Agree. My older Macbook Pro basically has a dead battery and I'm thinking about just replacing the battery and swapping the hard drive for an ssd to give it some new life. That said, it is used primarily at the house so we just plug it in to watch some netflix and browse the web or pull up a recipe for dinner, so it isn't that big of an issue in the first place for my purposes.
A SSD and some ram upgrade can do wonders for an older machine (and price is pretty reasonable for both these days). You can even get kits that allow you to take out your 'superdrive' and install a second hard drive.
Yep. I'm still using a 2010 MBP. I maxed out the RAM a few years ago and it performed better. Now I've got an SSD in it and it feels like new. Almost nothing I do pushes it so I simply have no good reason to replace it. If I hadn't put the SSD in I would have replaced it two+ years ago because it felt slow.
I'm actually still using a 2009 MacBook Pro(core2duo+4gb ram), I put in a Kingston 128GB SSD and the machine runs El Capitan without any problem. I keep it permanently on as a kitchen PC, for looking up recipes and stuff.
