I can&#x27;t upvote this enough.<p>A year ago, I wasn&#x27;t sure how much longer my ancient (but still functioning!) 2008 MBP would be going on. So I went shopping. Found the same tradeoffs Marco mentions here: I didn&#x27;t like the sealed nature of the newer offerings (and also, AFAICT no screen density can make up for the inexplicably missing matte displays).<p>I ended up buying a used 2.6Ghz i7 8GB 15&quot; matte MBP instead of anything new from Apple, though.<p>About the only complaint I have is that Mavericks seems neither as stable or as well-performing as Snow Leopard, which seems to be the last time Apple released an OS that was a strict improvement over previous releases. Too bad it&#x27;s no longer safe to run given the state of updates.