Apple Adding Last MacBook Pro With CD Drive to Vintage Products List

I've got two. SSD drives replaced the spinners. Batteries replaced. Recently the hard drive cable for one went "out of spec" and the drive became nearly unusable. Replaced the cable, better than new. Meet 95% of my needs. (The odd time I render out a video I think about upgrading.) Really love these.

Bingo. Some of the people in this thread are trashing the 2012 MacBooks without knowing that they are still more than capable for work that doesn't involve rendering or compression.

Reading the comments here is like watching YouTube review videos of products; apparently everyone is a vlogger running a business using Premiere or Finalcut..... yah, NO. Most people just need MS Office, Chrome, Spotify and Zoom. The 2012 MacBooks are still plenty fine for stuff like Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator as well... I'd know, I still use mine for that.

The last upgradeable MacBook...

I had the 15 inch version of this. I replaced the CD/DVD drive with a second HDD. The thing was a beast but it was built like a tank and just ran and ran and ran. It was fantastic.

Yesterday I was fiddling around with Apple Music on my Mac and saw ”Burn CD” in some menu and clicked it just to see what would happen since I only have newer Macs. No errors or anything, it started burning a CD. I have no idea where it burned that CD to! Can you still even buy CD-Rs? Did Apple even port that code over when they moved from iTunes to Apple Music? I’m so confused.

I don’t think I own a single CD/DVD at my house. Do you?

I know DVDs, and CDs are old but still DVDs sell the most even to this day. For the week ending Jan 6, DVDs has 55% of the revenue per media play news.

Believe it or not, there are a lot of professional musicians, educators and performers, who still use CDs (And hate dongles 😂). Even in 2022, this can still be a wonderful computer for those people because:

1) The 2012 is highly upgradeable and repairable. With Maxed out ram, an SSD, and a new battery if needed, this baby will still fly.

2) macOS Catalina is still supported for about one more year, and this machine natively runs Catalina.

3) With Open Core Legacy Patcher, this machine will run macOS Big Sur perfectly, and as of right now macOS Monterey is still possible on this machine with a bit of post-install patching.

I will probably use the 2012 models for the rest of my life because I have about 500 CDs/DVDs in my house. I have no intention of selling them, they are a part of my life and my memories. ❤️

edit: now getting close to 2024, macOS Sonoma can be run with Open Core Legacy Patcher on this machine.