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An SSD is definitely worth investing some money on. I would not recommend buying one from Apple. Get the MBP with the cheapest drive and then buy the SSD from a site like Newegg. You can get a equal quality SSD for about 40% less than what Apple is charging.

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Ten or twenty years ago, replacing the drive in my laptop and reinstalling the OS would have been a fun project, but I've got other demands on my time now, so I'm planning to stick with what Apple installs. Besides, I understand that the firmware on Apple drives is customized for their hardware/OS.

I just performed this operation last Sunday: bought a new MacBook Pro, swapped out the internal for an Intel X25. Whole deal took 15 painless minutes. I can press the power button, fish something out of my backpack, and glance up and it's done booting. Huge win, but might cause problems with AppleCare down the road.

In a previous post about SSDs some people already mentioned not having problems with apple care. This is probably because as of the unibody macbooks the harddrives are meant to be 'user replacable'. (Replacing the default harddrive with an X-25M took me just a bit over 15 minutes, mostly because I didn't have a small-enough screwdriver ready.)

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