Man buys a 2018 MacBook Pro for $330 from Temu to see if it works as a budget laptop

Buying a used MacBook Pro for $330 from Temu might sound like a gamble, but one man decided to find out whether the bargain laptop could actually work as a budget machine.

The creator sent Temu C$450 of his own money, expecting the heavily discounted 2018 MacBook Pro to be either a great deal or a complete disaster.

What arrived was a genuine Apple laptop, although its condition immediately raised some questions.

He then put it through a series of tests to see whether the aging Intel-powered machine still had anything left to offer.

The $330 MacBook Pro arrived looking seriously battered

The MacBook Pro gadget itself arrived in surprisingly decent protective packaging, complete with a power brick, but the laptop itself had clearly lived a hard life.

The aluminum body was covered in dents, scratches and scuffs, with all four corners showing significant damage. There was also a large mark on the lid and plenty of wear around the Apple logo.

Despite the cosmetic abuse the MacBook had been through, the machine powered on and the display still worked.

The creator, Dawid, discovered that it was running macOS Sequoia, meaning the operating system was still receiving security updates.

He also confirmed that the machine was a 2018 MacBook Pro equipped with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-8850H processor, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and Intel UHD 630 graphics.

That meant the laptop was far from obsolete for basic tasks.

However, gaming quickly exposed its limitations.

He initially tested Civilization V, which ran reasonably well, before attempting to download newer games through Steam.

Some titles were unavailable or refused to launch properly under macOS, prompting him to install Linux to get a better idea of what the hardware could really do.

The budget Temu laptop had one major problem

Once Linux was installed, Dawid tried Cyberpunk 2077 and discovered that the MacBook’s biggest weakness wasn’t necessarily its processor or graphics hardware.

It was heat.

At 1080p on low settings, the machine managed almost 20 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077, which was better than expected.

The problem was that the CPU quickly reached 100 degrees Celsius and began aggressively throttling itself.

The processor would repeatedly drop from around 2.6GHz to just 800MHz, resulting in major performance drops, and Counter-Strike 2 suffered from similar problems, with frame rates plunging whenever the processor throttled.

Dawid decided to take the MacBook apart and found dusty fans and fairly dry thermal paste.

He also discovered an AMD Radeon RX 560 GPU that hadn’t been properly identified by some of the software he’d used earlier.

After cleaning the fans and replacing the thermal paste, temperatures improved, although Cyberpunk didn’t gain any additional frame rate.

Counter-Strike 2 did become more consistent, with the severe frame drops largely disappearing.

Ultimately, the $330 MacBook Pro proved that an old Intel-based Apple laptop could still be usable, but it wasn’t exactly the budget gaming machine the YouTuber might have hoped for.

His conclusion was simple: buying a used MacBook locally would probably make more sense than gambling on a heavily discounted Temu purchase.

At least this particular Temu gamble had produced a genuine MacBook Pro – even if it looked like it had been through several years of extremely hard use.