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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

I'm seriously wondering what my upgrade path is supposed to be.

I have an ancient 2011 15" MBP, which was also the last user-upgradeable Apple laptop ever, but I remain hesitant to buy a new model. There is just not enough storage in the new ones, or in models that come close to my old one (1TB+) it's prohibitively expensive.

At some point soon, my old MBP will probably disintegrate or get stolen, and it has features I'm not going to get back. I'm used to having my music, my ebooks, my documents, my photos, and my code with me at all times. It's really convenient.

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Stop being a packrat and move cold data to an external drive.

Bonus: now you have your data around even if your laptop breaks.

Once I learned to live with a 64GB macbook air, I realized that 90% of the data I was keeping around was not useful.

It's very liberating.

Yes, I realize 64GB of data is huge, but not for modern machines.

> Stop being a packrat and move cold data to an external drive.

How does lugging around an extra piece of equipment that is inconvenient to handle equate to being less of a packrat? No. Inventing time-consuming and frustrating coping strategies just because newer tech is more limited than the old stuff? That's not a path I'm going to embark on. There is nothing liberating about it.

The restrictions Apple currently imposes on us do not exist because they believe we should throw away our data as a matter of Zen. They exist because SSDs have not caught up yet, though at some point they will.

> Bonus: now you have your data around even if your laptop breaks.

What does breakage even mean in this context? My laptop right now has an SSD for fast system things and an HDD for bulk data. If one of them breaks, the laptop will still be usable and I just put in a spare part. If the laptop is completely destroyed, chances are an external HDD in my backpack will also be.

It's not like carrying an external backup HDD is impossible just because my laptop has adequate onboard storage - it's obviously a false dichotomy.

> It's very liberating.

I absolutely get that shedding ballast is a liberating experience, but it pertains to physical things. I have gotten rid of many, many things in my life that didn't have any real value anymore - including almost all of my books, CDs, and DVDs. The books and CDs are still with me in digital form, which is kind of the point here (the DVDs are, too, but on my home server).

The neat thing about digital possessions is that they can scale very well without encumbering you.

"cold data" from OP was probably a key factor.

They're responding to a different philosophy.

Take music: The main case is generally "I want to listen to music that I like" or "I want to listen to (specific) music from (artist)" of some sort. I have 150GB of music, but neither of those cases require most of it as most of it is only accessed very rarely. The music file storage can stay somewhere else, for occasional reference if I want to pull something esoteric from the collection. "Cloud" or an external drive are great for this.

Wash, rinse, repeat for photos, movies, old software, etc.

And when it "breaks", i.e. that single-point-of-failure HDD fails, as they do often catastrophically without warning, the files aren't lost. It's like keeping your will, the deed to your house, baby photos, etc. in the briefcase/backpack you carry around all day. Fine way to protect them until something happens to that briefcase.

It's liberating dropping 3 pounds from your shoulder, as well.

I have a small (256Gb) SSD drive in my Surface Pro 2. I have a 1Tb drive I occasionally carry around with me that has "everything". It's a mirror of my 1TB drive in my desktop at home.

Whilst I love the 10" form factor and the light weight of the Surface there are times where I need something obscure and rarely accessed, and don't have my drive with me. This is frustrating beyond description.

Also not sure about the data loss argument, as I back up regularly.

Interestingly the data loss argument wasn't aimed at you, but at someone arguing they just needed their laptop with a big HD and nothing else.

There's many options for providing yourself access to the desktop at home from a mobile location, at which point you can access those obscure files.

It does seem that the tablet isn't a great product vehicle at the moment for a Tb portable desktop.

> Take music: The main case is generally "I want to listen to music that I like"

Sure, but that's not the same every day. I don't want to shuffle my music collection around constantly; I'd rather just have it, so if on a trip I'm reminded of $bandname and want to listen to an album, I don't have to futz with downloading it on hotel wifi. To me the cognitive overhead of manually operating some kind of caching scheme, where I purge rarely used files to the archive and then have to page-fault them back in again, is not worth it.

I'd be willing to put money on the general person never needing more than a small portion of their library but for the rare exception, at which point a free Scroble-ing service or YouTube suffice. If you reflect, are you really going back to the depths of your music library to find track 11 off that one less-popular (insert band name) album?

It's simply the philosophy that most of the stuff we keep with us on our TB hard drive laptops isn't actually stuff we need to keep with us.

Obviously Apple considers your philosophy to be an edge case to their intended business model and would rather not offer you moderately priced options to upgrade, which is certainly a shame.

> Stop being a packrat and move cold data to an external drive.

>Bonus: now you have your data around even if your laptop breaks.

External drives are pretty unreliable. It's more probable the external drive will die before the laptops internal one.

>External drives are pretty unreliable. It's more probable the external drive will die before the laptops internal one.

Citation needed.

There's no reason for the external drive to "die before the laptops internal one".

Not only that: you can actually buy the very same drives that are in your laptop for external use if you like.

Agree, most of the time external drives are cases with USB/eSATA adapters and an "internal" hard drive. The only difference with a PC is that it's easier to drop the external drive.

That was correct ten years ago.

Nowadays the external drives of course contain 3.5" or 2.5" hard drives. But the inbuilt hard discs come with little or no warrenty, are "eco"-drives that are meant to be used only occasionally (not 24x7) and spin with only 5400 rpm.

Internal hard drives for personal/business (desktop, notebook) come with up to 4 or 5 years warrenty and spin with 7200 or 11000 rpm and have a better internal cache.

You know you can buy the external versions of those 7200 and higher RPM drives, right?

And that contrary to what you said, tons of personal/business laptops come with 5400 HDs. Not much quality HD on a €400 euro laptop or even some Apple models.

I use a 2008 15'' MBP, replacing the superdrive with an optibay + SSD and rolling-out my own fusion drive extended the lifespan of this machine to no ends.

I am just slowly starting to consider getting another laptop in 2015, but the fact that the new line of MBP adhere to the soldered-on-and-force-obsolescence philosophy is really putting me off this purchase.

That's basically my current setup.

If I could retrofit a retina display to 2nd hand 2011 model MBP, then I'd replace my old Dell laptop with one today. Unfortunately every model of MBP since I've been wanting to upgrade has been less and less user serviceable or even technically repairable. Which puts me looking at spending a lot of money for the hope of more battery life really.

The overall system performance improvement of an SSD is worth it alone for an upgrade (or replacing it in your current laptop if you can). It turned my old plastic MacBook into a new laptop for me. I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet. You will love using your laptop even more, and you can get a small form factor external to complement it.

> My laptop right now has an SSD for fast system things and an HDD for bulk data

I've set up an old laptop on my home network with about 7TB of storage. Plex handles all my video and music needs (so long as I can get a decent internet connection). And teamviewer and dropbox lets me access the rest as I need.

If I need to go on a trip where I won't have good internet, there's more than enough storage for a dozen movies or tv shows or whatever and hundreds of hours of music. I just load it up and delete it when I get back.

It sucks in some ways to set up, and it's a lot of work, but it really does payoff later. And having all my media self-hosted somewhere I can get to from my laptop, my desktop, the web, my phone, my tablet, and chromecast to my tv is actually better than lugging all that around.

If you usually have a good Internet connection, one possibility (that I use) is for you to keep most files in Dropbox (or equivalent service) and unsync folders that you don't need. I do this for large data sets that I use periodically, and arrange for my videos and photos to be batched in folders with the year in the file name. If I want to watch a video I made two years ago, I just resync a folder, and it is soon available.

A disadvantage of this approach is that unsynced folders are not in Time Machine backups.

I'm not sure how much longer it'll be around, but this latest refresh still left one non-SSD/non-retina MBP, the 13" model that comes with a 512 GB hdd and upgradeable to 1 TB. Price after upgrade is $1149 (vs. $2299 for a retina model with 1 TB): http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/. Not an option if you like the 15" screen though.

I have an early 2011 15" mbp. I always only had a 500gb hd in it. Recently, its performances have starting becoming inadequate, so I switched its 4gb of ram for 16gb & its hard drive for a 480gb ssd. It is a night and day difference that should be enough to make me keep it one more year at least. The only really weak part now is the graphic card that may be too weak to support an high size high resolution screen.

The fact that you are still free to upgrade and mod it awesome. What kind of work do you do that would cause it to break? Just B E C A R E F U L. It's like owning a vintage car. Everybody will be envious.

> The fact that you are still free to upgrade and mod it awesome.

It is, although of course the downside is sheer heft. Compared to the new models, that thing is a huge and heavy aluminum brick. But yeah, I can cope with that in exchange for the convenience of more storage and upgradeability.

> What kind of work do you do that would cause it to break?

I'm just carrying it with me 24x7, basically. This laptop has seen the world, and it shows.

> It's like owning a vintage car. Everybody will be envious.

Doubtful but it's an interesting take ;)

No idea how you use laptops, but I've never needed more than 1TB on mine, let alone more than 256gb and I still have more than 50% free most of the time.

Perhaps it's time to declutter your digital life?

My last upgrade path was to pay $300 to get my MBP completely factory refurbished, then replace the internal HDD with an SSD.

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