The New MacBook Pros Mark the End of Upgradeable Apple Computers
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
- Late 2009 white plastic MacBook, 320 GB HD, 4 GB RAM, cost 1000 euros, came with OS 10.5 or so.
Earlier this year tossed in 200 euros worth of RAM (8GB) and SSD (500 GB), because Safari was gagging a bit on too many tabs of modern web. Has been updated to the latest macOS at every release, Sierra included, no problem.
- 2008 or so vintage HP-tx laptop, 320 GB HD, 4 GB RAM, cost 700 or so euros on sale in 2009, came with Windows Vista.
Installed Windows 7 pro (BizSpark gift), upgraded to Windows 10 pro, with no problems (except Windows updates being painful in general ;-)
Model Identifier: MacBookPro9,2
US version
Model No: A1278
Order No: MD101LL/A (2.5 GHz), MD102LL/A (2.9 GHz)
Initial Price: $1,199 (2.5 GHz) $1,499 (2.9 GHz)
It was only old because they let it get that way.
Mine: (2) 960 GiB SSDs, 16 GiB RAM, Sugru'ed FireWire port and optical slot.
The processor and screen are old, but they're not critical to what I use it for. New ones lack MagSafe and force you to pay for Apple upgrades and more accessories to haul around to do what was previously possible.
Anyhow, it's the last Apple computer I'll likely ever buy, until they get their products back to something people actually use as opposed to a Bentley for a Sunday drive.
I expect that will even be a likely third party snap on product given the upgrade in what the new ports make possible.
Yep, really want to see Anandtech's take on it. It's going to blur the line between memory and storage - at those speeds frequent writing to the swap file probably won't matter. A few people might have to eat their words when the reviews are out.
There's still a lot to be done before SSDs can truly rival with memory.
But isn't this the ultimate idea behind NVMe? By using PCIe in parallel it gets to the point where you can rely on nonvolatile memory to be more of a system workhorse than merely a storage system. Apple seems to have an idea of where they want to go - just look at the last two iPhones, the 6s and 7. They've had around 1/2 to 3/4 the amount of RAM of other flagship devices while having stupid-fast storage and in real-world tests they outperform their competitors for load times and responsiveness.