[MacTUG] FYI: Upgrading an SSD drive in MacBook Air ( and I guess Pro retina )

[Glenn Anderson]

I thought I would just pass this along to the group.

I just did an upgrade of the internal SSD drive, using a kit from OWC, in a MacBook Air from the 128GB to a 240GB and it went very smoothly. 

Dale ( Techworks ) did the actual upgrade and charged the minimum 1/2 hr charge to do so, and then I did the transfer of the data from the old drive to the new one. 

The kit I got from OWC has a portable drive kit that takes the old SSD and converts it into a SSD USB drive, this is kind of a handy plus as it does end up giving one a very fast USB “flash” drive. Due to the size of the SSD drive it is about 3X larger than a typical USB drive.

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Upgrading the SSD drive vs buying a new MacBook Air with a larger drive.

In this case as the MacBook Air performance was quite acceptable to the user, upgrading the SSD for a couple of hundred dollars made sense when compared to the cost of a newer MacBook Air. Whoever that might not always be the case.

Just a few costing figures/notes.

-A basic MacBook Air with the same i5 processor and same amount of RAM (4GB) is $1,299 educational, add taxes and it is $1,467.87. Applecare would add $199 + taxes, for a total of almost $1,700.

-Granted a new MacBook Air benchmarks somewhat faster, most due to faster RAM being used and a newer version of the i5 processor ( still the same clock speed however) and a newer video processor. However to really get a noticeable increase in performance one would have to upgrade to the i7 version at $148.

- If one was to buy a new one, it also would make sense to go to 8GB of RAM instead of the basic 4GB, additional cost of $108.

- Basically to make it worthwhile upgrading to a new MacBook Air, the cost would be almost $2,000. 






Glenn Anderson
IST 
anderson at uwaterloo.ca
519-888-4567 x43327
EC2 - 2019