I’m here to report that I’m still using this machine as my main development system. I think this is now my favourite Mac laptop ever, displacing the Titanium PowerBook which held that spot for a long, long time. Its still fast, its still thin, it still has a great screen, and from what I can tell it has a better keyboard than current MacBook Pro Retinas.
Mine is still going strong aside from the image retention problem. It definitely does not feel as slow at the 3.5-year mark as previous Macs I’ve had. It’s possibly the best Mac I’ve owned, despite being a first-generation product. Mainly, I’d like more RAM, a larger SSD, and the ability to drive a high-resolution external display. Current MacBook Pros are still limited to 16 GB of RAM, and the SSD has only increased from 750 GB to 1 TB.