penalty of upgrading later?

[ljova.com]

hi folks,

I was originally thinking of buying a souped up MBP 13.3" 2.4Ghz, upping it to 8GB RAM and maybe an SSD drive, but ---

...but now I'm wondering whether there's any "penalty" for buying the barebones machine and upgrading later. Let's say that I buy a 13.3" 2.4Ghz with the standard 250GB HD and 4GB RAM -- 6 months down or a year later, if my needs outweigh the barebones setup, I could upgrade the RAM and/or the HD.

Would there be any extra effective penalty for doing such an upgrade? (That is, aside from the labor charge assessed by the Apple reseller?) Figure that hard drives only get cheaper, though i guess RAM might stay the same for longer..

thoughts?

many thanks!

-Ljova
(who primarily works in audio -- as you can hear at myspace.com/ljova)

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Just do the upgrades yourself. If you can use a screwdriver you can do the upgrades -- they are that easy. You will need a Torx 6 driver to remove the pins out of the HD though.

 

[dusk007]

4gb RAM modules will very likely get cheaper as the premium will shrink with the new bigger chips coming to market. 4GB will become the new 2GB in a year.
Upgrade everything yourself and I don't know what possible penalty there could be.
But what do you need 8 gigs of RAM for? Few people can make use of 4 GB and very very very few people need 8 GB.

 

[angemon89]

If you're not too computer savvy upgrade the hard drive now, and RAM later.

If you switch hard drives later on you will have to go through the transfer process of moving all of your files and settings to the new hard drive. It's a really simple thing to do on a Mac but I have found that it deters most people because it sounds hard. With the RAM you just pop it in and go. No need to re-install anything. Plus RAM will only get cheaper so you'll benefit by installing RAM later on when you need it.