Goodbye to My 12-Year Old MacBook Pro

It's been a good run—ten years, to be exact¹. As someone who makes a living typing and staring at screens, my computers have become little milestones along my career timeline.My first MacBook, I bought when I realized I still had access to my university email and could ge the student discount. I want to say it cost around $800. I spent a lot of time doing typical activities of the era — Skype calls while abroad, listening to music (pre-streaming!), and starting to tinker with Wordpress sites and mixing music with Audacity.

One of my roommates accidentally spilled a full glass of water on it in 2012. I managed to recover some of the hard drive, mostly music, but the machine itself was toast. After saving up, I bought MacBook number two—the one still in storage. When I pivoted into software development, I pulled out the CD drive, added an SSD, and upgraded the RAM from 4 to 8 GB. Around the same time, I also bought some DJ gear off Craigslist to play a restaurant gig in the New Orleans Bywater. I mostly used Traktor and Serato, and this machine handled all my freelance projects from 2014–2016, as well as my JavaScript cohort work at the Atlanta Tech Village.

My next MacBook Pro was my work computer at Digital Additive until 2023. When I left, I bought it for $100. After a wipe, it ran better than ever. With my new job on a Windows laptop, the MacBook became my dedicated DJ machine and occasional freelance dev computer.

But over time, it started to fail. Speakers popped, it crashed frequently, and after reboots tracks would skip for twenty minutes, as if it needed to “warm up.” This even happened during my set at a friend's wedding—but luckily, the previous band still had instruments plugged in and people came up and improvised while I rebooted. Very punk rock.

Still, the writing was on the wall. Repairs were possible, but I couldn’t update the OS anymore. After a weekend of tinkering and dozens of crashes, I finally accepted it was time to let go and dip into my savings for a replacement.

I was reluctant to buy another MacBook—not a fan of the closed ecosystem or price tag or buying new things in general. But for my needs, it’s the best choice. Goodbye, old friend...ten years of loyal service and a trade-in value of exactly $0.

Footnotes

1. For the record, I still have an even older MacBook Pro in storage. ↩