Apple has officially marked one of its most loved products as obsolete – the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro. Both the 13” and 15” 2012 Retina MacBook Pros have now been marked as vintage, meaning Apple will not support these machines anymore in terms of hardware repairs.
Users of the 2012 Retina MacBooks will not be able to get their laptops repaired from Apple stores anymore. However, they can still rely on third party repair stores or use iFixit guides to repair it themselves (which we strongly do not recommend unless you are a professional at hardware repairs).
The 2012 Retina MacBook Pro changed the whole laptop industry. It introduced a display on a laptop that had a higher resolution than most TVs at the time and some TVs even in today’s situation. Apple skipped the 1920-by-1080 resolution and jumped straight to offering 2880-by-1800 on its MacBooks.
Of course, the 2012 15” MacBook Pro was the first Apple laptop to offer such a higher resolution. The display on the laptop offered 200 pixel per inch (ppi) and a brightness of 399 nits which made it extremely good to look at and also usable outdoors. The laptop was hailed as photographers and videographers best friend at the time.
During the WWDC 2012 keynote, Apple screened a video that detailed all the new and interesting aspects of the 15” Retina MacBook Pro. Jony Ive, Apple’s chief designer at the time talked at length about Apple’s efforts to get everything right in the laptop. For example, Ive detailed the fans used in the laptop – the blades were asymmetrically placed to “spread the sound over a variety of frequencies that make it sound quieter and less intrusive.”
The 2012 15” was truly a marvelous product. Apple followed up that year by releasing a 13” Retina MacBook Pro which is also marked as “vintage” now.
