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My notebook is 8 years old. It was a gaming beast when I got it, now it's not great on most modern releases(1060). It still works really good to be honest, I just stopped using once I got a good desktop computer.
Heyo yee old laptop gang. I have a 2011 MacBook Pro that I slapped more ram and a SSD into and it works amazingly. I don’t use it for games anymore (I bought it to install Windows and play games) but it handles like 60k photos wonderfully.
I read about this from people like you, but I did NOT have the same experience.
I recently upgraded a 2011 Pro Macbook with new RAM, and a new battery. I am furious at myself for even wasting the money to do that in the first place.
The battery, even when brand new from iFixit, barely lasted an hour or two on Youtube while I am at work. Two videos around 15-20 minutes, medium brightness, 720p, and the damn thing barely lasted those two videos. God forbid I want to use it for anything after those!
I'm assuming it was because the CPU is way way power hungry, which is okay, but DEFINITELY not usable in real situations. My main point is that my side of this situation was not at all good, and to not waste your money!
The battery, even when brand new from iFixit, barely lasted an hour or two on Youtube while I am at work. Two videos around 15-20 minutes, medium brightness, 720p, and the damn thing barely lasted those two videos.
googles
This is a discussion from back when they came out, and it sounds like two hours is maybe about right.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2789298?sortBy=best
Maybe get a 100Wh USB-C power bank? It sounds like you can get USB-C-to-MagSafe adapters.
Wow. Thank you so much for this post! I always thought I was flipping crazy, but it actually makes sense now!
As an aside, I just went ahead and bit the bullet and got a new laptop as I was under the impression the CPU was very power hungry, and that no matter what upgrades I gave it, it would never be "efficient" enough for me to use for what I need a laptop for, which is battery life.
Thank you for helping me understand the issue was always there, and that I should've definitely researched more before I bought these upgrades!
Hey just chiming in that I did exactly this on my 2011 i7 MBP (p Probably circa 2018) and had the same experience, terrible battery life on the new battery, MacOS would stutter, etc. Not worth it. Interesting to read that that's all we should've expected!
I also went and installed Debian on it because I knew it was no longer supported by MacOS. I know I could've tried the OpenCore and I did at one point, but it wasn't very stable and still ate through the battery. :/
Jesus, that’s a terrible experience!
I actually am on my original battery, it only has like 25 or 30 cycles because I only used it to play games so it was always plugged in. Before I installed the SSD, I tested the battery and got through 1.75 playthroughs* of Beetlejuice on full brightness!
The model I have is the early 2011, so it’s got an ancient i7 and a dedicated GPU. On the most recent OSX version it’ll take, the GPU doesn’t appear to be working though… which is fine, because I just use it to browse stuff and store a million pictures.
I've realized, thanks to tal, that I was under the wrong impression and had thought the CPU was just too power hungry. Maybe it is, but it has always had not so good battery life unfortunately.
I have bitten the bullet, and upgraded to a newer laptop. The battery actually lasts multiple days of youtube, plex, and anything else like games I throw at it. I just wanted a laptop I didn't have to worry about charging unless I got a few uses out of it first! I will always miss the glowing apple on the back of the lid though. That was some good times. :')
Replacing the spinning disk hard drive with an ssd will give you a significant increase in battery life. And it'll also make the machine wildly faster on all tasks that aren't cpu intensive
I see I didn't mention that, but it also had a Samsung SSD that I put into it when I upgraded my desktop with a bigger SSD. :(
I did that with a 2010 17” MacBook Pro. It had Windows for games and Mac OSX when I wanted a reliable computer. Finally died on me in ~2022 but otherwise was doing fine. I switched to a tower for games in 2018 and now my friend and I(mostly my far more savvy friend) and working out how to make Linux work reliably because Windows is…ya know.