While the new MBPs are lighter and have longer battery life, they hold little performance edge over this machine in my day to day use of the machine as INTEL has done little to really advance processors in a meaningful way over the years since this machine was designed.

This machine is fast, reliable and delight to use. The logic board nor the display on this machine have ever faltered. I upgraded the machine to Big Sur using a popular patching program along with an upgrade to the latest Broadcom WiFi/BT card (thanks to an enterprising young man) and am running 11.2 currently with no issues outside the ones that are plaguing even the newest MBPs. Both fans have been replaced and most recently I replaced the right side speakers as the woofer section had started to rattle. I have replaced the keyboard only ONCE in that entire time.

The 1TB HDD is still used as an in-machine Time Machine drive for Big Sur. I upgraded to 1TB SSD and a 1TB HDD and moved to APFS once Catalina came along using the HDD as an in-machine daily clone backup drive (used SuperDuper until Big Sur negated the ability to easily create a bootable clone). I upgraded the SSD to a larger one and rolled the SSD and HDD into a FUSION drive using the tools apple made available to anyone comfortable with the command line, which I ran with zero issues for several years. I swapped out the super drive (CD/DVD burner) for an SSD (initially a relatively small one to just hold the OS). I upgraded the HDD several times (started life as a 256MB HDD). This machine has a full compliment of ports with NO dongles needed! I upgraded the ram over time to its max 16GB. This machine was the last of the totally user repairable notebooks Apple made. Without question, a fine example of solid engineering. My daughter gave me this machine as a christmas present in late 2012. I am among those still using a mid 2012 non-retina 15' MBP.

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