Upgraded my crappy MacBook Pro, mid 2012 13" unibody

[Megatomic]

I was gifted a unibody mid 2012 13" MacBook Pro earlier this year. It was the low end model: i5 2.5GHz, 4GB, 500GB 5400RPM hard drive. Honestly I debated whether or not I was going to keep it, it was laggy and in poor physical condition. The previous owner was a slob and allowed it to get dirty and banged up. It had been dropped and the bottom cover was misaligned and bent. Coffee got into the insides.... It was still on OS X Lion! Yeah just bad all around.

A week later I got a 6s from work and decided I'd give the Apple ecosystem a shot again having ditched my old BlackBook and 4s years ago. First I updated to Sierra and the computer was even laggier. I bought an 8GB memory upgrade from OWC and while I had the bottom cover off I straightened it the best I could and cleaned the insides as thoroughly as possibly. The computer became snappier but boot up and app load time was still pretty bad. Lots of beach balls. Probably a combination of the 5400rpm HDD and a 5 year old install with all the crap that has been done to it over the years.

Fast forward to this week, I bought a 480GB SSD and repair kit (fortunate for me that I did) from iFixit. The instructions seemed thorough for replacing the HDD and they did prove to be good. The guide I had found to creating the install media for the computer was good enough to get a USB thumb drive prepared to do the OS install when it came time to do that. The drive install was super quick, no sweat.

When I booted up the computer and got to the recovery where I was to install the OS to the bare SSD I ran into my first and only roadblock. The SSD was not being recognized as an available install target drive no matter what I tried. I wound up using the caddy that came with my iFixit repair kit to mount the original HDD as a start-up disk where I was able to get into my old install of MacOS. I found the SSD was being detected by the system but it was unavailable as a usable drive because it was not formatted. DUH!! I formatted the drive, turned off the computer, and removed the caddy. Booting up to recovery I was then able to install MacOS to the new SSD with no problems. The computer is now GREAT! If I didn't know any better I'd never guess I was sitting down to a 5 year old computer.

So why is it that the MacOS installer isn't able to format a hard drive (whether a spinning drive or an SSD) like Windows and Linux has been able to do for freaking ever? Seems like basic functionality to me.

Anyways I'm very pleased with my "new" MacBook Pro, hopefully it lasts me a good while.

 

[Tyranicus]

You can format a drive from the installer. If you click on the Utilities option on the menu bar and then select Disk Utility, you get partition and formatting options.

 

[Megatomic]

You can format a drive from the installer. If you click on the Utilities option on the menu at and then select Disk Utility, you get partition and formatting options.

I was using my ultrabook while I was doing this and I saw that I should be able to do that but I swear that option was not there for me. It would have saved me so much time.

 

[Eug]

Format works fine from the utilities.

BTW, I'm still using my 2009 13" MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.26 GHz. Replaced the fan years ago, and then upgraded to 4 GB and SSD.

However, I will likely upgrade to a 12" MacBook Retina this year with the Kaby Lake update. 8 years with the same laptop is enough. If I had a 2012 i5, I'd probably still wait a couple of years, but the difference is my laptop looks almost new.

 

[nitsuj3580]

Took the same upgrade path with my 2010 MacBook Pro. maxed it out to 8gb of ram and a 500gb SSD and it flies for what I use it for.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Took the same upgrade path with my 2010 MacBook Pro. maxed it out to 8gb of ram and a 500gb SSD and it flies for what I use it for.

Housemate did the same. Still loving it.

 

[Rottie]

I did that with 2007 MacBook Pro with new Intel 320 SSD and the speed was smooth like butter.

 

[Oyeve]

A couple of years ago I had a spare 500GB crucial SSD laying about and I decided to install it in my mid-2009 MBP. Put a whole new life in it! Granted I can't go any higher than 10.11.6 but this thing is pretty damn fast for a C2D.

 

[Eug]

My Core 2 Duo 2.26 GHz dual-core 2009 MacBook Pro with ancient slow SSD felt way faster than my 2010 2.93 GHz Core i7 8-thread iMac 27" with 7200 rpm desktop hard drive.

I've since replaced both though, just last month in fact.

A couple of years ago I had a spare 500GB crucial SSD laying about and I decided to install it in my mid-2009 MBP. Put a whole new life in it! Granted I can't go any higher than 10.11.6 but this thing is pretty damn fast for a C2D.

10.13 High Sierra beta apparently works perfectly on MacBookPro5,5, if you use a hacked installer to install it. It's the same hack that worked for Sierra, but just updated for High Sierra. High Sierra apparently needs more memory though. 4 GB was at best borderline for 10.11, and is worse in High Sierra.

I had installed the Sierra beta with the hack on my 2009 MBP, but that beta was just buggy in general so I removed it. (It was buggy because it was buggy, not because of the hack.) I didn't bother reinstalling the release version because I didn't have a need for it. But after High Sierra gets officially released and gets a few updates, I'll install that, to get compatibility with HEIF photos and stuff like that. High Sierra also brings a new file system. I won't format the 2009 MBP with that new file system, but it will be nice to have compatibility with it in case I need to read another drive or something.