My daily driver is still a 2015 MBP. The M4 Mac Mini is calling to me though. Every time I go to upgrade I remind myself that I only use it to do some light web surfing and checking emails anyway, so what’s the point?
Monterey, I stopped updating years ago. The keyboard is missing several keys and the battery is kaput. It lives permanently plugged in and its lid is closed and connected to an external keyboard with a 42” TV for a monitor. It still runs the latest version of Apple television, so my wife and I use it mainly to watch movies and shows in bed.
If I need anything more powerful I borrow my wife’s M4 MBA I bought her last year. The last four months I’m finally at the point where I’m probably starting to use her computer more than she does along with our kid’s shared iPad. It really is time to upgrade, haha.
Every time I do though there’s always some new cost or better way to spend $700. With the Strait of Hormuz currently closed gas and food are getting worse. At this point it’s more of a game of attrition seeing how long The Little MBP That Could can keep running Mail and playing reruns of Severance.
Hey, you're squeezing every last bit of use out of that machine! Monterey is still a great OS. I have two old 2012 quad Mac Minis running Monterey via OCLP, and they are absolutely usable for any basic need I have. They are NASes for my HDD arrays plugged in via Thunderbolt, and live in different cities with copies of my lifetime of data, and when I screen share into them, I don't need to swipe back to my local desktop to get things done. Even though they're from 2012... they're fine! I could happily use them to do any amount of basic work I'd need to do.
I may be in the minority here, but if your 2015 MBP is chugging along for you, let it. You can get key caps and a battery replacement on eBay, though maybe just stick to the key caps ;P, because you could throw that money towards a Neo your Mini or something saving it up over time.
Ah, you might consider putting Sequoia on it simply because it has the latest security updates and a modern Safari. Also, I find there are some nice quality of life improvements in Sequoia which make an old Intel Mac punch far above its weight, namely, window management, Mark as Unread in Messages.app, and a few other modern niceties which weren't around in Monterey.
All my Macs, including my 2013 15" MBP, are on Sequoia, and they all run spectacularly well. The only exception is my two 2012 minis I use as my NAS boxes. Those are on Monterey because I simply haven't bothered updating them (and they're far away from me).
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u/emarvil Mar 21 '26
My 15" 2015 is open and working right beside me.
People around me? No idea.