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Maxim Zubarev
Random thoughts of an eventually dying individual.

Upgrading my mid 2010 MacBook Pro in 2016 with a SSD

So today I put a SSD into my mid 2010 MacBook Pro (that I already upgraded to 8GB RAM like 2 years ago). I am not gonna tell you how amazed I am about the improved performance nor any other boring shit that you could already think of and probably have read a thousand more times somewhere else.

Instead I want to point out something completely different: As I decided to make a fresh install over just recovering all the stuff from my time machine. I could also have just cherry picked files that I needed from the time machine, but I eventually decided not do even that.

Mac users rarely do a fresh install. When I was a Windows user I remember reinstalling the OS every three months. It would take me usually a full day, sometimes even two (with all the custom settings and stuff I had to set up again), and I would have gladly invested that time.

I haven’t done such any more since I got my MacBook Pro in 2010. Now, after roundabout 6 years sitting on the same OS X installation, I reinstalled the OS for the first time. And I learned something from it.

  1. Okay, I can’t really not tell you at all, that I am kinda overwhelmed by the improved performance (and I hate myself for not getting that SSD much earlier). Cause I really am. Although I still feel performance (and overheating) issues that I will hopefully sort out with the next MB Pro generation (unless Apple decides to release it even later in 2020).
  2. Getting all your shit together on a brand new system is kinda easy nowadays. Install Homebrew, sign into your big players accounts and use them to login into everything else that you need. Sign into Github, get all your projects and code down to earth. What else do you need?
  3. And there comes the fascinating point: You don’t need so many things you think you need. You can restore everything you really need so blazingly fast you wouldn’t even believe. I didn’t know half of my passwords (I didn’t even took over the keychains and my control panel happened to bug around when I wanted to activate iCloud keychain). But who remembers passwords in 2016, when you can click “I forgot my password”?
  4. The more important note about having what you need is to strip away what you don’t need. I didn’t look up what programs I had installed on the old hard drive, I just installed the programs I had a need for when I had the need for.
Sorry for the mess on my desk. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The only thing backup-worthy from the old drive are private photos which I maybe will want to have a look at when I become old (lol). Anyway, just keep all your hard drives and get a SATA to USB adapter and you are good to go. They don’t take too much time and you have the guarantee that in the worst case no data is lost ever.

I am quite mad at me that I payed money to get a time capsule exactly for this case. To restore the exact same state of my current MacBook Pro on a new one (or a new SSD as a temporary solution, as Apple let me down with the new MB release). That was exactly what I didn’t need.

Learn to throw away things from time to time. Digitally and in your real life. It helps a lot.