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I’m a pretty early adopter of technology as part of my job, but I always tell friends and family not to.
The truth is computers haven’t gotten much more powerful recently, and older computers have the benefit of being upgradable.
To prove my point, I upgraded two components in a 5-year-old MacBook Pro that was running pretty sluggishly.
The results were radical.
You can perform a few different upgrades on MacBooks of this vintage, but by far the two biggest are swapping its traditional hard drive with an SSD, and upgrading its RAM.
An SSD (Solid State Storage) is a big block of flash storage, the same type of storage system that’s used by your smartphone or tablet. Unlike a traditional hard drive, there are no moving parts in an SSD, which makes it significantly more durable. If you drop your computer, there’s always a chance the platter inside a traditional hard drive could crack, meaning you lose all your data.
The other benefit to SSD storage is that it’s way, way, way, way faster. Traditional hard drives search for data by scanning a platter with a laser. The speed with which it can find that data is limited by how quickly the platter can spin. With an SSD, your computer just searches the block of flash storage.
RAM on the other hand stands for Random Access Memory. Any time you open a program, it takes up memory. When RAM is full, it dumps data back onto your hard drive (or SSD) and fills up with new information. The more RAM you have, the fewer times that process has to happen.
That’s particularly important if you’re working with large files, where loading bits and pieces of it in and out of RAM constantly creates a bottleneck.
A standard 15″ MacBook Pro from 2011 had 4GB of RAM and a 500GB standard hard drive. I upgraded it with 1TB of SSD storage from OWC, and 16GB of OWC Ram.
Now it flies.
Processes that would take a minute now take a few seconds. Photoshop files load instantly, video files export more quickly, and the editing and bouncing of multi-track podcasts has become seamless. Most people don’t use their computers this aggressively.
If all you do is surf the web, write papers, and watch Netflix, you don’t have to perform such a serious upgrade. Buying a smaller, more cost-effective SSD will yield similar results (even if you buy a smaller SSD, the speed will be the same — you’ll just have less storage space to work with.)
This computer, though, is a production machine responsible for creating, editing, and producing hours of audio and multiple video projects on a weekly basis. I have a 2013 MacBook Pro and 2015 MacBook Air, and the difference in performance between those and this 2011 machine were negligible.
If you bought a MacBook Pro in college, even if that was as far back as 2009, and want to buy a new one because it’s sluggish, consider these upgrades before buying a new machine.
Of course there are benefits to having the latest-and-greatest, but they’re far outweighed by saving over a thousand dollars for most people.
There are a bunch of different hardware vendors out there selling SSDs and RAM, but I recommend OWC’s products. I use their 2013 MacBook Pro SSD, Thunderbolt 2 dock, Envoy Pro Mini and 2 dock Thunderbolt drive bay on a daily basis, and they’ve all become essential parts of my workflow.
16GB OWC RAM upgrade, $ 129.99, available at Amazon
480GB OWC Mercury Extreme SSD, $ 259.57, available at Amazon [More Storage]
240GB OWC Mercury Extreme SSD, $ 159.75, available at Amazon [Less Storage]
This article was originally published on 11/8/2016.
