- Intel Core i5 2.5GHz
- 4GB Memory 500GB HDD
- Intel HD Graphics 4000
Nice when it works
05/16/2013
This review is from: Apple MacBook Pro (2012 Model) Intel Core i5 4GB DDR3 500GB HDD 13.3" Mac OS X v10.8 Mountain Lion (MD101LL/A)
Pros:
Looks good, feels well built. Screen looks nice (though I prefer matte finish). Hardware is pretty good, runs most things without a problem. Nice keyboard, nice trackpad. I honestly liked using this laptop, until...
Cons:
...things started breaking. Now I baby my electronics, I don't throw them in a bag or toss them on the table or whatever that causes wear on other people's laptops. I had no dents, no scratches on this laptop, I even had a screen protector on it and a keyboard cover. One complaint, the laptop always ran a bit warm. In fact, on occasion it would get very hot and I could hear the fan spool up and make noise. Come to find out, it's because I watch YouTube videos a lot as well as go to other flash websites and OSX is very inefficient at playing back flash - uses a lot more resources than it should. After about 3 months, it started getting so hot the laptop would shut off.
I took it in to the Apple store and they had it for about a week, a defective heatsink they told me. I don't see how that's possible, a heatsink can't really be defective...maybe the fan, but I heard it spinning still and I already cleaned it out to make sure dust wasn't clogging it up. So that fixed I was good for about another month, then the thunderbolt port just stopped working. Back to the Apple store, this time they told me the logic board was bad and replaced it. Was really getting worried at this point because I didn't buy Apple care, but so far all under warranty repairs. I was using it up until last month, and now the trackpad has decided to stop working. I've been using it with a mouse and that's fine, but I need to take it back to the Apple store to fix the trackpad now.
Overall Review:
I'm really disappointed in the longevity of this MacBook Pro considering how much it cost. I expect a lot better out of a $1,200 laptop. Before this I used a few cheap PC laptops, and while they were never super fast they did always seem to work. I got tired of having to replace those PC laptops all the time along with the shoddy build quality so I thought a MacBook Pro would be the solution. My warranty runs out this summer and I'm honestly just too afraid of something else going wrong on this. I'll get called the PC fanboy or whatever, but I just want something reliable that works. I'm going to switch over to a ThinkPad when I can sell this - I have a co-worker who has been on a T410 for the past few years without a hitch, and a company I recently did some contract work for also had a fleet of ThinkPads all going strong. Thing is, I can get a well equipped ThinkPad for about $750 which is going to be as fast as my MacBook Pro was - sure it will be running Windows, but as an IT professional I found myself running Win 7 VM all the time since Visual Studio and SQL Server still have no Mac versions and are required for the work I do.
My qualms are not so much with OSX as it is with Apple's QA, I could accept a defect but going on the third one? I can't tell you the last time I had to replace anything on a PC laptop except the battery and a hard drive on one (But hard drives die randomly all the time, so I don't associate that with the vendor of the laptop). A friend of mine had to replace the logic board on his MacBook Pro out of warranty and it cost him about $400 which scares me to no end. A laptop should not experience critical failures if it's less than a year old (Heck, I ran on an old Dell from 2006 up until two years ago!). If you search around you'll find that MacBook Pros do have some QA problems, and that's just unacceptable given the kind of money Apple is charging for these. They're great on their warranty, but if you run out of it - well, you'll be spending a lot of cash.
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- Kevin C.
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Verified Owner
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Owned For:
1 month to 1 year
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