What Was Happening
A customer from Kingston KT2 brought in a MacBook Pro 13-inch from 2014 that had become essentially unusable for daily work. Boot time was measured at just over 8 minutes. Opening any application required waiting several minutes. Switching between open applications triggered the beach-ball spinning cursor for 20–30 seconds at a time. Saving documents was visibly slow.
The customer had been using the machine for a decade and was genuinely fond of it — the keyboard, display, and build quality were all still in good condition. They had assumed the machine was simply too old to be useful and were pricing replacement options, but wanted an honest assessment before committing to a new purchase.
Our Diagnosis
Health check on the storage showed two problems operating together:
Capacity: The 500GB mechanical hard drive was at 94% full — 470GB used, 30GB free. macOS requires free space to write system caches, virtual memory paging files, and Spotlight indexes. At 6% free space, the system was competing with itself for the small amount of available storage on every operation.
Drive health: SMART data showed a reallocated sector count of 28 with an ongoing trend — the drive was physically degrading. Not yet at the point of imminent failure, but clearly on a trajectory toward it within weeks to months.
Beyond storage, the machine was in good health. The A1502’s 2.6GHz Intel Core i5 and 8GB RAM are adequate for everyday productivity tasks even in 2026. The display was in perfect condition. The battery was at 74% capacity — getting toward replacement territory but functional. The cooling system was clean.
Our assessment: this machine was absolutely worth repairing. The entire source of its slowness was the storage. Replace the drive, and the customer would have a machine performing at the level it did when new.
How We Fixed It
The 500GB mechanical drive was imaged before removal — the full image was verified for data integrity. Rather than restoring the old system image onto the new drive (which would bring the old macOS installation and its accumulated storage bloat), we transferred the customer’s files and performed a clean macOS installation.
The clean installation approach meant the new drive started with a fresh system, the customer’s user data and documents moved across cleanly, and the 500GB SSD would be used at well under 50% capacity — leaving the system plenty of room to operate efficiently.
The customer’s applications were reinstalled where needed. App Store applications reappear automatically after a clean install. Third-party applications were reinstalled from the customer’s download history, which we worked through with them.
The Result
Boot time on the first restart after the work was 23 seconds. Application launch times were near-instant. The beach-ball cursor, which had been a constant feature of using the machine, did not appear once during our post-work testing session.
The customer collected the machine the same day and, by follow-up contact, confirmed it had been like getting a new computer.
The Case for Repairing a 2014 MacBook Pro
A 2014 MacBook Pro purchased for £1,200 has depreciated almost entirely. But depreciation does not affect function. The machine’s CPU and RAM are not the bottleneck for typical productivity work — email, documents, browser, video calls. The bottleneck is the storage technology from 2014, which was a mechanical drive spinning at 5,400rpm. That technology is genuinely obsolete. Replace it with current SSD storage and the rest of the machine performs as if the decade between purchase and today had not happened.
A replacement MacBook with equivalent CPU performance, RAM, and display quality would cost several hundred pounds minimum. The SSD upgrade costs a fraction of that. For a machine in otherwise good condition, the upgrade is straightforwardly the right economic decision.
Prevention Tips
- Check free storage space on older MacBooks regularly — keep it above 15% to maintain system performance
- SMART data on conventional hard drives is readable with free tools; check it annually on any MacBook older than 5 years
- If your older MacBook is slow but the screen, keyboard, and chassis are in good condition, get a health check before pricing a replacement — the cause of the slowness is often the storage alone
Local Help in Kingston KT1 and KT2
We carry out MacBook repairs and SSD upgrades at our Putney workshop for customers across Kingston KT1 and KT2. Free collection is available — about 18–25 minutes from Putney via the A308.
Related Services
- MacBook Repair — hardware and storage upgrades for all MacBook models
- MacBook Repair in Kingston — local service for KT1 and KT2
More Case Studies
- MacBook Air hard drive replacement in Streatham SW16 — same repair on a MacBook Air
- PC & Mac health check — iMac performance audit in Putney — Fusion Drive replacement on an iMac with the same cause
- Faster, safer MacBook Air upgrade to latest macOS — software upgrade extending another aging MacBook’s life