After an unbelievably long absence, I would suppose, mostly caused by laziness, but also in part by a very slow and sluggish MacBook; I have returned.
Now you may ask, how? The answer is actually rather simple. A bit of money and elbow grease.
If you read the Apple support pages, you will find that the mid 2012 MacBook Pro that I own, is user upgradable.
They claim that users should only upgrade the RAM. However, once you open the unit, what lies before your eyes? Why! The hard drive; and what do we do with slow hard drives? Rather obvious, we replace them.
Now, you may ask, why are you so gleeful? I suspect, the answer to that is rather obvious in retrospect.
I took my stock standard mid 2012 MacBook Pro with 4 GB ram and 5400 RPM HD, and revived it with 16 GB of RAM, even though Apple claim only up to eight will work and eight 240 GB SSD drive.
Now before you think, hey! Let's go to the shop, get ram an SSD and do it, be aware of several factors.
1. , The newest MacBook Pro that can be easily upgraded in this fashion is the mid 2012 MacBook Pro. None of the retina models is very user upgradable, in fact, you can only upgrade the storage as far as I can tell. What you buy, is mostly what you are stuck with. Why do you think, Apple still sells the mid 2012 MacBook Pro?
2. Different models of MacBook Pro uses different frequencies DDR3 ram. An example of this, the mid 2012 MacBook Pro uses 1600 MHz DDR3 ram. Other models uses different frequencies. I do not know these off the top of my head though. There are several excellent references online regarding this matter.
3. Do not try and replace only one of your ram sticks!!! If you do, you may have more trouble than you had before the "upgrade." There are technical reasons for this, which I will not go into at this point. If you wish to know more, look it up. Also, do not mix and match RAM brands. If you wish to do so, make sure the timing on both RAM sticks are the same, for if they are not, nothing good will happen.
4. Make sure you have a back up of your Mac available!!! This is critical!!!
I would personally make a clone using something like carbon copy cloner because that clone is bootable. Very useful in later stages of your upgrade.
Okay smarty-pants, what do I need to do this?
To open the unit, you need a 00 Philips screwdriver. There are 10 screws around the edge of the bottom plate of your MacBook Pro. These are the smallest screws I have personally ever dealt with. Please make sure that you have a place two keep these safe. Three of them are longer than the others, those are the three from the back right corner of your Mac, working along the back edge.
To replace the ram once inside the unit, you do not need any tools.
There are several excellent videos on YouTube demonstrating the procedure.
To replace the hard drive, you need an extra tool, which is a T6 screwdriver. I will not attempt to explain how this is done, go see on YouTube. Once again, they are excellent videos on the topic.
So, what now? Now, I hope you did the sensible thing, and used an app such as carbon copy cloner to create a bootable back up of your Mac. If you didn't, this is going to become very tedious very quickly. If, however you did, this is going to be a snap.
Once you've booted into your backup drive, go and format your new SSD drive in the disk utility. The defaults should work, I named my new drive Macintosh SSD, the format should be "Mac OS X extended journal" with the partition scheam GUID.
Now, clone your backup to your new SSD and shut down your mac.
Remove the external drive and hit the power button. It should be about 45 seconds, and voilà, you basically have a brand-new Mac. Mine was slow and noticeably old before the upgrade, now it is snappier than it was when I bought it in early 2013.
If you decide to go ahead, please do your research, a Mac is expensive, and the parts you will need is not cheap either.
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