Why the Macbook Pro 17" was the greatest laptop ever made. Review of a legend.
My office in Brazil. Not bad.
Why the Macbook Pro 17" was the greatest laptop ever made.
Review of a legend.
30 000 hours of operation without a single flaw. Now that’s what I call a true workhorse.
It was the best laptop on the market… or maybe it is still the best Macbook Pro ever made!
Casually playing music on Logic Pro X.
Before jumping in the review, here are the specs.
My specs!
It features a 32nm i7 2.2ghz with a 6mb shared L3 cache with Turboboost 2.0, which enables up to 3.3ghz processing speed (good stuff back in the days!). Mine came equipped with a AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1 GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory and an Intel HD Graphics 3000 graphics processor that shares 384 MB of memory with the system. It has bluetooth 2.1.
Oh, and it weights a brick: 3 kg, or 6.6 lbs. Yes, that’s a lot for a laptop these days! DImensions are: 0.98 x 15.47 x 10.51. Not very portable, but not bad neither. Definitely not an Alienware M18x.
10 years of abuse, Still works like a new.
I upgraded mine with 16 gb of ram (2x 8gb) and a Samsung 500GB SSD. This thing is *fast*. I’m talking about a 22 seconds startup time.
I’m able to run Logic Pro X with a ton of plugins and processor intensive synth (such as Serum) without any lag, slowdown, or glitch. I usually manage to get about 44 tracks with plugins and filters before it crashes. Now, that’s a lot. That’s almost 50 tracks without bouncing-in-place tracks. Logic Pro X can be quite processor-demanding, but surprisingly, the old i7 2.2ghz has enough juice to make an album. And I mean: how many musician for the last decade used it (or the 15.6” variant)? Like, a lot. Jon Hopkins himself used a Macbook Pro 15.6” 2009 (something like that) with a Windows 98 virtual machine to run a drum synth, something like that. So goes the story I heard from a friend in a pub.
It got a Magsafe adapter (which saved my laptop from flying about 200 times), 3x USB 2.0, an ethernet port, one thundebolt first gen (10gb/s), one line-in, one aux-out (also an optical output! Amazing!), and a wonderful mini express card slot. I have an adapter in mine for a SD-card, but you can find many other kinds online (USB 3.0 adapter, SATA in/out, serial cable, SSD, etc). Oh, and it has even a firewire 800! Old school!
The 17” LED-backlit screen has a lot of real estate. It’s 1920x1080 (full HD). Yes, my iPad Pro is so much better, but no, a Macbook Pro retine 13” isn’t has good (from the late 2012 to 2016 era). 17” is the perfect size in my opinion. 15.6” was always too small for me.
The magic thing with this generation of Macbook Pro is the keyboard. Yes, it is that good. No, nothing came close to it after 2012. Even the retina 2012+ wasn’t has good as the magical keyboard of this generation of Macbook Pro.
I got so many good things to say about this generation of laptop. For one, you can fix it yourself, or upgrade it. You simply unscrew the bottom, and voila. You can change the HDD easily, the RAM, the battery, etc.
You can change the battery by yourself.
Look at all those ports! Amazing!
Remember this? Yeah…that was back in the good ol’ days!
I replaced my optical disk drive with a second HDD that serves as my real-time live Time Machine. And this is why the Macbook Pro 17” will always be a beast of a tool for professional: you can have 2x 4TB hard disk drives in your laptop in RAID 1 or 0 configuration, a SSD in the mini express card, a line-in from your external analog synth, recording in Logic Pro, monitoring with your headphones, have a fast HDD connected to the thunderbolt interface and having the nice 10GB/s network speed of an internet cable EJ45. All without dongles. All of that with one machine.
Every other Macbook Pro after the late-2011 17” edition went downhill it seems (okay, maybe not), until maybe the newer 16”. But even then… You can pick up a good 17” for about $500CAD on kijiji or craiglist: that’s roughly $2500 cheaper than a 16” 2020 edition. Is the newer Macbook Pro $2500 better? I don’t think so. For one, we don’t know if the new magic keyboard will be reliable. I’ve been using my Macbook Pro 17” non stop for a year. It’s a decade old now. Yes, I use my iPad Pro 3rd quite a bit, but whenever I need to do some serious work, it’s my go-to-tool.
If you are a videographer, the Macbook Pro 17” is simply not good enough for you: it struggles to work with 4k files. But other than that…and if you are a budget photographer or musician… The Macbook Pro 2011 17” is still a legend, and one of the last true workhorse.
Thanks,
JP