Updgading memory on MacBook Pro (non-retina) - Cost?
This morning, a cup of coffee spelled (or spilled in this case?) the demise of our beloved 2008 white MacBook. We don't have a ton to spend, and this MacBook Pro deal seems to fit the bill for us. We aren't pro users, but I would imagine that 3 years from now, I'll want to extend the life of our next machine by upgrading the memory. Since I've always been able to just add RAM on my own, I need to know: will it be expensive/difficult to take my new MacBook Pro into a repair shop to upgrade the memory down the road a few years? If it's just a matter of paying someone an hour of labor to do it, that's not a huge deal to me. I just don't want to be stuck with a 4GB machine 3 years from now that doesn't perform well just because it could use more RAM.
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I'm guessing that may actually be a refurbished model, they don't say it is brand new.
Apple sells refurbished models from its website, which are for all intents and purposes as new and come with full warranty, also AppleCare if you want it, a good idea in the States where your consumer laws don't offer the same protection as in Europe or Australia.
I also found this at Amazon.
Check out the model specs in MacTracker [free]. The last model to have replaceable RAM and HardDrives was about 2-3 years ago, and also had an optical drive. My wife got an excellent deal on a refurbished 15" i7 iMac Pro.
As always with Apple there are swings and roundabouts. My wife's model doesn't have USB 3.0.
You can get the Retina model with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD for ~$15 more:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/FE865LL/A/refurbished-133-inch-macbook-pro-24ghz-dual-core-intel-core-i5
If it's for basic use, you won't need to upgrade the RAM. The SSD also means you never have to shut it down even when moving it around as it has no moving parts, you treat it like an iPad.
The SSD can still be upgraded, you'd have to get it from eBay but the laptops can be opened easily. Upgrades can be done by any computer repair guy in minutes. I would highly recommend the Retina MBP over the older model unless you frequently need a DVD drive or need lots of internal storage.
The RAM is soldered onto the Retina 13"Macbook Pro late 2013, and the SSD whilst replaceable is an odd and probably non-obtainable format.
https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/147435/Is+it+upgradable
The 256 Gb SSD will be restrictive. The System will eat up much of that and get worse as you upgrade. Add media and applications, and most the free space on the drive rapidly vanishes.
If you have less than 20% free on the SSD for System paging, the Mac will start to crawl.
8GB is plenty for everyday use and is suitable for light productivity tasks.
People sell higher capacities on eBay and OWC has started making some PCIe models. If the OP only has a low amount of storage needs then it's a non-issue.
There's no 20% limit for paging and it would only slow down if there's a process continually demanding more RAM than is available. They said it wasn't for high-end use so with 8GB, this won't happen.
Someone buying a non-Retina machine now is buying an obsolete machine. They will probably be discontinued this year.
OSX will always write to the SSD drive no matter how much RAM. Best to always have a minimum of 10% free, 20% is better.
Start using multiple tabs in your browser and you will eat that RAM. I have 12GB + a 1Tb HDD and sometimes hit slow downs.
8Gb RAM may look like plenty now, history shows that it won't be in a few years time.
Anything that gets dated and is an oddball format, is trouble brewing. Apple makes many silly arbitrary decisions with hardware and its users often have to pick up the tab. iFixit is right when it says Apple's custom SSD is not a format you can rely on for when you need it. At minimum it will get you in the typical Apple bind of little to no choice at a price that makes no sense. i.e. It will be cheaper to replace the whole Mac than upgrade some minor component.
Plus I would not rely on eBay for any major, oddball components. eBay is good for mainstream generic hardware, particularly if you can track the manufacturer. I have just recently been stung by 3 separate purchases, one was fake, one was possibly a fake and the other one simply never worked. The worst case scenario is something that appears to work but you get intermittent problems and just can't be sure. Is it the replacement or not?
That's not true for memory. It caches things but it won't page to the hard drive until you are running out of RAM. Having that amount of free space is a good idea but not a requirement.
History shows that old amounts of RAM weren't enough for modern 64-bit programs with Retina graphics. Modern amounts of RAM are sufficient and aren't causing pageouts. Even if 8GB somehow became inadequate due to some new type of computing in a few years (4-6 years), computers will be more advanced and a new computer makes more sense than upgrading such an old machine.
Computers are moving towards integrated graphics, which use the internal system memory. This needs to provide the right bandwidth for the graphics to work properly. Having a standard external interface just serves to limit the memory performance and the interface keeps changing anyway. NVidia's future GPUs are going to stick memory right onto the processor for the best performance.
Memory requirements will not keep going up.
Switching to PCIe SSD was not a silly arbitrary decision. Their SSDs are faster than any other mainstream computer and exceed SATA 3 performance. SSDs need to be properly controlled to maintain performance over time.
They're a repair company. They never give high marks for things they can't repair.
Memory requirements will not keep going up.
What was that famous quote by Bill Gates?
IFixit is not wrong just because they repair things. They have real knowledge of a broad range of computers because they tear them down and get to see what works, what doesn't, and where the bodies are buried.
The initial RAM and hard drive requirements in all my Macs and PCs always looked like they would be enough and thankfully I was able to do something about it when that proved to no longer be true, or a drive went south. But that's just my 30+ years of computing experience.
Obviously yours is different.
My 30+ years of computing experience is that Apple's switches and changes in hardware and software have always been at my expense. Better to play safe than believe everything Apple tells you. The extremely high cost of repairs and changes to Apple hardware rules out most options outside AppleCare and lately Apple's excellent open attitude to support is changing. To get a simple Genius Bar appointment now you have to lie to not get fobbed off at the online appointment stage.
Apple is tightening up support and it looks like that is ultimately going to change for the worse.
Which does not bode well if there is nothing you can personally do to fix or alter your Mac. Or it has a unique Apple connection or specification that will be rapidly made redundant by Apple itself.
The timing was wrong but the statement is based on the assumption of what people need the hardware for. Memory is used to produce and consume content. Our content is limited by our bodies. We can't distinguish more colors than roughly 32-bit although there are advantages to slightly higher depths, our visual resolution is limited, our hearing is limited. When it comes to content creation, we have limited time to create content. In the movie The Life of Pi, it took 600 artists to get the Tiger to look that real. That's just not feasible to do for most productions and it bankrupted the company:
http://www.thewrap.com/life-pi-chronicles-collapse-rhythm-hues/
Someone could say that audio requirements will keep increasing but they'd be wrong. We reached the limit of audio fidelity a while ago and computers have handled this for a long time.
Retina quality displays are enough visually that people can't see pixels so content doesn't need to be higher than this. Not least because it's too time-consuming for humans to do that.
I don't see anything that will require mainstream users to be using over 8GB of RAM. Look at the game visuals in Ryse:
[VIDEO]
That's maxed out with a GTX Titan, a core i7 and 8GB of RAM and it looks film-like quality to me. The fact that PC upgrades are slowing so much is because a larger and larger amount of people don't need performance and storage upgrades any more.
My experience was that computer technology was always inadequate but I saw it converging to being adequate. We're not going above 64-bit, mainstream users will never need something on the order of 32GB of RAM. You can tell from pageouts. Storage requirements do go up but not as much for consumers as it does for producers.
You're only talking about RAM sticks and a SATA port for upgrades on the old model. It's not as if computers have always been highly upgradeable. Having to do upgrades is a nuisance, not a benefit. RAM and storage should need as little upgrading as the motherboard or laptop display. Once you pick a RAM amount and storage amount at purchase, that should suit for the lifespan of the machine, which isn't infinite and never has been.
The iPad shows the future of the PC. People never get to upgrade them and nobody really cares. They have some of the highest customer satisfaction ratings of any product Apple has made.
I agree that Apple's changes to end up costing consumers more but it makes for a better experience. Look how long PC manufacturers were shipping laptops with VGA ports. They all end up following Apple's example anyway. They resisted ultrabooks but now they see the higher profitability vs dirt cheap laptops, it's ultrabooks everywhere.
It seems right now that soldered RAM and PCIe SSDs are cumbersome but from here, prices will keep falling and they won't switch from PCIe to something else so companies will build up stocks of these for trivial upgrades. ifixit sells PCIe SSDs for the laptops but they are official ones so limited stocks.
OK, we'll agree to wait and see. Time wounds all heels.
The day that having a Mac doesn't bite me in the wallet? That I'll have to see!
VGA ports were great. I could always plug in a PC to virtually every monitor, with Apple it changed constantly. I even got caught recently with an older white Macbook at a site where I would have loved it if only I had the oddball DVI-mini to VGA adapter to hand. We still need @#$% adaptors, only now for Thunderbolt 1, 2 …
I saw an hilarious picture of the chain of adaptors (at least 3) that a Mac user had to use to get a display to work with his older Mac.
Just saw a supposed prototype of a Macbook Air with no Thunderbolt or MagSafe ports. Not to worry, look at the thriving market in Thunderbolt to Firewire/USB2.0/USB3.0 adaptors. And Thunderbolt is cheap as chips, no worry if you can't connect to that investment! and I only have to look at Apple's beautifully integrated design as my iPod 5 perches, wobbling on top of its Lightning to Apple connector on my speaker system.