Macbook Pro - moving OS around and other questions?

Xee · 4 Oct 2011 at 17:41

Ok - I'm thinking of getting a MacBook Pro (my 1st), and thinking of getting a cheaper SATA with it new, and then adding a SSD later on. Is it easy to swap the OS to the SSD. Will a brand new MacBook Pro come with an installation disc for OSX or do you get a free download from the App store? Probably a noob question, but never bought a Mac before so no idea.

Thinking of getting the top end 15", with High res screen (gloss), 2.3Ghz cpu, 4gig ram (might upgrade myself later to 8), 750Gb SATA.

Will be running, Photoshop, Illustrator, AutoCAD (or similar), Sketchup, other 3D programs and a rendering package. With Parallels or boot camp for backup.

Any comments? Just cant bring myself at this point to click the buy button, as I think its too expensive for a laptop

"andy" · 4 Oct 2011 at 18:04

you get a recovery partition which lets you install osx lion straight from the web when you put a new hard drive in

i hated it though , constantly dropped connection for the 4?gb download and restarted the whole thing instead of continuing.

if you have a pc then you might be better off cloning the MacBooks drive to your new hard drive

SiriusB · 4 Oct 2011 at 20:00

When you bought Lion through the Mac App Store, you could download it again any time you wanted. You could then grab the OS X image from that download and load it onto a USB drive. I did this to do a clean install of Lion without the worry of downloads being interrupted - and the fact I nuked my HDD to start with, so no recovery partition.

Since you will be getting Lion pre-installed, I don't know if you can download it through the App Store. I was told by a friend you get no install disc with Lion with new Apple stuff.

All that said, going with andy's suggestion and using something like Macirum or Acronis to clone your whole HDD to SSD would be easier!

thor · 4 Oct 2011 at 23:08

I installed an SSD before Apple released the over-the-air update for the Pro's. I opted for the creating a recovery usb drive option and installing it from there. Was completely painless.

Xee · 9 Oct 2011 at 08:30

Thanks.

uniQ · 9 Oct 2011 at 09:24

Both the RAM and HDD are user serviceable and very easy to get too. Although there is a slight trade off to fitting your own SSD later in that it won't have TRIM support out of the box like one shipped from Apple would.

Whilst you can apply a patch that appears to enable TRIM support it also replaces some Lion system files with Snow Leopard files which is far from ideal. The best way to do it is to manually patch it with several terminal commands.

Results are also fairly mixed with some people having no problems and others having constant beachballs, freezing, kernel panics, crashes etc so again YMMV.