Part of this is because the upgrade options don’t necessarily offer huge benefits for photographers, which is my main use for this laptop. In fact, I’ve been very happy with the base model and am glad I didn’t spend more for the upgrades. The basic numbers aren’t the whole story, however, as I’ll explain in the benchmarking section. The default specs, including 16GB of memory, a 512GB SSD, and an 8 core CPU, aren’t particularly impressive on a raw-number basis, particularly for a $2,000 laptop. Not to mention that, at the time I bought it, choosing a custom order option would have pushed the delivery date out for months. My MacBook is fully updated to OS X El Capitan.I've read on similar threads that downgrading to OS X Yosemite might help?Īnother thought I had is that I've read that some people only swap one of the RAM chips, so I would have 1 of my original 2gb Ram chips and one 8gb upgraded chip, so having a total of 10gb which would be much better than my original 2x 2gb Ram.I ended up purchasing the base model of the 14 inch MacBook Pro. As I detailed in my guide to the MacBook lineup, Apple’s upgrade options are great for specific customers, but aren’t universally necessary. I Have checked the system report and the new memory is being registered in the correct RAM slots, but it seems something somewhere else is going wrong. Now it sometimes restarts its elf even when im not using it, very annoying! It has only done this since I put the new RAM in. But then all of a sudden about 5 mins into surfing the web the screen went blank and it started to restart itself. I have just upgraded my mid 2012 MacBook Pro to 16gb using 2x 8gb ATech DDR3 12800 1600MHz and to start with everything was fine, booted up quickly etc.

16gb ram macbook pro retina 13