The latest MacBook Pro with optical drive is officially obsolete, Apple has put it on the list of products considered as such worldwide. To be precise, it is a MacBook Pro 13 from mid-2012, a model that this year will cross the 12-year milestone and that until “yesterday” the company still kept among the vintage products, in other words it had some hope of receiving assistance from the official network in case of problems.
MacBook Pro 13 mid 2012 is a laptop with a 13.3-inch display and a resolution slightly higher than HD (1,280 x 800 pixels), dual processor option (Intel Core i5 or i7 2.5 or 2.9 GHz), 4 or 8 GB of DDR3 RAM at 1,600 MHz, up to 1 TB of storage with HDD or up to 512 GB with SSD, Wi-Fi n and Bluetooth 4.0, 2 kg in weight and, of course, built-in SuperDrive 8x reader (which is still available as an external device, but to be connected via USB-A).
The last MacBook Pro with optical drive has “lived” for a long time: Apple took it off the list at the end of 2016 and updated it up to macOS 10.15 Catalina, despite having debuted several generations earlier, on day one had macOS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. In short, a great career, before finally getting off the official radar with the inclusion among the obsolete Apple products. Now there’s no longer a MacBook Pro with an optical drive that has any hope of receiving support from Apple.
Apple’s policy is that products become vintage five years after leaving the scene, obsolete after seven. They can enter one of the two lists later, but not before. The difference between the two categories is substantial: vintage products can be officially repaired at Apple or authorized centers, at least technically because feasibility is subject to the availability of spare parts.
On obsolete products, on the other hand, there is not even the doubt about the availability of parts: they cannot be repaired through official channels, so in case of problems the only option is to contact third-party repairers, availability of spare parts permitting – original, if residual in stock, or non-original, if still produced by third parties.
