Best Budget MacBooks
Intro
The 2012 MacBook Pro models are the most capable laptops you can get for under $500.
Summary
- Parts List
- iFixit Guides
- My Thoughts
Parts List
- Memory: 16GB PC3L-12800S DDR3-1600
- Storage:
- Western Digital Blue 1TB 3D NAND SSD
- 2TB HDD
- Optical Drive Caddy
Approximately: $200 + Device Cost
iFixit Guides
My Thoughts
The three biggest factors that contributed to why I think the 2012 line of MacBook Pros are the best budget laptops on the market right now, are the exceptional build quality, performance per dollar and the upgradability of the system. After the Retina display was released as an option in 2012, the MacBooks Pros started getting thinner and lighter. Both great qualities, but this sacrificed the replaceability of parts like memory and storage. Then in 2015 Apple introduced the dreaded butterfly keyboard switches, taking the MacBook’s build quality down a notch.
Based on GeekBench results, my laptop the MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2012) with the quad core Intel Core i7-3615QM @ 2.3 GHz cost me roughly $500, including all the upgrades (it sells for $800+ fully upgraded). While the MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2018)with the 6-core Intel Core i7-8750H costs approximately $1500 used on eBay for a 75% increase in performance. I don't think that 3x the cost is worth the meager increase in multi-core performance.
The same trend can been seen in the MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012) with the dual core Intel Core i7-3520M , when comparing the MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2017) with the dual core Intel Core i7-7567U. Except here the performance gains are only 50% roughly the same cost over twice as much as a fully loaded 13”.
But I personally wouldn’t go out of my way to buy a newer MacBook until the MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) with the 8-core Intel Core i9-9980HK starts to hit the market used or refurbished. The performance increase with this model is a staggering 160% over my current laptop. Hopefully, in the foreseeable future, can be had for less that $2k.