Ha, I just did that this week. I have a late 2011 MBP and I noticed it was dragging a bit so I upgraded it from 8gb ram to 16gb and bought a 500gb SSD to replace the factory HDD. The next day I decided I wanted more space for my pictures so I bought the little enclosure and swapped out my CDROM and just reused the factory 1TB HDD. Like $220 later and it feels like a brand new machine.

you were using a 7 year old Laptop with a HDD in 2018 ? Some people don't seem to have any hardware requirements at all.. While i could tolerate a CPU from 2011, using it without an SSD feels so slow today, it's barely usable tbh. I switched to SSDs in 2009 in all my machines and never looked back, despite the price at the time.

Yeah I don't have a good excuse for waiting except it was my wife's primary computer for the last few years while she completed grad school and I didn't use it much to notice how much slower it seemed as compared to a modern SSD-based machine. Definitely wish I had done it earlier now.

It was an old work machine that I got to take with me when I left that job so it was far overspecced for casual use.. though it feels so much better now.

Not everyone can afford a new MacBook when their old one works fine, no matter how much HN shames them for it.

I did pretty much the same thing on my late 2011 MBP. And then the graphics went tits up. Argh!

Did the same thing for my 2012 MBP.

Any chance you've got a link to reliable instructions?

iFixit are great for this:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Installing+MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+...

Yep, I used their instructions for the hard drive replacement and then again for the CDROM swap out. I used to build my own machines so I was pretty confident going in, on my scale the HDD was about a 3 difficulty but the CDROM was maybe a 6.. you need to disconnect several tiny connectors to clear enough space which always makes me nervous about breaking one but it went fine in the end.

I'm still using mine, with a patched version of OSX High Sierra installed. No problems.

How has your experience with that been? My MBP (early 2011) won't be supported by MacOS Mojave, so I'm anticipating a similar patch.

I may end up staying with High Sierra, but I'd really like to try out the dark mode

Only problems have been after the occasional update, when the patches haven't been updated. A few times it's taken 5-6 reboots to start OSX properly. The best way is to delay updates as long as possible!

Apart from that, no problems at all.

http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/ and the related forum posts were excellent.

You mean the old PowerBook Series where you could easily swap the batteries on the go and swap the DVD drive for an additional battery.

Still have my G3 500MHz somewhere - used that for my entire first year at university in 2008. Battery life was amazing.

I recently bought an Aero 15. It's less than half a cm thicker than the new MBP and only 300g heavier. It's got a free SODIMM and NVME slot once you get the right screwdriver. There's plenty of reasons not to buy this specific laptop, but it's one of many that are in the same weight/size category that are both cheaper than the top end MacBook Pro and outperform it.