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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2006-01-22, 13:53

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Originally Posted by Luca
Don't necessarily take my word for it, but I have heard several things regarding laptop hard drives. First of all, supposedly there's a bigger difference moving from 4200 RPM to 5400 RPM than there is moving from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM.
Yes, I'm aware of that.

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Also, I've heard the increased heat and power consumption from 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM hard drives is negligible.
That's good to know.

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Furthermore, going for the highest option is usually kind of a rip off. It's generally true with all things (RAM, processors, hard drives, and so on), but when Apple's the one controlling the price, it's even worse. [..] On the $1999 model, Apple supplies an 80 GB hard drive and charges $100 to upgrade to 100 GB, even though the drive is only worth $30 more. The higher-end options are significantly more expensive (see the above statement about the highest-end things costing more than they're worth), but again, since Apple controls the price you end up paying $200 extra when they only cost $100-$150 extra in reality.

Apple rips you off on hard drives just as badly as they rip you off with RAM.
I realize all that, but as you point out yourself, I don't have much of a choice:

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Unfortunately, they also make it excruciatingly difficult to replace the hard drives in their machines, therefore forcing you to pay tons extra for hard drive upgrades (since you can't perform them yourself, at least without voiding your warranty).
Exactly. If I could have it my way, I would buy the upper (higher-CPU) MacBook Pro, but with 512 MB RAM (or even none at all) just so I can buy my own RAM and save a lot of money. But no dice: the minimum is 1 GB.

If I could have it my way, I would also get a much smaller hard drive, say 60 GB (or even just 40), replace it immediately, and keep that only as an emergency option. But again, no dice.

It's really too bad that I cannot even make such basic component decisions on a $2500 laptop. Third-party probably isn't an option either since I would like education discounts, which at Apple aren't bad at all.
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