Way to tell how many hours my MacBook Pro has been operating?

A mid 2012 MBP can run Mt.Lion.

Heh . . . that's what *I* thought! I had specifically bought that computer from apple.ca's Refurbished store because I wanted to make a clone of this computer (the one I am typing on, also a MacBook Pro 13" Core Duo i5 2.5GhZ/4GB/500GBHD) except that the new MBP (let's call it MBP2 as opposed to the one I am typing on, MBP1) arrived from Apple running Mavericks. Yes, you read that correctly.

Then, (please bear with me, this is interesting) I sent BOTH computers to my local Mac service place (not an Apple Store), whom I trust implicitly -- those guys definitely knew what they were doing -- to basically clone MBP1 onto MBP2.

However, they returned MBP2 not only NOT cloned, but now running Yosemite.

Well, I kind of forgot about it -- I figured, what the heck, if the time ever comes, I'll worry about my data then, and promptly put MBP2 into the closet, after tricking it out with every scratchguard/armor known to man.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, MBP1 DID crash -- luckily, I had a month-old copy stored on my Time Capsule -- but, and you guessed it, when I tried again to backup to MBP2 from my Time Capsule -- the very same backup that I used for MBP1 -- of course it didn't work because MBP2 was running Yosemite.

So then I got on to Apple. A very nice guy in California took my case and did his best to try to get MBP2 to run Mountain Lion. I actually uploaded special tech files directly to Apple engineers with his help, then downloaded a special program that enabled my to connect directly with Apple's servers, to at least try to install Mountain Lion on MBP2. No go. The best they could do was install Mavericks. so I'm back to Square One.

MBP2 is all but useless to me, since all I really wanted to do was clone MBP1. And you would think that two so-called "identical" machines would be, well, identical. But you would be wrong.

Let this be a lesson to everyone . . . just because it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and is listed as a duck, it might just be a goose.

But you're right -- MBP2 is absolutely flawless and they will have the option to upgrade to Yosemite or not, as they choose.

Ogle,

Thanks!! But I'm sure that if it were indeed possible to run Mountain Lion on the MBP2 the Apple folk would have shown me a way or told me it was possible. Believe me, I spent about three hours on the phone with them, and basically the deal was that if it didn't work, I'd be getting rid of the MBP, so a lot was riding on it. I see where you're coming from, but at this point I've packed it in. Better sell it and either buy another computer that does run Mountain Lion, or migrate everything to a new computer running anything except Yosemite.

That's really funny, I used to have Coconut Battery on my old iBooks.

Here is what it says . . . 51 cycles. But I never let it run down to nothing so I'm wondering what that means. Oh, and it says my MacBook Pro is 919 days old!!! That pretty much nails it!