**Works with late 2013 and mid 2014 15' retina MacBook Pro** Transcend JetDrive 720 (240gb), $209.99, available at Amazon **Works with Mid 2012 and early 2013 15' retina MacBook Pro** iFixit 15' MacBook Pro Battery, $79.95, available at Amazon **Works with 2015 13' retina MacBook Pro** iFixit 15' MacBook Pro Battery, $79.95, available at Amazon **Works with late 2012 and early 2013 retina MacBook Pro** iFixit 13' Retina MacBook Pro Battery, $109.95, available at Amazon iFixit 13' Retina MacBook Pro Battery, $79.95, available at Amazon Thankfully, upgrades for these machines have become less expensive over the past couple of years. You can still replace the battery for most models and upgrade their storage, but that's it. Apple engineered these machines to be thin and light, which unfortunately means they left little room for after market upgrades. The upgrade story for the retina MacBook Pro is similar to the MacBook Air's. **Works with 15' MacBook Pro Early 2011 through Mid 2012** **Works with MacBook Pro 13' or 15' Early 2011 through Mid 2012** iFixit 15' MacBook Pro Battery, $99.95, available at Amazon iFixit 64-bit Driver Kit, $29.99, available at Amazon OWC Data Doubler Converter Bracket, $25, available at Amazon Samsung 850 PRO (256GB), $129.00, available at Amazon Crucial RAM (8GB), $59.99, available at Amazon Computer batteries typically last hundreds of 'cycles,' so if you've been using your computer constantly for years, there's a good chance it's at least started to hold less of a charge. Having more memory lets you use more applications at once without lag.įinally, if your computer's battery life has fallen sharply over the past few years, you can swap it out for a new one. Apple ships its current, top-of-the-line MacBook Pro with 16GB, but you can match that on a computer that's six-years-old for under $100. The next upgrade you should consider is increasing the amount of memory in your computer.

Because older machines came with disk drives, you can also opt to remove that and use OWC's converter bracket to add an additional SSD for even more storage. I've performed this upgrade for a couple people, and they're always amazed at the improvement. You'll notice the difference whether you're loading apps, copying files, or even rebooting your machine.

Once inside, you can swap out your traditional hard drive with an SSD (Solid State Drive), which will make everything you do on your computer significantly faster. Getting into them is tricky though, which is why I'm recommending iFixit's 64-bit driver kit, which will make it easy to deal with the proprietary screws Apple uses on the inside and outside of its machines. Ironically, because of the changes Apple made to the way it makes its laptops, older MacBook Pros are the most upgradable computers on this list.

Macbook pro 2013 upgrade