Hi everyone,
My girlfriend has MacBook Pro from 2012 which has already been upgraded with more Ram and an SSD.
From what I understand, her OS (Catalina) has reached end of life in 2022 and doesn’t get any support from Apple anymore.
As that machine works perfectly, what should she do?
I hate Apple products (even if it’s painful for me to say that they’re good) and I’m a Linux enthusiast, so I’d tell her to install Fedora Asahi, but I wanted to know if the Apple enthusiast crowd had a better idea.
My girlfriend isn’t geeky at all (despite her geeky glasses) and she would want to stay in the safe environment provided by an Apple OS. But we also don’t want to replace that powerful machine as we hate programmed obsoletism.
10 years of support. Not bad.
Just install Linux on it (if this is what she wants, regardless of if you think it’s better) or find a M1 MacBook Air for 7-800 if she wants a Mac.
I have a 2012 laptop, and upgraded to the M1 Air. Using the old machine is painful now, I didn’t realise how slow it was.
10-11yrs from a laptop is pretty great. I wouldn’t call it planned obsolescence.
11 years old
“programmed obsoletism”
Serious question, how old is your laptop?
I have a 2019 Surface Go with Fedora on it and a 2006 Asus with Windows XP on it.
Planning on installing a lightweight Linux on it as it was mainly used for backups (iTunes) of my work iPhone (which I didn’t buy and didn’t choose to have).
But now that I can use my girlfriend’s Mac for that, I don’t need windows anymore. I also have a windows virtual machine in the Surface Go.
I heard about something called Open Core Legacy Patcher the other day which is supposed to allow updates for older macbooks but I have not tried it yet.
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I have tried it with a 2012 Retina MacBook Pro and it’s really cool. I installed a recent version of macOS on it so it wasn’t great performance wise (the OS itself ran pretty well but the computer was very warm all the time), but I think you can make it work still.
I’d try Big Sur or Monterey.
Also if you have performance issues, changing the battery can help a lot.
Why would you do anything? It still works, so keep using it. Changing the OS just because you can sounds like a really bad idea to someone who’s been using the same thing for 11 years (and I’m a Linux user so no pro-Apple bias here). It sure sounds like she’s not the greatest fan of change.
And also, as already said by many other comments, an 11 year old laptop is about the opposite of planned obsolescence.
Look into OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I updated my GFs 2012 Air to Ventura and it’s running okay. A bit clunky around MacOS updates since you have to specifically run patcher again to get graphics acceleration again but otherwise fine. It’s definitely worth it for security updates.
I’m going to disagree with the OCLP people: it’s a fine project, but it’s absolutely horrible to deal with from an end-user perspective because they’ll update something without realizing it’s going to break something, and now you have to deal with someone’s computer not working and get to maintain it.
If you can move to Linux, and she’s happy with that, then great. Though you’d probably want normal Fedora, and not Asahi since it’s not a M1/M2-based Mac.
But it sounds like she wants MacOS and, unless you want to fiddle with something that’s finicky, failure-prone, and not guaranteed to work in the future, just go buy a used/refurbished M1 for like $600, and then not worry about it for the next 5-10 years.
Just keep it on Catalina and use that until it dies. I gave my dad a 2011 MacBook Air a while ago and that hasn’t been updated since High Sierra. It still works fine.
Thanks for all the answers.
I guess we’ll keep it on Catalina for a while. But what are the risks? Could she diminish them by getting an antivirus (which I never do)?
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I also dislike often dislike Apple but, a nearly 11yr lifespan is more than reasonable
I have this exact same problem! The hardware all runs great, but no more OS updates :(
I can’t believe how long it has lasted.
Fedora Asahi is for ARM64 versions of MacOS, your 2012 MacBook Pro is x86, meaning that any x86 Linux distribution will run on it. My personal recommendation for someone who is not as tech savvy is Linux Mint. You don’t have to install it either until you decide it’s a good fit and instead run it from RAM and fiddle around with it until you decide it’s a good choice.
It depends on what she wants to do with it. Does she need any first-party Apple apps? If so, she might be out of luck. If not, put your Linux flavor of choice on it and get another 10 years or more out of it.
I’m running Ubuntu Server on a 2009 Mac mini with absolutely no problems at all.
Well finally I think we’ll keep MacOs Catalina for when she wants to use Apple stuff and dual boot it with Fedora for everything else. That way she can also slowly ease herself into using Linux.
Since I already have a perfectly set up Fedora installation, I wanted to know if anyone had an idea on how to duplicate it without going through 1000 steps.
But I might be in the wrong place since the second part isn’t really Apple related…
You can try using OpenCore Legacy Patcher to install a newer unsupported macOS.
Mbp from 2012 should have everything working in ventura with a bit of patching.
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The 2012MBP is a fine machine. I actually just retired one. Being an intel model, you can run any Linux. You don’t need to stick to Ashashi (that’s for Apple silicon chips).
You could also put Windows on there.
Really though, if she likes the Apple ecosystem, go find a 2017/2018 MPB 4 thunderbolt port model. I recently picked one up on fb marketplace with an i7, 16 gigs of ram, and 256gb ssd for $350.
Well just to give an update, I’ve now installed Fedora on that MacBook Pro and it was pretty easy. The only thing which didn’t work out of the box was the wifi. I had to install ROM fusion and then it downloaded some drivers.
Otherwise everything ran smoothly except for the installation of the windows 10 virtual machine in gnome boxes. I had installed the flatpak one, but that one doesn’t allow you to use the usb ports, so I had to reinstall the machine on the Rpm version.
So that old beast can now have a long life again!
