Great if you need Intel MacBook Pro
The 2019 MacBook Pro 16" that I received was exactly as described. I ordered "Excellent" condition.
Physical condition: The physical condition was excellent and had only very minor scuffs on the exterior edges of the shell. There was a small smudge on the bottom of the laptop that I was able to wipe off with a lens cloth. The keyboard , trackpad, and screen were all in pristine condition with no visible defects. This is about as good as I normally take care of my own laptops, which is high praise coming from someone very detail-oriented like myself. I also checked that all four thunderbolt3 ports were able to accept charge from my charger; that the speaker was able to reproduce music at full volume without static, crackling, or pops; that wifi and bluetooth were working as expected, and that the touchbar was working.
Specifications: I verified that all of the specs (CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD) were exactly as described in the product listing. I used apps like coconut battery, SMART mon tools, and Apple's own system information tools to check battery cycles and wear on the SSD. There were only 52 cycles on the battery when I received my unit (which is very good). There were 14TBW on the SSD -- at first I thought this seemed a bit high, but given that modern 1TB SSDs are usually rated to last 600+ TBW, I was comfortable with the wear on the SSD.
Software condition: The reason I gave this review 4 stars instead of 5, is because of multiple software issues that I had to resolve on my own. I am a software engineer by profession and was able to resolve all the issues by myself without having to call anybody for support -- that said, if I was less tech savvy, I could see myself having potential trouble setting the laptop up. Firstly, the laptop came with macOS Catalina, which is 3 major software versions behind as of the time of this review (Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura). After updating and upgrading to the latest OS and setting up my iCloud account, I noticed that Apple Pay was disabled. To make the long story short -- a security feature called "Secure Boot" had been disabled by the seller, and in order to get the full functionality from my Mac, I needed to enable Secure Boot -- which means I needed to do a fresh re-install of the OS and boot into recovery mode in order to enable Secure Boot. This took several hours to set everything up again, but things have been working smoothly since.
Final recommendation: If you KNOW you need an Intel MacBook (ex: software developers running specific virtual machine images), or a reasonably-priced MacBook (I paid $1200 for my spec) with lots of RAM and a big screen, then this is a great buy. The 32GB of RAM in this Intel model is great for power-users who don't want to shell out the eye-watering $3000 for the newest Apple Silicon M2 Pro or M2 Max MacBook Pros directly at Apple. That said, if you don't truly need 32GB of RAM, or a 16" screen, or an Intel CPU, then for the money you are better off buying an M1 MacBook Air for the portability, battery life, and speed.
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Verified purchase: Yes
