I live on this long, steep hill that some days just feels so infinite and Sisyphean that I fear I might be the character of some inexplicably forgotten short story by Jorge Luis Borges. On particularly hot summer days, I’ll sometimes muse to myself, halfway up this interminable hill, that walking really is for suckers, and I should just lop off these wimpy locomotive appendages and treat myself to some of those robo-legs I’ve had my eye on for so long.
Apple doesn’t make robot-legs, unfortunately. What they do make are MacBooks that come with SSD drives… and to me, investing in one was pretty much the direct equivalent of having my computer’s old weak, broken legs cut off and some rocket-powered karate kickers transplanted in their place. You simply will not believe how fast computing can be with an SSD, or how slow your current “fast” computing experience is without one.
Need more proof than my say so? MacWorld tested a few MacBook Pros — a couple with SSDs, a couple identically specced without — and found notable speed improvements.
On a 13-inch MacBook Pro, the SSD upgrade led to 20 second boot times, compared to 38 second boot times on the HDD model. It was also 20% faster in Speedmark tests on various file operations. The SSD even allowed the Pro to outperform a model with a faster processor in various disk-intensive texts.
So, seriously, if you’re looking to buy a new MacBook Pro, you deserve to treat yourself to an SSD. Opting for an 128GB SSD instead of the 320GB stock hard drive will add $250 to the price of the base MBP, but considering the speed increase, the noiselessness, the advantages in battery life and the increase in durability and shock resistance, it’s easily the best upgrade you can opt for right now… as long as you can live with less raw capacity.
