Comment by illamint | Hacker News Reader

Comment by illamint | Hacker News Reader

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I've always been in the camp that rarely replaces the battery in my Mac laptops, especially with the new LiPo batteries. It's not like they're NiCads that need replacing every month (I remember having a stack of batteries for my Powerbook Duo). Additionally, in the past, the only other components I've replaced have been drives (adding an SSD) and memory (upgrading to the max amount supported by the board). In this case, you've already got those. If you go the 16GB route and pick an SSD appropriate to your needs (I'd never want to trust 768GB of data to one drive in a portable machine, anyways), what's left to upgrade?

Seriously, most people talk about adding SSDs and replacing drives: it already has an SSD that is near-as-makes-no-difference fast enough to saturate the SATA bus. People expecting to get the one-time boost they got from going to a 5400RPM drive to a blazing-fast SSD won't ever experience that again until we push past SATA interfaces. The 16GB of RAM you can option it out with is also pretty close to not only the limits of practicality but also the limits of the chipset. So, those points are moot. Max out the RAM and pick any SSD and you'll never need to touch them during the lifetime of the computer, and if you could, it wouldn't have any real effect. The SSD is even socketed so--should it die--you can replace it.

And, sure, the screen is hard to replace, but it's not like Apple's ever been the pinnacle of upgradability anyways. What were you expecting, a socketed processor and some thumbscrews so you could drop in a new chip? Whether you know it or not, this serves the needs of well over 99% of Apple's market for the MacBook Pro, and if it doesn't serve yours--if you really insist that you must be able to replace and/or repair every single component in your computer, then a Mac wasn't for you in the first place. Two Thunderbolt ports and two USB 3.0 ports further drive the point home. I do, like many of you, lament the loss of the "hacker" ethos that enables us to modify our computers and drop in new parts, but we're kidding ourselves. This isn't a new state of affairs and we're making a mountain out of a molehill.

During these four years, I have been able to: replace the keyboard (after I had improperly cleaned it), replace the battery, upgrade the RAM, and upgrade the HDD. I can give it to a family member as a hand-me-down as it not only wasn't that expensive but has a lot of newer the components that make age well.

Four years ago, I was fine with having even just having 2 GB for a bit of Photoshop and browsing on my current white MacBook. Now, even after expanding to 6 GB (the undocumented max for this model) I still get memory swapping due to the newer Photoshop and tons of tabs in Chrome. That's of course, a limitation of this model. If I had even one of the newer MBPs, I could go up to 32GB in memory when 16GB sticks come out, as I believe that this Ivy Bridge model and the early 2011 (not the late 2011) Sandy Bridge MBP's can be upgraded to 32GB of RAM despite Apple's documentation that it only goes to 16GB.

Unfortunately, because the RAM is soldered, it means I don't really have that option. Which kind of blows because in three years, 8 GBs could be closer to the normal use case, and 16GB will probably be what some professionals need, while 32 GB could become the cushy future proofed number that 16 GB is right now.

And then with the SSD, I think the idea is that some people (including myself) would rather pay for the minimum right now, and pay for the upgrade when parts come down in price. Effectively paying $600 largely for an extra 256GB (as the processor upgrade of .3GHz is quite unnoticeable for most) isn't outrageous, but I think the onus is then to front-load the costs instead of appropriately upgrade when some costs come down. Thankfully, it is possible to upgrade the hard drive (like Air), only it's just a bit more tricky than a standard SSD because there are less options outside of OWC.

The Macbook Pro Retina is a great and beautiful computer, but it's the toughest laptop choice I've had to make in my lifetime. I've always felt burned by front-loading computers ($4k PowerMac G4 which was a beautiful machine but easily underpowered after a few years, my hand-bult built $2k desktop that was outdated six months later when PCI-Express became ubiquitous) as I rarely feel justified spending $3k on something that is left behind in a short amount of time, even though I do 100% of my work on it. So I've preferred going with a bare-bones approach with upgrading components as they get more economical.

YMMV. I have bought fully-loaded mid-release-cycle Apple laptops for the last ten years, starting with the Rev. D TiBook. Each lasted for several years of heavy use. At year 3, they started feeling dated, and at year 4, I generally replaced them.

If you go the 16GB route and pick an SSD appropriate to your needs (I'd never want to trust 768GB of data to one drive in a portable machine, anyways), what's left to upgrade?

That configuration is very expensive, though. I think the complaints about upgrades are really a proxy for complaints about price.

So, what you're saying is that 640kb should be enough for everyone, at least until next year's WWDC, when Apple releases a new $2000 laptop?

The parts that will be bottlenecking performance are parts that you wouldn't be able to upgrade in any normal laptop. The GPU is the most underwhelming part of the machine, because it can't keep up with the high resolution of the display. The resolution may also cause the CPU to be a bottleneck for some tasks that aren't totally offloaded to the GPU.

On the other hand, 16GB of RAM is plenty for quite some time, and the CPU's integrated memory controller can probably only handle 32GB at most, so offering standard SO-DIMM slots wouldn't really do that much to extend the usability of the machine. It's pretty much the same for the SSD: you can't get much faster without updating the SATA controller on the chipset, and 768GB will be a reasonable amount of storage for a laptop until the entertainment indrusty can settle on a standard for what to do with all the extra pixels on that display.

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