire-ability . Ability to run 32 bit software and 64 bit is why I run windows 11.
I picked up a late 2012 MBP (Catalina) for $130 CDN for the single purpose of running REW and miniDSP Device Console to fine tune DSP setting on 2x4HD on two separate multichannel audio systems. While the MIDI controller won’t properly map more than 7.1 surround ( i.e. Atmos, etc) , and a mini display port to HDMI adapter is required to connect to my surround receiver, it works like a charm. The budget priced Dayton calibrated microphone and stand cost more than the MBP, so for a total investment of less than $300, my use case is fully satisfied.
Honestly, for the use it’s gonna see, I think you’ve bought the right machine. Glad you’re finding a purpose for it, and good luck with the project.
@@montaguebarnabasltd Other than a small documented bug in one of the apps that occasionally requires a forced quit and restart, it’s worked like a charm. I’d previously done this job in main audio system with a Mini of approximately the same age - also running Catalina - but the portability of the MBP for this function is a huge benefit. Only remaining question is whether I’d be well served long run in upgrading to Sonoma via the Open Core Patcher app on which I’ve seen several very detailed YT videos?
@@fonkenful I found myself going back to Catalina simply because it was slightly cooler running and smoother than Sonoma on the 2012. If you need a certain feature or support, update using OCLP. If not, don’t.
@@montaguebarnabasltd exactly the answer I needed - thanks
So happy to find your channel. 2017 mbp owner here. I'm so bitter about being stuck in this ecosystem. For audio, windows can be really shaky.
Thanks for watching!
Yeah I’m in a similar situation for video and photo work. It’s just a bit more seamless on macOS.
@@montaguebarnabasltd Tbh Mac OS may be seamless and whatever but one thing that is a fact is that Windows or Linux PC's are simply so much better in terms of user friendliness, they can be repaired and upgraded very easily. Windows may not be perfect but most of the issue it has can easily be fixed
@@Warp2090 generally it’s a matter of use case. Like this guy said, audio production is a better experience on macOS. Other stuff, Windows can surely beat it on!
I use my 2011 MacBook Pro because it’s actually modifiable and I only use it for college coursework, which consists of using Canvas, making and using Google docs, sheets, using visual studio code, anki, and mainly using Firefox as the web browser with various web browser sites like ChatGPT and TH-cam, I also use windows natively but love how the MacBook connects to my Apple products
I was surprised that there was no mention of 2014-2020 iMacs, particularly the 2014 and 2015 models. 2014s can be had for under $200 and 2015s for under $300. I bought my 2015 iMac 27 five months ago. It has an i5, came with 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB hard drive. I added an external SSD from my parts box and it's perfectly fine for running my office programs. So $200 for a 5k monitor, great speakers, webcam, and microphones, Apple keyboard and mouse. I was looking to buy a Dell Ultrasharp 4k 27 inch but those are around $500-$600.
I don’t have space to buy iMacs unfortunately. Have never had one so they get an unfair amount of mentions compared to other computers on this channel I think, yeah.
Might do a video in the future talking about some of those deals. The 2015 does sound like a good buy!
iMacs seem to be overlooked by Apple fans, but I've always loved them despite being a lifelong Unix/Windows user. I own a 2012 iMac and the screen is still breathtaking. iMacs are an amazing package. Small form factor with great screen.
@@VincentW2 really, I’ve overlooked em. When I’ve the space and money I hope to pick up an i9 27”
@@montaguebarnabasltdI actually got a 2019 imac for 350 with 32gbs of ram I placed a bid and won and it has radeon to in the 21.5 inch size.
@@stpworld very decent. Mad luck!
1 word for me: BOOTCAMP. but I still prefer MSeries for macOS but Windows on ARM is absolutely dog garbage
Gotta agree with you there
I have an M1 MBP and an M1 MBA but all I want to use is my 16" Intel i9 MBP. I just love the damn thing.
Interesting topic. Just 2 additional tips - with an OpenCore OCLP installer, 2012-17 macs can run the most recent OS Sonoma almost perfectly. Also for eGPU a great use case is for local AI training with a Nvidia GPU (from 3060 and up) - under Win/Linux, if you don’t want to build a brand new box. Many Windows laptop/mini/sff models lack Thunderbolt, and therefore does not eGPU. Mac Mini 2018 is the most cost effective model to run this. And AI on m1/2/3 is still under early development.
Thanks for watching!
Yeah OCLP is something I take as read on this channel in some ways. I probably should have highlighted it more in the video.
I’m honestly not very interested in eGPU setups, but that sounds quite cutting edge. Interested to see how it develops…
I have a maxed out 2012 MBP and a pretty high end 2019 MBP. The only downside of running Windows on them (native or VM) is that it runs hotter, so MacFansControl app is important.
Especially on the 2019, I bet. Nice machines though!
My 2009 white macbook still works to this day, runs a lightweight linux distro
Among my favourite models. Nice work!
I miss those!! Which distribution?
The switch to Apple Silicon was the motivation for me to switch back to Windows. They made me choose between the operating system I loved for 11 years, and my 33 years of PC gaming. I intend to keep gaming till the day I die, so Apple basically said said they don't want my money. I guess Tim Cook is a game-o-phobe.
Yeah. windows might not be perfect, but apple is at its worst right now. Its best to stick with Linux or Windows.
@@Warp2090 Why is Apple at its worst now?
@@tebhernandez it's obvious
@@Warp2090 can you explain
@@tebhernandez anti repair and upgrade, plus they dont last more than 5 years most of the time
Rhino for mac v8 only just released to work on apple silicon and it's a crash fest so I'm still on Intel.
I have a 2017 MacBook Pro. Apple replaced the keyboard, battery and top case a year ago. The machine is a dream to use. This MacBook is only used for productivity purposes and it fulfills that role perfectly. At some point down the road, I'll get a Silicon Mac but not right now.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I’m glad yours is useful, and sure it’ll last you a few more years!
You better gonne be careful with flexgate problem 😅
@@napst3r1 yeah
Did you have AppleCare with it?
For a Musician with tones of Plugins and Virtual instruments not compatible with Silicone Macs it was just absolutely a downgrade for me to upgrade. Now what i did is I got the last Imac 2020 27 inch with 3.8ghz 8 core i7 and 8gb GPU with 16 GB of Ram but i upgraded to 64GB.I Bought the Imac and the ram on my local bestbuy for less than $1k this was new on clearance and this was to replace my 2013 Imac that was already struggling even after i did a few upgrades including morr ram an ssd. The 2020 Imac was the best decision for me I keept all my Plugins and VSTs. This thing is a monster so fast on logic pro where RAM is the most important thing. No regrets.
That last Intel iMac seems like a bit of a beast, yeah. I’ve heard musicians get a lot better performance out of Intel Macs, so will take that into account in my next videos…
I probably should have done that.
I was happy with my 2012 MBP, but by 2018 I needed something more current that I could upgrade too. After a lot of internal debate, I went back to a Windows based PC and laptop. Doubled the ram on the laptop, and I put in two 2 TB m.2 nvme SSDs. It was easy peasy with no painful decisions that I had to live with because the specs could never change. Every once in awhile I think about an M2 Max or even an Ultra, but what I have now is cheaper and does what I need it to do. Apple makes appliances, and I need a computer. It's just one of those things.
I was personally close to give up on my MacBook Pro 2010 which I’ve upgraded to the max possible mentioned in the video (matte / i7 / SSD / 8gb ram)
Overall Sonoma works okay for basic tasks and and I ended up buying a new battery.
In case Mac OS 15 is the last open core can patch, it will still extend his lifetime until technically 2027 for security updates.
If it manages to survive, I will likely end up putting some Linux. They are still power pc distro maintained around so I’m not worried to find one for intel i7 even in 3 years.
I guess it strongly depends of the usage everyone wants to make. In my case I’m already happy to have a 14 years MacBook still beating apple obsolescence.
Yeah 14 years on a 2010 is unreal. Nice work!
Best of luck keeping it up to date. I’m sure you’ll find at least 3 more years very doable.
Disable the iOS widget and the new screen saver you won’t feel any lag under normal use for 2010-12 models. And, disable/minimize iCloud sync services - drive, music, photos calendar etc also helps.
@@montaguebarnabasltdActually a 2007 24” iMac is still quite usable with macOS 10.11, even without patching to 10.13 via CPU upgrade.
Thanks for this! I am a vintage Mac user, from 2008 and 2012I they are long past OS upgrades, but they are the most reliable of machines. Since I retired, they are just fun machines now. If I need a battery or a part or two, IFixit is just a call away.
Physically very reliable machines, indeed. Thanks for watching!
But the SoC approach does come with latency advantages, nowadays thin and light windows laptops are also doing this
I’m a pretty big Intel Mac guy but one of the things Apple has done that’s kinda ended Intel Macs is not adding AMD 7000 support. Kinda makes my 2019 not worth it
That’s certainly something I should’ve gone over properly in the video. Very disappointing to see how the 2019 was snubbed.
PS. I’m a big, big fan of your content. Have probably read every word in your 5,1 guide. Means a lot to have you watch my video!
Very informative. Well presented.
I have an iMac Pro with a Vega 56, plus, 3 eGPU: a 6800 and two 6900. I use it for Redshift and its quite, quite fast. Electricity bill is a thing, but still, not a complain. And also, if you can get a MacBook Pro with a 5600 GPU plus an extra eGPU with the 6900 AMD card, you still have a great machine nowadays.
That’s a great great mac. One of my all time faves. Pity about the power draw, but honestly for a desktop the Intel Macs can all make some really solid machines with the right setup.
You can bench mark all you want. In real use case scenarios with video editing and audio production, my 2018 i9 Macbook Pro outpreforms my M2 Mac Studio hands down in every way.
To be completely honest I don’t believe you lol
@@montaguebarnabasltd how? its a literal i9. Those things are BEASTS
@@Warp2090 They were beasts in some regards. I used a 2019 16” and a 2020 M1, and my M1 is astonishingly better.
@@Warp2090 ryzen 9 better
@@Warp2090 plus arm chips are less hot, and heat matters
I still use a 2013 Intel MBA. I’ve upgraded the RAM, replaced the battery and keyboard, and replaced the original SSD with a fast nve drive. With OpenCore it runs Monterey perfectly.
The ARM MBA is very nice but with no fan it thermal throttles under sustained load, which I need (compiling). This is not an issue on the Intel as I can control the fan.
And it’s difficult to justify buying a machine that will become e-waste WHEN its proprietary non-replaceable SSD dies. This is especially true of used machines with just 8GB of RAM.
A LOT of these Silicon macs will start dying in the next five years and there will be no way to fix them.
Yeah the ARMs are not exclusively a step forward. There’s a lot I’d prefer to use my Intel machines for, were it not for their less efficient CPU hardware.
Apple Silicon Macs are incredible. I bought a Mac Mini M2 Pro a month ago and it is a total beast. But a year ago I also bought a Macbook Pro 13 2017 inch without touch bar for approx. 500 euros used in very good condition and it is still incredibly good for HomeOffice and even video editing.
They're fine I guess as long as you don't use the SSD much. Poweruser SSD usage ==> dead after six months.
I upgraded my friend's early 2015 macbook air from macos monterey to vanilla windows 10. While in MacOS, the computer estimated 3 DAYS for a simple folder copy of an app. (App's size was 64 mb) Now in Win10 with drivers installed, it preserved its former glory when it was fast and well optimized on MacOS. I also did this to an Early 2014 MBA and it also performs very well. To be concise, Windows is a very well optimized OS for everything you can imagine. Just go with windows if you have problems with macos or perhaps linux, in my case I did.
I can honestly say it’s always been the other way around for me, with MacOS the optimised OS. I guess the takeaway from this is neither OS is perfect
I wanted to buy the macbook pro 2019 16 for my engineering degree and run windows on it thinking the battery life will outperform any windows out there in its price range, or am i wrong on this? The budget is 700 euros
Still have my original Macbook 2008 where I upgraded the memory to 8GB and 1TB SSD. It have multiple versions of Windows using Parallel and it is an amazing machine. I would only get an M? Macbook if I get a crazy deal from it probably after the M4 comes out.
I loved those. The ones with the little door to access the battery and HD!
Using MacBook Pro 13" 2015 and 12" 2017 on a daily basis for light work like typing, email, Arduino programming, and so on (2024).
The only reason I would get intel macbook pro, would be the price and piece of mind. Being a photographer(no video editing) that travels, the potential of damaging the computer is actually real. $500 or less provides you with a decent machine in terms of RAM and storage to take care of your basic needs on the road with an amazing screen. If you buy the last ones of the breed you have another 5-6 years of updates for a very small monetary outlay.
Very fair. Your reasoning is sound!
I just bought a 2019 intel mac with 32 gb ram for $200 USD. It works amazingly well and if I wanted to, I can dual boot it with linux, even install linux or Windows on an external SSD. It runs very fast, as long as I use Catalina on it. I don't use it for gaming, but for what I use it for, it boots up fast and works very well. Why would I spend $4k for a new macbook pro?
Lol that dosdude1 pic was of my World's Fastest 2009 Mac Mini 😂 Great video bud!
Woahhh it must’ve come up when I searched for his stuff, my mistake. I’ll put a card up linking your video later today.
Thanks for watching!
@@montaguebarnabasltd that was his video but he built it for me. It’s been in multiple videos of mine and also in a Computer Clan video.
@@HrutkayMods ohhhh I see what you mean. Well, a very interesting computer, nonetheless.
I have a 2019 intel equipped mbp and a 2022 (I think) m1 mba.
I mostly work in macOS, so I don’t worry about other OSs. I love the MBA. It’s light, battery is amazing and it just feels faster in all of my day-to-day uses.
But the thing that my intel powered laptop can do far better than the newer Apple silicon powered laptop is drive external monitors.
Apple really dropped the ball with that imo.
The intel MacBook Pro feels like a desktop replacement when paired with a thunderbolt dock and some external monitors. The Apple powered MacBook Air never feels like anything more than a very, very, good laptop which sometimes has an external monitor hooked up.
You’re absolutely right about the monitors. Apple could very easily engineer the ability to support more monitors better into their M chip MacBooks, but I think they’d rather leave that for the desktops in order to push people to make another purchase.
Both of those are nice laptops, anyway.
I bought the last Intel Mac (2019 16” MBP) and I plan to keep it as long as humanly possible
Besta luck to you
@@montaguebarnabasltd thanks :)
Not having the latest macOS is a dealbreaker to me. I’m a software developer..
software developer with only one computer? come on bro step your game up. i as an accountant have 2 intel macs and 2 apple silicon macs. all have different use cases
I gave my grandson my intel macbook pro which he still uses. I have a 27 inch imac with 32 gigs of memory. You could not ask for a better looking screen and I could easily upgrade the harddrive to a ssd, the memory to 64 gigs of memory and other upgrades. A beautiful machine. Allow me to mention that I realize that I cannot update the OS anymore, however if it should come to it I understand that Linux would run brilliantly on it.
Those are some really nice screens. Love the upgradeability factor on them!
I can’t work out whether Linux is worth learning about yet. For me it may never be, but we’ll see.
I wish someone would come up with a graphics fix (other than bypassing the dedicated) for the late 2011 macbook pros
Don’t we all. Still hope to get one and disable the graphics one day lol
I do have an 2020 M1 MacBook Air base model, it’s crazy that it beats my i7-7700k workstation by like 1000 point on Cinebench! I mainly use my systems for cpu intensive tasks so graphics is different story. I don’t even play any games so i dont care about the graphics card too much on any of my machines. I bought the Air to replace my old MacBook Pro Late 2011 and the performance difference is huge! 😂 I do still use my old for sd cards and usb drives etc cause i dont have any dongles yet.
We re paid apple hundreds of dollars to make them better and thinner then they remove necessary ports so lots of people carries dongle mayhem in their bag (including myself). Such an idiotic circumstance…
@@berkinerengurman1401 Yeah you are absolutly right! I still love their stuff tho XD But i really hope that they bring atleast few ports back, atleast the sd and usb a. I am not sure about the pro etc models but i am not fan of that usb c charging at all, i liked the magsafe alot.
talking about local prices, my 2015 macbook air was $150 and I could put a ridiculous 2TB SSD upgrade on it, an M1 macbook air is $800, $150 dollars was already a big enough expense, can't justify $800 when that's like 3 months of work
Watching this on my mid 2009 MacBook Pro running El Capitan with maxed out 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD that I recently installed after my third failed HDD. I've thought about buying something newer for a long long time now, but it's so discouraging to see that all of the upgrades for the new Macs these days have to be bought upfront for crazy prices and that there's no way to upgrade them later on. This video really affirmed my feelings towards the whole thing. Until my laptop literally quits booting up one day, or I actually need something more powerful, I just can't justify paying thousands for a machine that will be outdated in a few years, although it can be very tempting seeing how slim, lightweight, fast and pretty the new MacBooks are! Was considering maybe taking a middle ground and finding a newer used intel i7 or i9 iMac and maxing out the internals instead....
Happy to hear the video meant something to you
Yeah if it ain’t broke…
I think as long as it performs tasks you need it to you might as well hold off upgrading. If you’re wondering which newer Mac to get though, my next video covers how long each will last ;)
I have a 2012 Macbook Pro and 2012 cMP tower. The fastest unibody you can get on the old style, upgrade friendly chassis is Ivy Bridge based. The 2012 cMP can take up to dual x5960s and 128 GB RAM. If you run it in the 96 GB configuration (memory controller quirk) and leave the sockets near each CPU empty, the system can use all three memory channels fully and you will gain something like 20% performance. Throw in a NVME drive on a PCIe card and it is still a very quick / usable machine once you get rid of the bottlenecks
Can't stand the thought of a fully locked down system. I've had very little hardware fail, but it irks me to not be able to replace wear items (SSD / battery) easily. It's very much a tactic to destroy the used Mac market
Yep, I’ve got several videos on both of those machines on my channel lol.
True about the used market. It’s tanked in the last three years or so.
All your points make me quite happy to be a big box PC guy. This is not a dis at Apple or MacOS, this is a dis at the fact the systems are now entirely locked in. What you see is what you'll get, and that's it forever.
Youre probably experiencing a great setup tbh. Thanks for watching!
I still used intel for dual boot.. I need a bootcamp
I had an old mbp late 2011 fully maxed out. I’m a mobile software engineer, when I made the first upgrade to m1 iMac man did it feel really good. I then upgraded to M1 Max a year later (and I only lost about maybe $100-$200 when reselling the maxed out iMac) and wow I can’t even look back. The only thing that sucks is that wine doesn’t work on some old retro games, but I got a Win 11 VM that actually does work with those games. Just 1 quirk on the Star Wars rebellion space battles. Other than that I’ve been very pleased. Of course not everyone is like me though. I play the retro game consoles on my iOS/iPadOS/tvOS in their respective apps. Only windows retro games I play on my Mac
It’s a stark difference for sure. Glad that went well for you. Yeah VMs are the way forward I would say. For better or for worse…
My "ohh shit everythings dead" sailing navigation solution is a 2008 Macbook running OpenCPN and any iphone running gps2ip. That gives me Sailing charts and GPS location. I have a couple of Polycarbonate 2009 as "spares". Sailing life is exceptionally hard on electronics. Just makes more sense to use something i can replace for less than £100 than a £1000 M1 device.
That’s a really unique perspective, interesting to hear!
Thanks for watching and best of luck with your sailing endeavours…
air 2017 non touch bar a1708 model can also be upgraded but only ssd
As someone in the market for a MacBook, you have been brilliant. These videos have helped me decide. I was close to an Intel Mac, but think I’m going with a MacBook Air M1 now!
That makes me very happy to hear. Thanks for watching!
Intel:
1. Native Windows Support (BootCamp)
2. Native Linux support (Dual OS)
3. Upgradability (Especially on Desktop Computers)
4. eGPU Support (in macOS and Windows)
Just picked up a 2015 MacBook Air with 8 GB of RAM and 512GB for $190. Big Sur still works great for email, TH-cam, and most web surfing, especially with FireFox. I can still upgrade to Monterey if need be.
That’s a very sweet price! Yeah sounds absolutely workable. The 2015 Airs had some unexpectedly decent performance.
dont have mac but damn that chip is fast if the gpu cores can mach 4060 ti and still have cpu cores to do other things. Is that machine noisy when do anything heavy?
Remarkably quiet.
They’re notably a lot bigger than Intel processors, but still can pack a hell of a punch. If only they were more able to support native windows workloads and games I suppose.
Have a 2018 Mini that you'd have to pry out of my cold, dead hands. (On it right now, as a matter of fact.) It runs a couple of monitors, is fine at web browsing and does the Affinity Suite with no problem. But its real advantage is I can still run 32-bit apps if I boot it into Mojave (which I have on an external drive). Have a few apps I still use that'll never be recompiled to 64-bit.
I just bought second handed Macbook Pro 2016 touchbar for my daily drive work and I happy how it still can run smoothly in 2024. Might change to silicon once this 2016 total obsolete
Sounds like a plan
Actually if u go to windows and get drivers for the Mac 2019 it can beat really Any m series Mac’s or to expand life egpu as what you said
Points highlighted are pretty much why I have invested heavily on MacBook Pros such as Boot Camp although I never go for the eGPU setup. I'm still keeping my following MacBook Pro 15 2019 (Personal) and MacBook Pro 16 2019 (Professional). Use case is VMware Fusion running Windows Server and RHEL/Ubuntu x86 based for test bed for system application. Enterprise applications are mostly running x86. The only fear now is that I have is Apple drop OS support entirely for Intel Macs entirely.
Longevity (mainly due to OS support) is what I’m covering in the next video. Should be interesting to see how it pans out for Intel MacBooks!
Just bought an old Macbook Pro Late 2013 15inch with 2.3Ghz i7 16GB RAM and Nvidia Gt750M. It runs very smooth and is nicely usable. I use it next to my Dell XPS 15 9510 with OLED and RTX3050ti. The old Macbook can still hold up very well in most basic things. I love it.
2013 Mac Pros are still great for Pro Tools for almost no money. I've compared my 10 core 2013 to a new M2 max studio and although the M2 was maybe a little quicker there wasn't much in it!
I’m surprised to hear that. I suppose everyone runs different tasks on them. Glad you’ve found the right machine for the right price
Apple Silicon doesn't run x86 Virtual Machines. I've tried setting up a solidworks VM in parallels desktop, but it just doesn't work. UMT is sort of working, but getting the Emulated VM to share a folder with the host system... still hasn't worked out for me. I bought a new 18 inch laptop so that i could have a decent mobile CAD workstation...
Cor I’d love an 18” screen. Glad you found something that worked
i got a second hand Alienware 18 R5. it's a beast of a tank but it's really supposed to be my desktop replacement...and for when i need to be slightly mobile, i can fold it up and go @@montaguebarnabasltd
4:41 "Blud" 💀💀💀
Bro is up to date with the memes.
Also you can upgrade the storage on all the mac's, even M1 and higher but it takes ALOT of skill
~4:05. This may not have a big impact on old intel machines, but the discussion was kinda getting into Apple silicon at this point. You said you "don't think there's a market for developing games on Macs right now."
Did you see the announcements from WWDC23? I'm sad you didn't include a discussion of the Game Porting Toolkit (GPTK). That is the actual solution. Andrew Tsai has some great videos illustrating the power of GPTK. It doesn't require a "huge incentive" for developers. I'm running DirectX titles directly on MacOS Sonoma on a M1 Pro (currently playing Kenshi atm). It's not perfect yet, but holy crap what a big leap for the Mac! Apple took the time to show it off at WWDC last year, and I think there's a reason why Apple included hardware-based ray tracing for the A17 Pro & M3-series chips. This empowers developers with the tools they need to get games running on Apple silicon.
Thanks for getting into detail on this.
I remembered there being a big announcement regarding gaming at one of the events while making the vid, but never came back to the GPTK. Should’ve covered it more, and no doubt will in a later video.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a full solution to the problem. There’s not a huge demand for games on MacOS, which doesn’t help people spread info about this sort of stuff, or take action. Obviously it’s not the same as having a full release, too.
Either way, big leap without a doubt, and should’ve talked about that more!
my 15" 2015 maxed out macbook pro died on me so i upgraded to a 16" m3max macbook pro and am really happy with it. (upgradability and repairability would be nice tough)
I bought the last ever one in 2021 when they started getting phased out and it’s abysmal how hot it gets under strenuous loads. I tried selling mine with original packaging but everyone lowballed for far less than I paid with my college discount
Yeah it’s a real bummer, you got the short straw I’m afraid. Best of luck selling, if you do.
@@montaguebarnabasltd I'd say it holds up better than the crappy Walmart gaming laptop on an ever-decreasing clearance sale which I bought originally for about the price of what I was hoping to sell that MacBook several years ago. No wonder it was at that one completely crumbled in build quality after the years and eventually developed an unfixable issue with the keyboard spamming keys and working only intermittently even after being swapped, luckily the repair guy I gave that laptop to was able to issue a return with the eBay seller and so he didn't charge us at all to recuperate any lost amount. Meanwhile the MacBook does have a pretty solid build quality, while being equivalent in it's specs and so it ran Windows 10 & 11 even pretty well through Bootcamp as a point you made in the video amongst the other reasonings with virtual machine compatibility. To each their own I suppose, I put off on selling it just for now for the time being.
Just recently bought a late 2011 Macbook Pro with 17" non-glare screen for 250€ because my old one broke down and I simplay swapped the 2TB SSD, 16GB RAM, Blu-Ray writer and internal Wifi/BT card (for Continuity and AirDrop) to the new device. Try that with a newer Mac lol.... This is the best FCP and Logic Pro machine ever!
They are the most incredible machines, especially considering the screen size. I do worry about the graphics though. Disabled them?
The thing is that Intel macs are satisfactory that's why. You don't need to photoshop on a supercomputer..
Different strokes for different folks. Some need that, some don’t.
I haven't bought a mac in a while I just got a Dell vostro and turned it into a hackintosh but do want to get the apple silicon mac this year and all I'm going to complain about is the upgradability
ARM64 was set to replace x86 long before M1 released, Apple were just the first to implement it in a consumer laptop. The whole point of technology is that it gets better each year. It’s better to sell your device after a couple years and buy the latest.
Great video buddy, and I must say I am a big fan of the apple silicon macs however, I do see the value in the Intel ones and I do actually sell quite a lot of them on my eBay store so there is obviously a demand
Thanks a bunch!
Yeah people will continue to buy Intel for a couple of years I’d imagine.
2018 Mac Mini i5, 32GB of RAM, TB3 eGPU RX 570 XT. I think it performs better than an M1 Mac Mini. I also made the eGPU work on my 2012 Mac Mini quad i7 with good results, despite the Thunderbolt 1 bus. Some problems on a rMBP 2012 with dGPU, so if you're planning to use an eGPU, prefer Intel Macs without a dGPU.
I use a 2015 MBP (a 2.8GHz CPU version with 16GB RAM and a 2TB SSD, running Sonoma), got spare ones of those (less than 120 USD's each) and I also have 2012 MBP's (with the HDD replaced by SSD). I don't use windows and I don't customize that much. And I destroyed more than one M2 MBP, although technically one was bitten into. In Apple's quest to make nice thin light laptops, they made ones that are a bit more fragile. As a photographer and writer I don't need a powerful laptop, not does it have to be a small one. I need a laptop that's durable, cheap to replace if something goes wrong, offering enough storage capacity without working with external drives, powerful enough to edit my photos and be a Mac (for several reasons). The old MBP is just the thing I need. I don't like the risk of having a really expensive machine with me, knowing the sort of conditions it will be in. My 2015 MBP is a rather cheap machine that still packs a punch and can do everything I need. It survived arctic and tropical conditions. And it being technically the 2nd one, because the first one eventually died after I tried to build a usb-c port IN it (which did work on number 2). I have a newer MacBook. However, I use the 2015 one more and I absolutely love it more, even with its shortcomings.
Your comment leaves me with a lot of questions, but first, congrats on finding a very suitable set of machines for your workflow. The 2.8 2015s are very solid.
Now…
- Can we see the USB-C 2015 Pro?
- How did your laptop get… bitten into…?
- where did you find 2015s for 120 bucks a piece??
Thanks for watching :)
I use an older intel mac because it lets me do everything I need under macOS, windows and linux. Loosing the ability to dual boot windows and linux on the M1 is just too much to give up for my use case.
I’m running Mac OS SONOMA on my 2013 MBP 15. Runs better now then it did on Sonoma then it original Mac OS mavericks. Oh and the case has never been opened.
I personally think the only Apple Silicon Macs that are worth buying are the laptops. The Mac Studio and M2 Mac Pro can hardly count as upgradeable as the SSDs in both are tied to the SoC, and I guess you can put in PCIe SSDs into the M2 Mac Pro but it's just not worth what Apple are asking for, and the iMac is just stupid, so really the only options that are worth getting are a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with a dock of some kind to use as a desktop. You get the best of both worlds then, a desktop when you want it and a laptop when you need it, that's how I do it at the moment, current setup is a 14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro 10-core, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD connected to a Lenovo USB-C dock with two DisplayPort monitors and all the peripherals I used on my old desktop PC. It works pretty well, super fast, runs cool and I only ever hear the fan running when HandBrake is compressing video, it's dead silent otherwise.
Honestly, good take. I agree with most of that. I do worry the GPUs in the laptops are gonna age a lot quicker than the rest of the parts, since the industry moves on so quickly.
I still have a 2012 MacBook pro retina i7 and I think it time to upgrade, I've changed the thermal paste and cleaned its fans but it won't stop heating up, I guess its now time to change it!!
I had the same problem. If you’re trying to get serious work done on it, might be the case.
I had that happen… turn out the fan had failed because of dust.
@@Scarlett.R I checked fan run fine
How do you overcome the “wi-fi not working “ problem a lot of user have after installing Opencore software?
@@wilty5 I changed the Wi-Fi card in my 5,1 Mac Pro. Otherwise I’ve never had that problem, though.
Thanks, I’ve seen the complaint many times on other YT channels where people are attempting this