The Display: A Mixed Bag

I've talked about this display before when discussing unibody MacBook Pros and you can actually get around this somewhat if you go for the anti-glare display which has a higher 1680 by 1050 resolution but this is a 15-inch panel with a lower 1440 by 900 resolution. While it's not ideal, I suppose it's usable, albeit passable. The higher resolution version is definitely better, but it's not great - the viewing angles aren't ideal for content creation and it's just not very color accurate.

It's worth noting that if you're considering buying a mid-2012 unibody MacBook Pro versus a mid-2012 Retina by the unibody, regardless of your intended use case, I would advise against choosing the Retina model with the GT 650m graphics. There's an issue with that voltage controller on the logic board, and the soldering is terrible - it falls apart, the graphics fail, and it's just a pain to deal with. While it may be fixable, it's really not worth the hassle.

Value: A Limited but Functional Machine

So what about this MacBook in terms of value? It's definitely limited when it comes to horsepower - you can't upgrade the CPU or GPU, and that's a major drawback. However, just because it's limited in terms of raw processing power doesn't mean it's limited in terms of functionality. As officially supported under Mac OS Catalina, the graphics are Metal-supported, which means you'll get a full Mac OS experience with features like iCloud, Apple applications, multi-touch gestures, and more. And while it may not be as powerful as newer machines, it's still a capable device.

It's also worth noting that Mac OS support is a unique selling point for this machine. While you can run older versions of Windows on much older hardware, Mac OS is a fully-fledged operating system with its own set of features and applications. And when you're talking about Mac OS, you're not just talking about running the operating system on an old computer - you're also getting access to all of Apple's ecosystem, including iCloud, iMessage, Handoff, Airdrop, and more.

Upgrading for Value

If you can find a mid-2012 unibody MacBook Pro for cheap or have one that's already been upgraded, I'd say it's still a great machine. One of the best ways to get the most value out of this computer is to upgrade it reasonably. I've personally put in a 1TB SSD - it's overkill, but it's also a great way to future-proof the machine and give yourself some extra storage space.

Another good idea is to add some RAM. With a base model starting at $400, you're getting pretty close to the territory of the late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro at that price point. Adding an extra $50 or so for some additional memory can make a big difference in terms of performance and overall usability.

The Verdict: Not the King of MacBooks

So is this mid-2012 unibody MacBook Pro still the king? Definitely not. It's an old machine with its limitations, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't buy one. With some careful upgrading and consideration, you can get a lot of use out of this device. And while it may not be as powerful as newer machines, it's still a capable device that's worth considering for anyone looking to find a good deal on an older MacBook.

In fact, if you're looking for an old machine to buy, I'd definitely recommend avoiding the 2011 models - they're just too limited and prone to hardware failure. But the mid-2012 unibody is a different story altogether. With its support for Mac OS Catalina and all of Apple's ecosystem features, it's still a great option for anyone looking for an older machine that can get the job done.

Ultimately, this machine may not be the most powerful or the most modern, but with some careful consideration and upgrading, you can make it work for you. And at a good price point, it's definitely worth considering if you're in the market for an old MacBook Pro.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is the mid-2012 unibody 15-inch MacBook Pro and it has long been regarded one of the best if not the best MacBook Pro ever made but this thing is coming up on eight years old so what I want to find out is is the 2012 still the king in 2020 regardless of what Mac you're using total AV has got you covered with their antivirus suite that protects against malware and traditional viruses as well as phishing scams that are becoming a lot more common check out the link in the description below to get total AV for just $19.99 annually so I want to start this video by talking about why this was long considered the best MacBook Pro ever made and quite simply for a lot of people it's one word upgradability that was it that's what this thing had to offer this was the last unibody MacBook Pro before the Retina generation took over and it's actually kind of interesting this computer launched at the exact same time as the retina MacBook Pro over the summer of 2012 I hear a lot of people saying that the unibody came out first and then the retina succeeded it later that year that's not true these two launched at exactly the same time and in fact they have pretty much the same hardware obviously the retina has a different design but they have these same processors the same graphics the same Ram it's very very similar this is something I used to love doing they don't do it as much anymore but they used to introduce a new product and just kind of put it on top so this guy started at 1799 but the original retina 8 years ago started at 20 199 so for at least a little while you had a choice between the unibody MacBook Pro and the retina MacBook Pro with the same specs but different designs different architectures and a lot of people picked the unibody MacBook Pros because they were on average about $400 less expensive for pretty much the same performance and you could actually upgrade them so this has an upgradable SATA hard drive you can also upgrade the RAM you can even remove the DVD drive and put a second hard drive in it so the specs of my machine this one is pretty loaded out this has the upgraded 2.6 gigahertz core i7 processor 16 gigabytes of RAM the one gigabyte GT 650 M graphics and I've upgraded mine with a one terabyte solid-state drive so this is pretty much as good as it gets for these unibody MacBook Pros obviously you could theoretically put whatever size SSD and then add a hard drive but that doesn't really matter that doesn't affect performance a whole lot and I know what you're thinking but no you can't put in another SSD and raid0 them unfortunately mac OS doesn't allow you to boot off of a RAID Drive I don't know why so before we break down the overall value why don't we run through some benchmarks to see how this thing performs as far as the CPU goes it's really not that far off of much newer retinas if we compare it to say a mid-2015 which is often people second favorite MacBook of all time you'll notice that they're pretty close now largely that's because Intel frankly didn't have a lot of competition at that time so the CPUs at least mobile CPUs quad core i7s are all gonna perform pretty close to each other from that time period so not a huge upgrade there the graphics are definitely the area where this shows its age so I ran the image in heaven on this MacBook Pro and what I'm gonna do is put a pull-up in the top of the screen and I want you to click on it and vote for which device you think had the exact same score as this MacBook Pro not close they had the exact same score okay so you should have voted by now and the answer is the 20/20 base model MacBook Air they both scored 179 so if that gives you some idea of the context we're looking at here the CPUs are no doubt gonna be much more powerful than a 20/20 MacBook Air than that 7 watt CPU a dual core i3 this is definitely going to be better than that but in terms of graphics these things are old they're it's eight years old there's no getting around that so before we break down the value of this computer let's talk about the usability of this computer because well it might be an 8-year old device it certainly doesn't look that outdated and sure ok it's a little bit thick it's a little bit heavy but overall I wouldn't call this thing outdated if you were to take certain you know like PC laptops from 2012 and go out to a coffee shop with them you'd probably get some some sidelong glances of people like what the heck is that old beast that really wouldn't be the case here I don't think most people would look twice at this computer it looks like pretty much any other MacBook and to the untrained eye it definitely doesn't look old it doesn't feel old it still feels like a high quality device but by and large the design of this computer has held up extremely well considering that this is pretty much a 12 year old laptop design it's kind of crazy the keyboard on this thing is spectacular there's no other word for it this is the original chiclet keyboard that kind of put Apple in the map is making great keyboards until they took themselves off the map when I started making butterflies and in fact why don't we do a walk through the history of all the major Apple keyboards from unibody Retina butterfly to magic so personally I think the current magic keyboard is the best of all of those I think it blends the tactility the click enos of the butterfly keyboard with much better heat travel and reliability of these older keyboards that's just my two cents a lot of people really prefer the retinas and these unibody x' even over the magic keyboard it's personal preference but regardless this is definitely better than a butterfly keyboard to type on so the other important input the trackpad is also fantastic that's where a lot of older laptops even if you're talking like 2015-2016 laptops a lot of them fall short on the trackpad windows laptops are getting a lot better these days they used to have some of the worst trackpads in here I was always using a mouse because they were so bad this is a fantastic trackpad it's pretty much the same trackpad that you'll find on retinas until they introduced the force touch trackpad but it's fantastic it's got all the multi-touch gestures all of the features in Mac OS that you're gonna get great trackpad you're also gonna get a lot of i/o and granted some of it is dated firewire I don't know anyone who uses firewire anymore some people do and they've got it here but by and large the ports are great I love MagSafe it's a great connector USBC is great don't get me wrong but MagSafe you got two USB ports you've got headphone microphone separate Jack's you've got an SD card slot this has some great IO on it now the one area where I think this really falls flat is the display I've talked about this before when talking about unibody MacBook Pros and you can actually get around this somewhat if you go for the anti-glare display which has a higher 1680 by 1050 resolution but this is a 15-inch panel 1440 by 900 and it's not good I mean the thing looks pretty chunky it's usable it's passable and like I said the higher resolution version is definitely a lot but likes it's not great it's not very color accurate the viewing angles aren't great for content creation it's definitely definitely not as good as a retina however I can't talk about retina without mentioning one very important thing if your Cross shopping between a mid-2012 the unibody and a mid-2012 retina by the unibody regardless of what you want to use it for regardless of the conclusions of this video I would advise you if you can to stay away from a retina MacBook Pro with the GT 650m graphics they have an issue with that voltage controller I see on the logic board the soldering is terrible it falls apart the graphics fail it's annoying it's fixable but just don't bother go for one of these or buy a newer retina straight up now I'd like to tie this back around to talk about value so here's the thing about this MacBook it's limited it you cannot upgrade the CPU you can't upgrade the GPU there's no getting around that however just because it's limited in terms of horsepower doesn't mean it's limited in terms of functionality because this is officially supported under Mac OS katalina the graphics are metal supported so you're going to get a full Mac OS experience now I know a lot of people when I say that an 8-year old MacBook is supported and talked about that like it's impressive will point at Windows and say you can put windows on like a Core 2 Duo really really old machines but it's not quite the same comparison here because when you're talking about Mac OS support you're not just talking about putting Mac OS on a computer there's a whole feature set that's associated with that iCloud all of the Apple applications multi-touch gestures metal support airdrop handoff iMessage there's a whole feature set that is accompanied with support and what you can run Mac OS on certain older devices you can run Mac OS you with the Catalina patch or you can run it on really old like 2008 2009 Mac's but this is really a more fully featured experience it's less buggy because it's officially supported and granted this is the end of support for this I doubt that this is going to get updated for Mac OS 10 point 16 that's probably not going to happen but the point is you're still gonna get a full Mac OS experience even though it's old even though it's limited so I think that there's still a lot of value in these Mac books especially if you can find one for cheap and upgrade it reasonably so when it comes to extracting the most amount of value from one of these I would say upgrade it but upgrade it modestly so I've put in a one terabyte SSD that's probably a little bit overkill because you don't want to be putting hundreds of dollars in upgrades into this thing because at that point you might as well buy a newer MacBook if you're gonna spend $400 on a base model put in a hundred dollars for an SSD put in $50 for Ram you're already at five hundred and fifty dollars and sure you're gonna get a nice machine for that amount of money however you're getting pretty close to late 2013 retina macbook pro at that territory and you're gonna get newer processors you're gonna get faster flash storage and you're gonna get better graphics and a much much better display however if you can find one of these for cheap or that's upgraded already for cheap these are still excellent machines even though they're not gonna be supported officially for a whole lot longer you can get a lot of use out of these older unibody MacBook s' and while these I mean the 2012's don't buy a 2011 those are terrible they're all the graphics will fail and you'll die so the ultimate question is the unibody 2012 15-inch MacBook Pro still the king no it's an old computer it's got its limitations but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't buy one this is still a fantastic computer and if you can find one at a good price you'll be very happy so that's going to do it for this video I hope you guys have enjoyed as usual don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Luciani and please consider checking out my subreddit which is a linked in the description below and with that I will see you all in the next videothis is the mid-2012 unibody 15-inch MacBook Pro and it has long been regarded one of the best if not the best MacBook Pro ever made but this thing is coming up on eight years old so what I want to find out is is the 2012 still the king in 2020 regardless of what Mac you're using total AV has got you covered with their antivirus suite that protects against malware and traditional viruses as well as phishing scams that are becoming a lot more common check out the link in the description below to get total AV for just $19.99 annually so I want to start this video by talking about why this was long considered the best MacBook Pro ever made and quite simply for a lot of people it's one word upgradability that was it that's what this thing had to offer this was the last unibody MacBook Pro before the Retina generation took over and it's actually kind of interesting this computer launched at the exact same time as the retina MacBook Pro over the summer of 2012 I hear a lot of people saying that the unibody came out first and then the retina succeeded it later that year that's not true these two launched at exactly the same time and in fact they have pretty much the same hardware obviously the retina has a different design but they have these same processors the same graphics the same Ram it's very very similar this is something I used to love doing they don't do it as much anymore but they used to introduce a new product and just kind of put it on top so this guy started at 1799 but the original retina 8 years ago started at 20 199 so for at least a little while you had a choice between the unibody MacBook Pro and the retina MacBook Pro with the same specs but different designs different architectures and a lot of people picked the unibody MacBook Pros because they were on average about $400 less expensive for pretty much the same performance and you could actually upgrade them so this has an upgradable SATA hard drive you can also upgrade the RAM you can even remove the DVD drive and put a second hard drive in it so the specs of my machine this one is pretty loaded out this has the upgraded 2.6 gigahertz core i7 processor 16 gigabytes of RAM the one gigabyte GT 650 M graphics and I've upgraded mine with a one terabyte solid-state drive so this is pretty much as good as it gets for these unibody MacBook Pros obviously you could theoretically put whatever size SSD and then add a hard drive but that doesn't really matter that doesn't affect performance a whole lot and I know what you're thinking but no you can't put in another SSD and raid0 them unfortunately mac OS doesn't allow you to boot off of a RAID Drive I don't know why so before we break down the overall value why don't we run through some benchmarks to see how this thing performs as far as the CPU goes it's really not that far off of much newer retinas if we compare it to say a mid-2015 which is often people second favorite MacBook of all time you'll notice that they're pretty close now largely that's because Intel frankly didn't have a lot of competition at that time so the CPUs at least mobile CPUs quad core i7s are all gonna perform pretty close to each other from that time period so not a huge upgrade there the graphics are definitely the area where this shows its age so I ran the image in heaven on this MacBook Pro and what I'm gonna do is put a pull-up in the top of the screen and I want you to click on it and vote for which device you think had the exact same score as this MacBook Pro not close they had the exact same score okay so you should have voted by now and the answer is the 20/20 base model MacBook Air they both scored 179 so if that gives you some idea of the context we're looking at here the CPUs are no doubt gonna be much more powerful than a 20/20 MacBook Air than that 7 watt CPU a dual core i3 this is definitely going to be better than that but in terms of graphics these things are old they're it's eight years old there's no getting around that so before we break down the value of this computer let's talk about the usability of this computer because well it might be an 8-year old device it certainly doesn't look that outdated and sure ok it's a little bit thick it's a little bit heavy but overall I wouldn't call this thing outdated if you were to take certain you know like PC laptops from 2012 and go out to a coffee shop with them you'd probably get some some sidelong glances of people like what the heck is that old beast that really wouldn't be the case here I don't think most people would look twice at this computer it looks like pretty much any other MacBook and to the untrained eye it definitely doesn't look old it doesn't feel old it still feels like a high quality device but by and large the design of this computer has held up extremely well considering that this is pretty much a 12 year old laptop design it's kind of crazy the keyboard on this thing is spectacular there's no other word for it this is the original chiclet keyboard that kind of put Apple in the map is making great keyboards until they took themselves off the map when I started making butterflies and in fact why don't we do a walk through the history of all the major Apple keyboards from unibody Retina butterfly to magic so personally I think the current magic keyboard is the best of all of those I think it blends the tactility the click enos of the butterfly keyboard with much better heat travel and reliability of these older keyboards that's just my two cents a lot of people really prefer the retinas and these unibody x' even over the magic keyboard it's personal preference but regardless this is definitely better than a butterfly keyboard to type on so the other important input the trackpad is also fantastic that's where a lot of older laptops even if you're talking like 2015-2016 laptops a lot of them fall short on the trackpad windows laptops are getting a lot better these days they used to have some of the worst trackpads in here I was always using a mouse because they were so bad this is a fantastic trackpad it's pretty much the same trackpad that you'll find on retinas until they introduced the force touch trackpad but it's fantastic it's got all the multi-touch gestures all of the features in Mac OS that you're gonna get great trackpad you're also gonna get a lot of i/o and granted some of it is dated firewire I don't know anyone who uses firewire anymore some people do and they've got it here but by and large the ports are great I love MagSafe it's a great connector USBC is great don't get me wrong but MagSafe you got two USB ports you've got headphone microphone separate Jack's you've got an SD card slot this has some great IO on it now the one area where I think this really falls flat is the display I've talked about this before when talking about unibody MacBook Pros and you can actually get around this somewhat if you go for the anti-glare display which has a higher 1680 by 1050 resolution but this is a 15-inch panel 1440 by 900 and it's not good I mean the thing looks pretty chunky it's usable it's passable and like I said the higher resolution version is definitely a lot but likes it's not great it's not very color accurate the viewing angles aren't great for content creation it's definitely definitely not as good as a retina however I can't talk about retina without mentioning one very important thing if your Cross shopping between a mid-2012 the unibody and a mid-2012 retina by the unibody regardless of what you want to use it for regardless of the conclusions of this video I would advise you if you can to stay away from a retina MacBook Pro with the GT 650m graphics they have an issue with that voltage controller I see on the logic board the soldering is terrible it falls apart the graphics fail it's annoying it's fixable but just don't bother go for one of these or buy a newer retina straight up now I'd like to tie this back around to talk about value so here's the thing about this MacBook it's limited it you cannot upgrade the CPU you can't upgrade the GPU there's no getting around that however just because it's limited in terms of horsepower doesn't mean it's limited in terms of functionality because this is officially supported under Mac OS katalina the graphics are metal supported so you're going to get a full Mac OS experience now I know a lot of people when I say that an 8-year old MacBook is supported and talked about that like it's impressive will point at Windows and say you can put windows on like a Core 2 Duo really really old machines but it's not quite the same comparison here because when you're talking about Mac OS support you're not just talking about putting Mac OS on a computer there's a whole feature set that's associated with that iCloud all of the Apple applications multi-touch gestures metal support airdrop handoff iMessage there's a whole feature set that is accompanied with support and what you can run Mac OS on certain older devices you can run Mac OS you with the Catalina patch or you can run it on really old like 2008 2009 Mac's but this is really a more fully featured experience it's less buggy because it's officially supported and granted this is the end of support for this I doubt that this is going to get updated for Mac OS 10 point 16 that's probably not going to happen but the point is you're still gonna get a full Mac OS experience even though it's old even though it's limited so I think that there's still a lot of value in these Mac books especially if you can find one for cheap and upgrade it reasonably so when it comes to extracting the most amount of value from one of these I would say upgrade it but upgrade it modestly so I've put in a one terabyte SSD that's probably a little bit overkill because you don't want to be putting hundreds of dollars in upgrades into this thing because at that point you might as well buy a newer MacBook if you're gonna spend $400 on a base model put in a hundred dollars for an SSD put in $50 for Ram you're already at five hundred and fifty dollars and sure you're gonna get a nice machine for that amount of money however you're getting pretty close to late 2013 retina macbook pro at that territory and you're gonna get newer processors you're gonna get faster flash storage and you're gonna get better graphics and a much much better display however if you can find one of these for cheap or that's upgraded already for cheap these are still excellent machines even though they're not gonna be supported officially for a whole lot longer you can get a lot of use out of these older unibody MacBook s' and while these I mean the 2012's don't buy a 2011 those are terrible they're all the graphics will fail and you'll die so the ultimate question is the unibody 2012 15-inch MacBook Pro still the king no it's an old computer it's got its limitations but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't buy one this is still a fantastic computer and if you can find one at a good price you'll be very happy so that's going to do it for this video I hope you guys have enjoyed as usual don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Luciani and please consider checking out my subreddit which is a linked in the description below and with that I will see you all in the next video\n"