These machines are great. I still use my 2015 rMBP as a secondary. It's a little slow now but a couple years ago I was still running Solidworks (in Bootcamp) on it with minimal issues.
My wife is still using her 2012 MBP. We maxed out RAM and gave it an SSD in 2016. She uses it for video editing and music production. The thing look like new. Completely ridiculous. Only downside: no OSX updates since I don’t know when.
You might find OpenCore Legacy Patcher[1] worth a look. In many cases, it allows later-that-supported Mac OS versions to be installed on older Macs.
As a data point, I still use a 2013 Mac Pro as my primary desktop, and I've been using Sonoma on it for several months, have been able to install all Sonoma patches over-the-air on release without incident, and have only experienced a single, trivial problem: the right side of the menu bar occasionally appears shaded red, in a way that doesn't affect usability; switching applications immediately resolves the problem (the problem appears to be correlated with video playback).
video encoder/decoder support and performance has order of magnitude improvement in M series, I am surprised that didnt sway you.
Not just that, for high res stuff or modern codecs like AV1 or h265 is probably not supported at all in a 2012 device without updates for so long?
Even if support was possible it would be software encoding and even short clip it can take hours to render ?
I would happily use an older device for development a lot of dev work especially if not frontend or UI usually i can use any laptop just as a terminal, but UI or video editing I wouldn’t be able to.
I can't help but reply every time this thread comes up. I'd still probably be using my 2010 if it wasn't for a series mechanical failures. Paid to replace the keyboard once (85 screws, didn't need to do that to myself), but third battery crapping out, trackpad not clicking (probably due to swollen battery) and the MagSafe connector getting loose and glitchy was the end of it. Though I did just boot it up because my phone is somehow still supposed to sync music from it.
If the battery is swollen, get rid of it as soon as possible. Swollen battery == ticking time bomb, and I'm not joking about the bomb part. These things can, do and will explode randomly.
Overall, my 2020 M1 MBP is infinitely better than the 2015 MBP I had before, it's not even close. Battery life, thermal output, speed, noise, neural engine (for ML workloads). It's an utter workhorse that just marches on, no matter what I throw at it. I haven't even considered upgrading to another more current Mx version because this one just.. works. Best laptop I ever owned.
I just want to echo this experience and sentiment. I absolutely adore my 2020 13” M1 mbp, for all the reasons you list. I do ML workloads and Linux builds and I’m starting to think they forgot to put fans in mine because I’ve never heard them! Despite the annoying limitation of 1 external screen, it’s up there with my 2007 13” mb (rest in peace) as being the best laptop I’ve ever owned.
I recently upgraded from a 2019 Intel Mac to a similarly-specced M3 Mac, and it really is night and day. My battery life is more than doubled - I can run IntelliJ and multiple Docker containers on battery for more than my whole work day, when before it would barely last a couple hours with that load and be slow while doing so. The fan hardly ever runs while on my Intel Mac it would run constantly.
I can definitely say there's a downside. I sometimes take the bus home, but it can get chilly at night. Previously, I would fire up a little python script that saturate all the cores, to warm my lap. My old Intel was plenty warm to keep me from getting too uncomfortable. I can't even feel my M2 through my pants, and sticking it into my shirt makes me look like an idiot.
Battery life is insanely better. If you have not used one of the M series laptops it cannot be overstated how much better the battery life is. It is worth it for battery alone.
But beyond that they are also incredibly fast and run cool. In the MacBook Air there is no fan and on the Pros they barely ever spin up in an audible way.
The fans literally never come on for my personal M2 MBP 14" or on my work 16" M1 (it helps that the heavy lifting of running stuff and compiling happens on a dev server)
During work from home during Covid I was still using an Intel MBP and video conferences invariably caused the fans to kick up to the point where using noise cancelling headphones and not the built in speakers was necessary for sanity.
I went from the last Intel i9 16" MBP to an M3 Pro in the last month at work.
I think it's saving me an hour a day and the fan has never come on, the the laptop has never felt warm, and the battery life is just mind blowing.
I run docker & compilers all day. The i9 would run the fan 75% of the time and had to throttle down any time it was on battery power and it was lucky to last 3 hours on battery.
