Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Cheapest way to upgrade RAM & Storage on MBP 2015?

jagooch

jagooch

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 17, 2009
811
249
Denver, co
I'm looking to upgrade my Macbook Pro 2015 13" to double the memory from 8gb to 16gb and the storage from 256Gb to (ideally) 1Tb. I bought it in 2017 and underestimated how much of a workload I was going to put on it. I really ramped up development in 2018 and my laptop is desperately trying to tap out of the ring, so to speak.

My current plan is to purchase a used Macbook Pro on Craigslist or a refurbished on from the Apple store.

I'll sell my used Macbook Pro on Craigslist. I've had a good experience there though sometimes it takes a year or more to find a serious buyer.

I can't think of a lower cost way to upgrade. I love the standard USB ports, the trackpad, and the keyboard..That keeps me from considering newer models as Apple had done some janky things with them.

If you have a suggestion on a possibly better upgrade path, I'm all ears.
 
You're stuck selling it and buying a model with more RAM unfortunately as RAM has been soldered on the mainboard since 2013.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jagooch
I figured as much. I was hoping a Mac genius would reveal an option that I was not aware of. Hey , it was worth asking.
 
I understand the dilemma. I just "upgraded" to a 2018 15" MBP. They 2015 version with "old school" USB ports.
I have 16G RAM now & I went for the 512G SSD.
One option & I did this on my old 13" was to put a Sandisk 256G USB in a USB port to increase "disk" size.
These things are tiny and pretty fast.
Doesn't help your RAM situation.
 
You can increase storage by purchasing and using an external drive. If you want speed, go for an external SSD. Samsung makes the T5, which comes in capacities of 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB. Just plug it into one of your USB 3 ports and you're good to go. You might want to reformat it to be more Mac-specific, either with MacOS extended journaling or with APFS.
 
If you want more RAM and HD space, buy another MacBook Pro.
It's really as simple as that.

I WOULD NOT buy a 2016 or 2017 model, though.
They have an abnormally-high rate of keyboard failures, and it's a VERY expensive fix if you're out-of-warranty.
 
buy cheap and pay twice. this is the reason why i always urge ppl to buy a bigger storage (1st priority) or bigger ram size model.

no point for the sake to save peanuts and make ur macbook pro to have bottleneck so soon which it totally limits the capability of it in order to be usable.
 
I for one am very happy with my 2015 15" MBP with 512 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM, which I bought in December of that year.....I figure that in another year or two I'll be ready to update to whatever is available at that time, and I am hoping that by then the various issues with the 2016 and 2017 MBPs will have been resolved....... However, if I were trying to decide what to buy right now, I probably would not go for this 2015 machine and would be focused on moving into the present and looking ahead into the future.

In the meantime, at the time I was buying the MBP in 2015 I was going from a 2012 iMac with a platter-based slow 5400 rpm 1 TB storage capacity storage to the 512 GB SSD....and had to make some adjustments, including sorting through what was on the older hard drive to determine what could be simply trashed and what needed to be saved. External platter-based hard drives and external SSDs are our friends..... I realize that not everyone can casually dump a lot of their important data and other content on to external drives and that they really do need a larger-capacity platter hard drive or SSD right from the get-go, but it is surprising how much stuff really does NOT need to be on one's internal drive all the time.....
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: iPhonagain and smallcoffee
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back