The IT Nerd

Wow! This week is huge week for questions from readers. Thanks for all the e-mails and keep them coming!

Now to this question. If you want to buy a MacBook Pro with a retina display, you must choose wisely. That’s because they are not upgradable… Mostly. To illustrate this, iFixit ripped one apart and here’s what they had to say. First, here’s what they said about the RAM:

As in the MacBook Air, the RAM is soldered to the logic board. Max out at 16GB now, or forever hold your peace—you can’t upgrade.

So you’re best strategy is to buy it with the max amount of RAM whether you need it or not. Now how about the SSD disk? Here’s what they said:

The proprietary SSD isn’t upgradeable either (yet), as it is similar but not identical to the one in the Air. It is a separate daughtercard, and we’re hopeful we can offer an upgrade in the near future.

At least there’s hope in that department. Companies such as Other World Computing sell SSD disk drive upgrades for the MacBook Air, so one hopes that the same will be true for the MacBook Pro with the Retina Display. Until then, you may want to consider how much space you need and pick your SSD drive size accordingly.

This entry was posted on November 10, 2012 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Tips with tags Apple, Macbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.