Is an 11-year old MacBook still usable in 2024?
I posted about this last year, but the 2013 15-inch MacBook Pro with the 2GB NVIDIA GT 750M graphics card, 1TB SSD, and 16GB of RAM still holds up well today. I recently went on a 3-day work trip, and I took this laptop as my primary laptop. I had my work desktop as a backup computer if anything went wrong, but everything worked out just fine.
I left the base model M1 Air at home even though it would run circles around this beast from 2013. It is always nice to retreat back to a 15.4 inch screen. The M1 Air is obviously the better choice for portability, but I was using the 15-incher as a desktop. I had it elevated on a stand, and paired it with the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID. Plugged in a USB-A mouse, and I was good to go. No, Touch ID does not work on the Magic Keyboard, but everything else does. When I did need to use Apple Pay, I had my watch and my iPhone nearby, so it wasn’t an issue when I had to buy lunch, or anything else that caught my eye online.
When I got back to the hotel, I just used the laptop’s keyboard and trackpad, a delightful and reliable experience. This is pre-butterfly keyboard mayhem.
The most limiting factor about this laptop for me is ironically, the blog platform for my website, which is Squarespace. In the past, Squarespace was the Achilles’ heel as it would constantly cause the fans to spin up and slow down this computer. I eventually took a hiatus from blogging, and when I came back months later, I noticed that Squarespace had changed its design and layout and updated their platform altogether. I was skeptical if a 2013 laptop would keep up, especially now that it has been improved with a more modern UI.
To my surprise it actually performed better than before! Whatever optimizations Squarespace did in the background ended up breathing new life into this machine. Still not as fast as a modern computer, but nothing that would make you call it a slow machine and make you want to hurl it down the street after typing for 15 minutes, only to find out that nothing was saved due to website errors and not pressing the save button frequently enough. I used to blame the laptop for those issues before, but in hindsight, maybe it was Squarespace that was the kink in the armor?
It just goes to show that software optimization can go a long way in making an old computer work like new.
Not everything is great, of course, since we are still talking about an 11-year old laptop. The battery life is at best 3 hours, which is good enough for me and probably most people who would use this as a backup computer. Once again my main use for this laptop was as a desktop, and the hardest I pushed it would be using Squarespace while doing some graphical work in Canva. I would also have the typical Apple apps open in the background, such as Mail, Safari, Notes, and Apple News. Safari works fine and you can easily browse any website with no issues, including YouTube.
When I bought it in 2018, I paid around $800 for it. Now, you can get these for $300 at the high end, which is insane. I’m not saying you should buy this laptop, since for another $300 you could get an M1 Air that is miles ahead of this Intel based laptop. What I am trying to say is, if you have one of these lying around, you should definitely give it another life.
Maybe you know someone who wants to try macOS but doesn’t want to take the plunge? Let them borrow this for a while. Or you have a child who needs a real computer (sorry Chromebooks, and iPads).
If you do want to tinker around and get one, remember to get the right spec. It has to have 16GB of RAM since that is not user upgradeable, and you should get the GT 750M graphics. It helps a ton. For more details, check out Louis Rossman’s video about which older Macs are worth buying. Remember, this video came out during the butterfly keyboard era, and also before Apple introduced the M1 chip.
Unfortunately if you need to buy a charger, they’re still $80 brand new for a real one. Don’t get a fake one and burn your house down.