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by burky 2706 days ago
I’m operating on a Macbook Pro 15 from mid 2010. I upgraded the hard drive to SSD, upgraded the memory to 8 gigs (max supported), and the mobo has been replaced twice (fried from overheating .. the thing gets really hot). This has prolonged my machine for a bit but it’s starting to getting long in the tooth. They also just dropped my model from being able to install the newest mac OS (for a 2010 that might make sense). Seems being able to upgrade modular pieces of your tech is a thing of the past. It has saved me some really time and money being able to remain on the same machine for 9 years. If it weren’t upgradeable that probably be a totally different story.

Biggest features that I would miss from my macbook:

--Touchpad with BetterTouchTool - I heavily use custom gestures and it’s insane how much this drives my daily work flow and speed

--Unix environment is super nice

--Reliable and quick resume from hibernate or suspend

--Never really lags at the OS level .. but individual apps might get a little bogged

I would use a windows notebook as my daily driver if the experience were close and it had a solid build (weight and slimness is not a huge deal to me). Laptop + linux would be fine as well but I don’t know about the user experience with the newer touchpads in linux.

Does anyone have any success stories with notebooks that mirror my experience and isn’t OSX?

2 comments

> upgraded the memory to 8 gigs (max supported)

You should be able to put 16GB in it. Apple doesn't say so, but I ran that much with 0 issues for years in machines from that time.

Are you sure it was a 2010 model and not a 2011 one?
I may have had a 2011 model.

A quick peek at https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2010.h... suggests that the Core 2 Duo systems (13" MBP) could handle 16gb, but the i5/i7 models (15"/17") couldn't. This Stack Exchange answer confirms: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/105036

You should be able to run Linux on this laptop, once Apple drops support for the Mac OS version you're running. It's only with very recent Apple hardware that you encounter real problems with Linux. (Recent Linux distributions support touchpad gestures as well.)