If you have any friends still banging their heads into a Macbook Pro (the non retina variety) – and you probably do given its longtime popularity – do everyone a favor and ask them if it’s because it’s so slow and then when they nod knowingly, ask them if they are still using the stock 5400 rpm Hard Drive.
Help them into an SSD. You may need to coax them. They won’t want to open up that unibody. But as nerds and geeks, we know they should. So convince them.
SSDs are cheap now; even a 1TB drive is very affordable.1 And that drive bay is user accessible with a Phillips #00 screwdriver. Send them the ifixit link and talk them through it.2 Get them to smack the old HDD in a $10 USB 3 enclosure and use it for Time Machine or whatever.
Bonus Tip: Apparently, those 13-inch Macbook Pro can handle 16 GB of RAM even though Apple claims they max out at 8 GB. The RAM is also user-replaceable.
For $300 dollars, they will feel like they bought a whole new souped-up computer. Sure, it’s not super thin and light and it isn’t retina. But it will probably be a nice box and for a few more years still.