Enlarge / A late 2008 MacBook Pro with El Capitan, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD upgrade feels a whole lot more modern than it should. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
I took a vacation last month. I traveled some. I read a lot. And I refurbished an old late 2008 MacBook Pro, one of the original aluminum unibody models. I completely took it apart, dusted it out, put it back together, and stuck in a memory and SSD upgrade. This is the kind of thing I do to unwind.
There are lots of differences between this thing and a new MacBook of any stripe. They’re smaller and they’re thinner and they’re faster and they have better screens, better performance, better batteries. But once you’ve put in a few more modern parts and plunked a fresh install of El Capitan onto the SSD, it feels a whole lot like a modern Mac. Using a Windows laptop from 2008 to run Windows 10 is totally possible, but the screens, trackpads, and general build quality of a laptop from the last year or two will feel way better.
Upgrading and using an old-ish Mac for a bit drives home a point I’ve been trying to articulate for a while—Apple’s Mac lineup simply doesn’t feel ahead of the curve in the ways that it used to. Starting especially with those late 2008 Macs, Apple started some trends (big, multitouch trackpads; chiclet keyboards; aluminum unibody designs) and properly identified others before the rest of the industry could jump on them (SSDs, the death of the optical drive, high-resolution “Retina” displays). Apple led with the MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pros, and the PC industry largely followed.
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