The Wilbur Smith Discussion Forums

Buying my son a new Apple MacBook pro 15 inch laptop with Retina screen for Christmas this year,the Mac book pro runs a 256 gb Pcle flash storage drive in lieu of an internal hard drive for storage.To upgrade from the 256 gb flash storage to 512 gb flash pcle is $300.00 ( my god apple how do you sleep at night ).The unit I am looking at is very expensive $2099.00 plus tax etc on Apples Canadian website and comes with the 256 gb drive standard.
My question is this - is a 256 gb going to be large enough or am I going to kick myself in the ass for not upgrading to 512 gb flash storage 3 months down the road.

Any opinion or advice would be appreciated - I am computer savvy to a degree and understand computer hardware well enough

johnrogers wrote:Buying my son a new Apple MacBook pro 15 inch laptop with Retina screen for Christmas this year,the Mac book pro runs a 256 gb Pcle flash storage drive in lieu of an internal hard drive for storage.To upgrade from the 256 gb flash storage to 512 gb flash pcle is $300.00 ( my god apple how do you sleep at night ).The unit I am looking at is very expensive $2099.00 plus tax etc on Apples Canadian website and comes with the 256 gb drive standard.
My question is this - is a 256 gb going to be large enough or am I going to kick myself in the ass for not upgrading to 512 gb flash storage 3 months down the road.

Any opinion or advice would be appreciated - I am computer savvy to a degree and understand computer hardware well enough

I would say it depends on what your son would be doing with the machine. Does he have lots of videos, music, games and photo's? They take up a lot of space so if so the larger drive would probably be the best.

johnrogers wrote:Buying my son a new Apple MacBook pro 15 inch laptop with Retina screen for Christmas this year,the Mac book pro runs a 256 gb Pcle flash storage drive in lieu of an internal hard drive for storage.To upgrade from the 256 gb flash storage to 512 gb flash pcle is $300.00 ( my god apple how do you sleep at night ).The unit I am looking at is very expensive $2099.00 plus tax etc on Apples Canadian website and comes with the 256 gb drive standard.
My question is this - is a 256 gb going to be large enough or am I going to kick myself in the ass for not upgrading to 512 gb flash storage 3 months down the road.

Any opinion or advice would be appreciated - I am computer savvy to a degree and understand computer hardware well enough

I would also ask if he's dead set on a macbook or would he consider a PC. Macbooks are ridiculously expensive and you can get equivalent laptops for much less!

The total truth and honesty is the machine will be used primarily for entertainment purposes more than practical purposes.Yes Matbow he is a gamer for certain,and yes he downloads a lot both music and video.Saying that he is also a video streamer via Netflix,You Tube with his Ipad and Iphone and Apple TV.The extra 300 bucks for another 256 GB flash story to take it to 512 GB is choking me.If I have to pay $2099.00 plus for the laptop and the add another $300.00 plus - by the way rotten of Apple to offer there high end laptop with a storage compromise and a outrageous price.
Saying that Matbow if I had to spend the extra 300 I may as well bump myself up to there very highest most extreme mac book pro with a price tax of $2649.00 plus tax which would give me the 512 GB flash plus an upgraded Intel I7 4 core processor and a dedicated Nvidia 2 GB video card to go with the Inter iris pro integrated graphics.
You are correct Apple is so way overpriced it makes your stomach turn and I would consider a PC if it were not for the investment in the ipads iphones and Apple TVs - total integration .

By the way the most extreme high end MacBook pro at $2649. is only a $100.00 less than there new 27 inch Imac retina desktop - disturbing and I would actually purchase the Retina 27 Imac desktop all in one if it was not for the fact that my son would have a hard time putting in his small apartment.

I always go thru this obsession when I buy a computer - flash drive is nice because it is so fast and it will replace hard drives in the near future but right now flash is so very very very expensive.

Dear god, that's some present . Anyway, is it a possibility with these macbooks to put in a secondary normal harddrive? He could use this for datastorage of large files if necessary. That is how I always set up my laptops/pc's. SSD as a primary drive and a HDD as the secondary. The secondary might go into a slot normally reserved for a DVD/Bluray-player, but who uses that these days?

All Apple laptops are sealed and if you open them you void Apple warranty.By the way there is a slot for an SDXC card and I think that they are flash as well,so if I am correct I could put up to a 128GB flash in the slot and that would mean I have 256 GB on the computer which means now I have a total of 381 GB flash memory.So is my assumption correct ehoog I am not certain.

Second thing I need to lock my head down on is adding an HDD for more storage capacity which can be done but on an MacBook pro or any Apple laptop it would be an external drive only and I have thought about this..So can you confirm with me that I am correct.Lets say in theory I added an external HDD of 500 GB size to store large files on,video,audio,photographs,etc.That would mean I have internal memory of 256GB flash and external memory ( not flash ) of 500 GB of storage on a hard drive.

Sort me out Ehoog - the other reality I would like you to think on maybe 256 flash internal is enough,my son Jonothan knows his way around computers he is the go to guy to figure things out in the family.

My gut is telling me 256 is not enough - I am obsessed with making the correct decision you can not error when your spending big money on a stupid computer that ends up costing up to $3000.00 dollars and is worth next to nothing the next year.I have been thru this computer buying so many times I can not count that high.

Well, if he downloads a lot of music and video's, then even 512GB will not save the day. In that case I would go for the 256GB model. This is plenty for some games and light video/music use. And then for the rest of the data (video's and music), just get him a $100 external 2TB HDD. And if he complains about the 256GB, kick him in the nuts, disown him, and tell him to buy his own $2500 laptop .

Alternatively, set up a 2TB NAS on his home network (if he knows about computers he will know ho to do this, if he hasn't already done so). This would cost you $200-300, but has the added advantage that all network users can access it.

My remark about a secondary HDD was only if Apple provides this. Indeed, never open Apple products...

But to be completely honest, if it were up to me, I'd get a high-end non-Apple laptop for $1800 and spend the change on a decent NAS and a nice dinner with friends and family.

Breaking News

Just after I posted yesterday I went online to do some more investigation and price shop.I found the next version of the MacBook pro on sale with a $250.00 discount one day online only event,I bought it,so what I purchased is the most premium,top of the line loaded up MacBook pro Apple provides.

This is the configuration

15-inch:2.5 GHz with Retina Display

2.5 GHz quad core Intel core i7
Turbo Boost up to 3.7 GHz
16 GB 1600MHz memory
512 GB PCle-based flash storage
Intel Iris Pro Graphics
Nvidia Ge Force GT 750M with
2GB GDDR5 memory

Final cost $2752.00 taxes included

I will now go into the second stage of my obsessive computer buying event - I plan to spend the next week kicking my ass for being so stupid to spend that much on a computer

Thanks for your opinions and advice EHoog and Matbow

Congratulations with the purchase John .

On a completely seperate note: are you looking to adopt more children? Say, a 29-year Dutchman?

E-Hoog wrote:Congratulations with the purchase John .

On a completely seperate note: are you looking to adopt more children? Say, a 29-year Dutchman?

Oddly enough E-Hoog my son Jonothan is 29 years old,he turns 30 on Dec 31st this year.