I’m still using a 2010 Macbook Pro as my main day-to-day system, and I’ve been meaning to upgrade for a while now since both RAM and disk space have been getting tight, and although I could slap a bigger hard drive in it, the RAM can’t be upgraded any further. May as well just upgrade the whole shebang at once anyway.
Except…I haven’t been too happy with the available choices lately. The newer MBPs have a new type of ‘butterfly’ keyboard that’s widely hated and fairly fragile, I don’t know if I’d like the lack of a physical ESC key (especially as a ‘vi’ user), you need dongles for fairly common connection types now, etc. But, perhaps worst of all, they’re just really friggin’ expensive!
I paid about $2200 for my current MBP, and then upgraded the memory and hard drive later on, but they’re non-upgradable now, so you have to buy the long-term specs you want right up-front, and those upgrades are ludicrously expensive. I currently have a 500GB hard drive, but I’m always running out of space and cleaning things up, so I’d like to go to 1TB for a new system. Bumping the storage up to 1TB adds $720 to the price, even though a decent 1TB M.2 module costs around $300; that’s a hell of a markup!
Putting together a new MBP that would actually be a one-step-up upgrade for RAM and hard drive, the total price starts at $3900. If I drop down to a 13″ screen (which I’d rather not do for a system I use so heavily), it’s still around $3400.
That’s just too much for me right now, especially if it’s going to have an awful keyboard. It’s not like they’re going to get any cheaper in the future though, so I’m still not sure whether to just suck it up, wait even longer, or just start looking at Windows laptops. There are plenty of Lenovos with half-decent specs in the $2200-$2500 range…