Not Dead Yet; Why Choosing a non-Retina MacBook Pro in 2015 Can Make Sense

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If you’re an Apple laptop traditionalist, Apple still offers the old-school 13-inch MacBook Pro in the form factor that began life as the late-2008 aluminum unibody MacBook. I’ve owned one of these since early 2009, and it’s still my number two Mac after my late 2013 Haswell MacBook Air.

iMore’s Rich Stevens reports that he just replaced an ailing 2012 Macbook Pro with the thick, “hopelessly outdated,” 13-inch non-Retina Macbook Pro, and he loves it despite its not having a Retina display or the new MacBook’s fancy form-factor.

I concur. I have an iPad Air 2 with a Retina panel, and it’s nice enough, but in my estimation, Retina resolution is overrated and over-hyped on machines with larger than iPhone size panels, and I’m on the same page as Rich when he says “high-density displays are extremely useful on a phone and certainly the future of computing, but they aren’t mission-critical for me.” I don’t even find the old MacBook’s low 1,280 x 800 screen resolution a hardship, and the 1,440 x 900 panel in the MacBook Air is more than adequate to satisfy me.

I’m also on side with Rich’s appreciation of the little MacBook Pro’s relatively easy upgradability and repairability, especially the ease of swapping in more RAM and larger, faster storage drives. Rich has replaced his MacBook Pro’s original 500 GB hard disk drive with a cheap SSD from Amazon, and did the swap himself. He also upgraded the MBP’s RAM with 16 gigs out of an old Mac mini, while RAM or SSD upgrades with current Apple laptops can only be done at point of manufacture, and will cost you plenty up front. I opted for a 256 GB SSD with my MacBook Air, but am kicking myself a bit for not having ponied up for 8 gigs of RAM. So far I’m finding the standard 4 GB adequate, but I tend to keep my laptops a long time, over which memory demands of software tend to increase.

The last old-school MacBook Pro 13-inch is powered by a 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 with 4GB of upgradable 1600MHz memory, a likewise upgradable 500GB 5400-rpm hard disk drive and an Intel HD Graphics 4000 IGPU, and sells for $1,099.

You can read Rich Stevens’ article at:
http://www.imore.com/yes-i-bought-non-retina-macbook-2015-and-its-awesome

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