How do I determine when my Macbook pro was manufactured? I have an early 2011 17" Macbook Pro which is giving me issues related to SATA 6.0gbps; these issues were apparently consistent with the first machines off the line but some of the later machines have been better. I bought my first in March but fed up with the issue I went this week and bought another - alas - same issue. 

How can I determine the manufacturing date of the machine?
I'm always hesitant to recommend an app to do what a terminal command could do... but I cannot for the life of me find the terminal command to output the date of manufacture of any given Mac.

So...

I recommend the free app coconutBattery for this task.  It's a battery health monitor, and it happens to also show the date of manufacture of the Mac that it's running on.

Installation

brew cask install coconutbattery (if you use Homebrew) or download from the developer's site.