11/05/2023
Is An Old MacBook Pro Unibody (Pre-Retina) Still Worth It?
After two weeks of using a Mid-2009 MacBook Pro 15 Inch with a Core-2-Duo Dual Core and 8GB Dual-Channel RAM i can say that it was quite underpowered. It was good for browsing the web but struggled with playing a youtube video and frequently dropped frames. The screen resolution is low for todays standards and is not very colour accurate. The build-quality was still great, glass screen, aluminium unibody and a nice feeling scissor switch keyboard. I have also previously used a Mid-2012 13-inch Macbook Pro with the Dual-Core i5 and 8GB RAM. The 13-inch with the more powerful Core i5 was much better and faster. The speakers on the 15-inch were good for laptop speakers for the time and are very usable. The old Unibody MacBook Pro is great for upgrading storage, ram and easy to replace a part if it fails. The 2010 and 2011 15-inch and 17 inch MacBook Pros have a common GPU failure problem which will make them un-usable when they fail. I would recommend avoiding them.
Overall, the Old MacBook Pro Unibody is a good purchase provided you go for the intel Core i5 or i7 and avoid the Core-2-Duo. This will make using the MacBook Pro a much better experience. If you can get a Retina MacBook Pro, i would recommend getting that as its display is much better. I would recommend keeping the max price to £170 as you can get a much better used windows laptop for higher/the same price.
