Upgrade from SSD Early 2011 to Early 2015 MBP?

[simonjsouth]

Hi folks,

I am considering upgrading to the new 13" MBP but I am really uncertain.

My current setup
- early 2011 13" MBP 2,3 i5 with 16gb of RAM, a 256gb SSD and a 1 TB HDD. - It is fast enough, has tons of storage so I never need an external harddrive even though I do lots of video stuff (and I could even upgrade to a 3tb internal HDD) and yes - sometimes it could be faster but it's still pretty good for me.

What do I not like about the current setup?
- the mbp is a little thick/heavy
- the display obviously doesn't have the best solution so it could improve my workflow to have a better resolution display
- the battery starts to wear off and some little things keep popping up like the sd card reader isn't always working anymore or the trackpad occassionally not working properly

Pros for upgrading
- Good timing - I could still get decent money for my current mbp (in Europe around $500-600$) and the new MBP has just been released

Cons
- I would hate having to carry around an external hard drive. Paying ridiculous money for the 1TB SSD in the new MBP is not an option
- I would hate to see a major redesign coming soon to the mbp and with the new butterfly keyboard in the new macbook and the use of usb-c ports I can see that happening in the near future.

So, any thoughts on this would be really appreciated? This decision is killing me

Thanks so much
Simon

 

[CaptainChunk]

My MBP is identical to yours, except yours has more RAM and I'm assuming you swapped out your stock optical drive for an HDD.

One thing to consider is that the Early 2015 model just came out, so don't expect an update to it anytime soon. The upcoming 2015 MacBook utilizes the butterfly keyboard and USB-C merely as space saving measures. USB-C does not replace things like Thunderbolt, for example. I honestly don't see USB-C (at least in Apple's current implementation) making its way to the Pro models. Butterfly keyboard, maybe...

The 2015 13" rMBP is about 23% lighter than your current non-Retina model. And about 20-25% faster, depending on the CPU. The most dramatic difference in performance you'll see will be from the M.2 SSD - it's twice as fast as a modern 6G SATA SSD. Unfortunately, the new models have no provisions for other internal SATA devices like the older models did, so anything beyond what you order with the machine would have to be supplemented with external storage.

 

[RichardC300]

I would say stick with yours. You probably won't notice much of a difference in processing power or the increased speeds from the new SSD, but if the battery, mouse, and card reader are becoming a real issue, upgrading wouldn't be a bad idea at all. Losing out on all that internal storage space would be a bummer like you said, though.