I am looking a purchasing a refurbished Macbook Pro with a 13 inch display. I understand that Apple is making it more difficult to fix things DIY. Any suggestions on what is the newest model that is still easy to fix on your own?
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The machines before the advent of the Retinas (i.e. about mid 2012) are much more repairable. Screens can be fixed, hard drives replaced, no glued in batteries, RAM upgradeable. I personally like the 2012 non-retinas, both in the 13" & 15".
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I hope the rumors of Apple coming out with a working Pro's MacBook Pro at the end of the year hold true. I think they got the message there is a market for an upgradable laptop and one that has the ports back (USB-A & MagSafe)! So far here we've seen one person get their system wet and have no means to recover their data from the soldered SSD. And many Pro's want more than 16 GB of RAM.
I agree the non-retina's are the best to service & upgrade!
@danj would you give a link on this rumor, i have not heard of it yet. Also, have you heard anything on a MacPro?
Here's a bit on the negative feelings on the new MacBook Pro's: Apple Losing Out As Consumers Reject The New MacBook Pro. I have a source inside ;-} thats teasing me a bit so I can't offer anything in the rags that support the rumor on a Real Pro's MacBook Pro!
For the MacPro systems there is a fair amount of news Apple has confirmed it will come out with a new desktop for the Pro's, Here's news on the Apple meeting: Apple Says Sorry But You'll Still Wait A Year For A New Mac Pro. I verified the New iMac Pro is not the MacPro!
This is what I think happened... Jony Ive redirection to Apple Park cleared the deck for some new players. These are the ones that appear to be righting the course of both the MacBook Pro line & MacPro for the Pro market.
The problem was the current (2016/17) MacBook Pro series was to far down the path to be altered, hence the iMac Pro will be the first under the new design team followed up by new MacBook Pro & MacPro lines for the heavy duty pro's.
Sadly too late for us! The bigger company I do work for just signed a multimillion deal with HP!
Don't get me wrong! I do like the new MacBook Pro for the average user & sales folks that don't need or use peripheral devices heavily. I still would have wanted replaceable SSD and a MagSafe. Clearly Apple did manage to find a group of people who want this series as it's selling quite well. It's not selling to the working creative pro's or engineering folks though. Yes, thats a smaller market... But its also the group that makes or breaks companies and failing to meet their needs does not sit well for the long game if they don't fix it.
@danj I have never put a customer in a 2013+ MacPro. I still try to find the 2009-2012 machines as the CPU upgrades will blow away the older ones:
12 Core 3.46 GHz CPU Tray Upgrade for 2009 2010 2012 Mac Pro 2 x X5690
@mayer - Fully understandable! It gets down to how you work.
A single person don't need to worry about sharing work so having onboard (fast) storage makes sense.
When you start to loose it here is when you have massive work pieces or need to share groups of files with others, then you need to get into SAN & NAS storage. This is where the newer iMac's (2013+) make more sense as you get the higher speed Thunderbolt 2 (six ports) & 2 Giga Ethernet connections.
We still have a few older MacPro's which have a Magma Thunderbolt 2 PCIe card just so we can save & move files manually using an external drive.
I think the 2018 MacPro will be more like the older MacPro with slots and a few drive bays of some sort. Basically the middle ground of the two designs.
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