We were contacted by a very high level source today that had received some serious misinformation that the factory flash drive in the 2012 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina display was soldered in, thus leaving the machine not able to be upgraded. We won’t go into details, but it was enough that we thought that we should nip any bad info in the bud about this, in case you too may have been misinformed.
Absolutely nothing has changed in the last two weeks since we confirmed the ability to upgrade the new rMBP with an OWC Mercury Aura Pro SSD.
In fact, for some “independent” confirmation, head over to ZDNet and read Jason O’Grady’s take on it from earlier today. You’ll see that he had no problems using an OWC Aura in a rMBP. And… spoiler alert… he found the Aura was both faster and less expensive than the Apple unit, too!
UPDATE 2:43PM 11/8/12
Seems as though Rob over at Barefeats.com also posted a performance benchmark test today showing the Aura Pro is compatible with the rMBPS as well as how it smokes the factory drive in Quickbench and AJA System Test results.
Any chance of a higher capacity version of Aura Pro for rMBP? Apple has been offering a 768GB drive for a while, and having gotten the 512GB with my rMBP when they were first released, upgrading to the 480GB for a small performance boost doesn’t seem worth it — but I’d buy a larger capacity OWC SSD in a second.
Unfortunately we really can’t speak as to future products here on the OWC Blog. That said, in the technology industry in general capacities are getting larger and speeds are getting faster as time goes on. I wouldn’t anticipate anything different when it comes to our products.
Just to let you know–I put an Aura SSD in my 13″ MacBook Pro Retina last night and it’s working fine.
I did this:
1) used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my stock SSD to an external firewire disk,
2) installed the new Aura
3) booted from that external disk
4) used CCC to clone the external disk to the new Aura.
CCC took care of all Recovery Partition nonsense, so I didn’t have to do any “recovery” or reinstall Mountain Lion or anything. CCC rocks. :-)