How I Use My Mid-2012 Macbook Pro in 2020
PC and Mac enthusiasts alike, you are probably cringing at this. But here is the truth from a former university student, and current bioinformatician: I used my mid-2012, not Retina unibody MacBook pro for all my work for years, without the slightest hitch. What’s more, I recommend that people on a budget who are in desperate need for an Apple laptop do the same, even in God’s year 2020. Here’s how I did it.
- Upgrades. I managed to grab my mid-2012 13" model for a bargain price of about £300 ($376), and it came with 2 x 2 GB sticks of DDR3 RAM, as well as 500 GB of HDD storage. Thankfully, it is very straightforward to swap both for better options. (And you get to feel like a computer person while doing it.)
After loitering in a nearby Apple store and chatting with some of the staff there, I found out that I should be alright to upgrade my RAM to as much as 16 GB. This is despite publicly available information posted by Apple online, who recommend a maximum of 8 GB memory for this model. It was then that I found out that a visit to the Genius bar is almost always the right thing to do as an Apple customer. Whatever they read off of those iPhones and iPads while you are waiting patiently for them to save your high-value device? You can’t get it elsewhere. So I purchased 16 GB of DDR3L RAM (for about £70/$88) and it blew those 4 GB of built-in memory…
