Jfholly

There are a few re-furb places that sell used MBP with 1tb hard drive and 16 gb ram. I purchased a 2015 from ipowerresale.com and so far very pleased. They and others also offer extended warranty, good luck

morkie1891

Look at Macsales.com website. It’s core business is selling diy Mac upgrade and provide free how to videos. Any of the tech people can advise what works.

rodpark2 Loc: Dallas, Tx

HD size make little or no difference, but going to a faster HD or SSD will, especially an SSD. Ram always helps. I agree that Crucial is a great way to make sure you get the right parts.

petercbrandt Loc: New York City, Manhattan

My 15" Mac Book Pro is from 2008 using High Sierra and a SSD hard drive. Works great!
I keep the internet off.
Its my "Photoshop computer"; CS4 extended version. The only problem is that newer PS programs allow you greater tricks to execute. For what I like doing, CS4 is fine and after all those years I still only know 15% of the program....but I'm happy with the situation.

petercbrandt Loc: New York City, Manhattan

PS: I store my images on many external hard drives, my MBP is only a work station.

Ednsb Loc: Santa Barbara

Have to agree. Since you can run catalina you have to have a newer mbp from 2012. We recently upgraded a mbp late 2011 with SSD AND BATTERY myself. It was already maxed out on memory. It runs great now.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

1. YES.
2. I’ve done it twice to Mid-2012 MacBook Pros. It isn’t hard, if you have good fine motor skills and you are familiar with common tools — AND you can watch a video on another computer or a smartphone in “Monkey see, monkey do” mode.

Go here: https://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/macbookpro_15_unibody_mid12/

If that’s not your machine, they have a different video for that. The video should give you a comfort or fear level appropriate for your situation.

OWC also sells all the RAM, drives, and tools you need. Stuff 16GB RAM and a 1 or 2TB SSD in there. You can even add their Data Doubler, remove the optical drive, and keep your old drive.

Read everything and use the pause button on the video as you go. Use muffin tins to sort small parts as you go. Use a table with a lip on all sides of it. And use a static-free mat! No carpet! Wear rubber-soled shoes.

Good luck.

Machinedoc Loc: Yorktown Heights, NY

Do not listen to Best Buy...it is not difficult to upgrade the RAM or install a SSD...as someone else mentioned, OWC (Macsales) has good DIY videos and is a good source for RAM. As for the SSD, but it from where you get the best price. I have upgraded my 9 year old macbook several times and have veen very happy with the improved performance. Have fun!

rook2c4 Loc: Philadelphia, PA USA

Oftentimes when an old computer is running slow, it is less because of age, but rather because too much bloatware installed over the years is running in the background, hogging up the memory. Especially problematic are programs which are configured to automatically start up every time you turn on the computer. I have a 10-year old computer that I use just for image editing, the installed programs stripped down to the bare essentials. And it is lightning-fast! Just starting up the computer never takes more than three or four seconds. Of course I don't use this computer for internet access.

RGG

Check the video in your MacBook. If it doesn't have the premium Radeon video consider a different laptop.

If your 2012 is anything like my 2011, the RAM swap is easy. Just remove the back. Its right there.

I've never had a problem with third-party RAM in the MBP or any other computer.

The available 250gb will hold you for a while. More important to have an external backup drive.

chasgroh Loc: Buena Park, CA

...I have a 2012 Mac Pro. I did everything you want to do *plus* junked the optical drive to open that slot and replaced that with another SSD to use as a scratch drive. Although I have a couple of other "dedicated" machines for photography-type stuff that are feistier, that old mac still runs all the current software I'm using and is quite speedy enough. Just my .02.

Carlschav Loc: New Jersey

Thanks; lot of really helpful information. Ordered the SIMM cards and the SSD.

ORpilot Loc: Prineville, Or

i was having a similar hand warmer problem with mt 2009 13 inch macbook pro. I had the Apple people replace the mattery the year before. But I went to the OWC site and purchased the replacement battery last month for about $25. I watched the video and changed it out in less than 20 min. Now it's back to normal. I do miss the hand warmer on cold mornings. It was well worth the $25.

chasgroh Loc: Buena Park, CA

I've been told by my "expert" (and he really is, lol) that after 2012 it gets harder and harder to do any substantial hardware upgrades/changes. So, I'm keeping mine 'til it croaks! ;0)

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

My twins have 2012 MacBook Pros like that. I put 1TB SSDs in them, two 8GB RAM sticks replaced the original 4GB sticks, and I did the same thing you did — I put the existing hard drives in an OWC Data Doubler for additional storage, by doing the same thing you did. They use streaming services for video, and we have a couple of portable disc burners when we need them. So the optical drives sit in my spare parts bin.

They run MS Office, Adobe Photography Plan, Audacity, Final Cut Pro X 10.4.7, and we will soon upgrade to Catalina (holding out for another point upgrade). These are still powerful machines, made so much better by the addition of RAM and SSDs.

Many of the performance gains in modern computers aren't due to faster processors with more cores. It's also the use of SSDs, and large amounts of RAM. 5400 RPM drives are slow. Having a small amount of RAM starves the system, causing memory paging or swapping of data in and out of memory, to and from the hard disk. An SSD speeds up that paging and swapping, and more RAM reduces the need for it. SSDs can be 80 to 95 times faster at I/O than a spinning hard drive.

I did this same upgrade to my late 2013 iMac. It was taking nearly four minutes to boot to a usable Finder Desktop. Now it takes 35 seconds, and after sign-in, is usable ten seconds later. A video clip that took over seven minutes to render in Final Cut now takes about 62 seconds.

The fastest processors on the planet are starved by a lack of Input/Output speed.