Speed up MacBook Pro mid-2012?

If you have not already upgraded the hard drive to an SSD, then that would be the best most economical option. If you have the 13" non-Retina model, then you may also need to replace the internal hard drive SATA Cable since this cable has an extremely high rate of failure.

If the Mac is only using 4GB of memory, then that will be the second bottle neck. Memory for this model may be a bit harder to get these days and may not be worth the cost. Replacing one of the original 2GB sticks with an 8GB stick is sufficient to give you 10GB, but a 4GB stick would also work (6GB total) although it will be expensive for just a 2GB extra memory. You can easily test the laptop with the SSD upgrade first to see how the laptop performs as the SSD will make the most difference in performance and the SSD can be used externally when you retire this laptop unlike the memory which will be worthless.

You do need to consider whether any of these upgrades are actually worth the money for such an old laptop.

Greetings SMW2022,

Getting the best performance from your Mac is important and you've come to a great place for help. One of the best tools for isolating performance related issues is Activity Monitor. You can follow the steps below to open Activity monitor and see if there are any apps using a large percentage of the CPU, then quit the app to see if you notice any improvement in performance.

1. Go in to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.
2. In Activity Monitor click %CPU.
3. Click any app using a large percentage of the CPU.
4. Then click the stop sign icon with the X in it to quit the app.

Check if your Mac needs more RAM in Activity Monitor

Let us know how that goes!