
The New MacBook Pros Mark the End of Upgradeable Apple Computers - walterbell
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/new-macbook-pros-mark-the-end-of-upgradeable-apple-computers
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TurboHaskal
They're consumer machines anyway. Some folks dropped extra cash in order to
make their Macs future proof to realise just now that they cannot upgrade to
macOS Sierra even though their hardware still runs perfectly fine.

~~~
ableal
My absolutely boring, "cannot complain of seven year ride", anecdata:

\- Late 2009 white plastic MacBook, 320 GB HD, 4 GB RAM, cost 1000 euros, came
with OS 10.5 or so.

Earlier this year tossed in 200 euros worth of RAM (8GB) and SSD (500 GB),
because Safari was gagging a bit on too many tabs of modern web. Has been
updated to the latest macOS at every release, Sierra included, no problem.

\- 2008 or so vintage HP-tx laptop, 320 GB HD, 4 GB RAM, cost 700 or so euros
on sale in 2009, came with Windows Vista.

Installed Windows 7 pro (BizSpark gift), upgraded to Windows 10 pro, with no
problems (except Windows updates being painful in general ;-)

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ramenmeal
Wasn't the only upgradeable MBP an older edition that they were still selling?

~~~
throwaway4891a
MacBook Pro 13-inch, Mid 2012, non-Retina

Model Identifier: MacBookPro9,2

US version

Model No: A1278

Order No: MD101LL/A (2.5 GHz), MD102LL/A (2.9 GHz)

Initial Price: $1,199 (2.5 GHz) $1,499 (2.9 GHz)

It was only old because they let it get that way.

Mine: (2) 960 GiB SSDs, 16 GiB RAM, Sugru'ed FireWire port and optical slot.

The processor and screen are old, but they're not critical to what I use it
for. New ones lack MagSafe and force you to pay for Apple upgrades and more
accessories to haul around to do what was previously possible.

Anyhow, it's the last Apple computer I'll likely ever buy, until they get
their products back to something people actually use as opposed to a Bentley
for a Sunday drive.

~~~
rz2k
The real world throughput of the internal SSD on the new MacBook Pros at 3GB/s
will be 6 times faster than SATA III. Additionally you could duct tape four of
those Crucial SSDs to the lid and connect them with a single USB3 hub and get
the same performance as SATA III — and it would be smaller and weigh less.

I expect that will even be a likely third party snap on product given the
upgrade in what the new ports make possible.

~~~
icanhackit
> throughput of the internal SSD on the new MacBook Pros at 3GB/s will be 6
> times faster than SATA III

Yep, really want to see Anandtech's take on it. It's going to blur the line
between memory and storage - at those speeds frequent writing to the swap file
probably won't matter. A few people might have to eat their words when the
reviews are out.

~~~
jeroenhd
I'm not sure if they really "blur the line". Speed wise, the new SSDs are
coming closer and closer to RAM, but latency wise they're still miles off.

There's still a lot to be done before SSDs can truly rival with memory.

~~~
icanhackit
> I'm not sure if they really "blur the line".

But isn't this the ultimate idea behind NVMe? By using PCIe in parallel it
gets to the point where you can rely on nonvolatile memory to be more of a
system workhorse than merely a storage system. Apple seems to have an idea of
where they want to go - just look at the last two iPhones, the 6s and 7.
They've had around 1/2 to 3/4 the amount of RAM of other flagship devices
while having stupid-fast storage and in real-world tests they outperform their
competitors for load times and responsiveness.

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aq3cn
I wonder how are they going to survive if they keep earning bad reputation in
developer community this way.

~~~
martimatix
The problem is nobody else comes close to what Apple has on offer. I'm in the
market for a new computer for dev work and I'm going to have to dongle up and
get one of these new Macbook Pros.

~~~
aq3cn
Check out this thread to know about better manufacturer.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12845081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12845081)

