A New Mac for Less Than $200

If anyone has a slow MacBook, read on to learn how to have a new Mac for less than $200.

I had a 2010 MacBook that I began using last year when my brother bought a new iMac and stopped using the laptop. It was unbearably slow. I am used to my desktop, which is a Mac Pro with the following specs:

Processors: Two quad-core hyper-threading 2.26 GHz Intel Xeons (16 virtual cores)

RAM: 12 GB

Hard Drives:
2.64 TB internal mechanical
120GB internal Solid-State
3 TB external

This is a server-grade machine. It is very fast, the MacBook was not. It was a fine machine, considering the life of a laptop is about 3 years, but I wanted a faster laptop for school. 

Apple launched the MacBook Pro with Retina Display two weeks ago, and I wanted something that was that fast. When I was messing around with the MacBook, I realized it only had 2GB of RAM, the bare minimum to run any modern operating system. I checked with Other World Computing because they test every Apple computer to determine the highest amount of RAM that it can take. For my MacBook, it was 8GB for $50. That alone would have been an improvement, but I knew from my Mac Pro how fast a solid state drive could make a computer. OWC sells 120GB solid state drives for $130, free shipping. I added the RAM to it, for a total of $180 and got the parts in today. 

I have taken apart Macs before, so to swap out the parts took 15 minutes at most. I tested the startup time of the computer before and after. I pressed the power button as I started my stopwatch, waited till my account auto-logged in and then stopped the timer when the menubar loaded, signifying a usable desktop. Here are the times:

Before SSD: 1 minute, 54 seconds.

After SSD: 16 seconds. 

Yes, I wrote that correctly. My MacBook used to take almost 2 minutes to boot. Now it books in 16 seconds. Something to note: the 2 minute time was just to the blank desktop, when I booted with the SSD, by the time my finger had hit the STOP button on my stopwatch, all of my previously opened windows were open and loaded. 

As far as using the computer is concerned, apps open instantly. The SSD is almost 4 times faster than the old mechanical hard drive.  If anyone is interested in upgrading their MacBook or MacBook Pro, let me know.