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Buying Advice. Help needed

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wooddar

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 7, 2014
4
0
I have the Late 2009 Macbook 13" (unibody) with upgraded 8gb RAM and 256gb SSD drive. The beauty of this Is I have been able to upgrade both (Ram and HDD), meaning it has survived until today. It is now however getting a little slow. Would love to have option to buy Windows Laptop again but no hardware/after sales support I can find comes close to Apple

I understand that new Macbooks (13 and 15") cannot be upgraded as the Hard Drives and or RAM is soldered. Is this really true and if so what would those suggest I do to ensure my next Mac remains faster enough (can handle and keeps up with Video (4k +) and Pictures (36mb +) camera resolutions) for the next 5 years of use.

Regards
 
wooddar said:
I understand that new Macbooks (13 and 15") cannot be upgrade as the Hard Drives and or RAM is soldered. Is this really true and if so what would those suggest I do to ensure my next Mac remains faster enough (can handle and keeps up with Video (4k +) and Pictures (36mb +) camera resolutions) for the next 5 years of use.
Click to expand...
Yes, it's true you can't upgrade drives or RAM on retina MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs. You can perform such upgrades on the 13" non-retina MBP. Any Mac model, including the Mac mini, made in recent years can easily handle the workload you described.
 
I think a Macbook Pro retina 15" with dGPU will handle all that pretty well for at least 4 years! Technology advances pretty fast so it is normal that in 2-3 years you feel the machine isn't so fast anymore.
 
13 vs 15 inch

GGJstudios said:
Yes, it's true you can't upgrade drives or RAM on retina MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs. You can perform such upgrades on the 13" non-retina MBP. Any Mac model, including the Mac mini, made in recent years can easily handle the workload you described.
Click to expand...

Are you referring only to the 13 inch as I thought the 15inch had upgrade options
 
Go for the 15 inch

The 15 inch comes with 16gb of ram and hard drive space can be easily augmented with external hard drives cloud starage and NAS storage or even sd cards and usb sticks at a pinch.
 
wooddar said:
I understand that new Macbooks (13 and 15") cannot be upgraded as the Hard Drives and or RAM is soldered. Is this really true and if so what would those suggest I do to ensure my next Mac remains faster enough (can handle and keeps up with Video (4k +) and Pictures (36mb +) camera resolutions) for the next 5 years of use.

Regards
Click to expand...

Yes, its true, you cannot upgrade the ram, its soldered on. For the 15" MBP it comes with max ram, so that's a non issue. At the time of purchase you can opt for more memory and configure your mac, if you wish to get the 13" MBP.

As for the drive, its not soldered on, but right now there's no one making any replacement drives. You can find them out on eBay, since people pulled them from the MBP to sell for what ever reason.
 
A 15" rMBP with a dGPU would wourk fine for what you described. While they can't be upgraded, this hardware is far from being obsolete. A top of the line 15" rMBP will get you 2-3 years at the minimum before it starts to feel a bit sluggish.
 
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