December 2011

So I have an older MacBook Pro, and only recently learned a thing or two about this trusty workhorse. This MBP is the first unibody design, designated “Late 2008.”

First the good news. When it shipped, this model supported 4GB of RAM. Then it was discovered that the machine was still stable with 6GB of addressable memory. This meant one 4-GB module paired with one 2-GB module, giving a total of 6 GB. Not bad, but when Apple released Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6, they also supplied a firmware update for some machines. This firmware update had an undocumented change which consequently raised the RAM ceiling to a full 8 GB.

To replace the internal hard drive is easy since the drive is very accessible. The Late 2008 MBP can handle SATA2-speed drive throughput. But… don’t try to future proof the purchase of a replacement drive, especially if you’re looking at the newer Solid State Drives (SSD). Some SSD drives that operate at SATA3 speeds (6Gb/s) are not fully compatible with this MBP and instead of downspeeding to SATA2 speeds, these fast SATA3 drives run at SATA1 speeds! That’s a big waste of a fast SSD, so don’t do it. Go with the slightly cheaper SATA2 drives.

Besides the unfortunate SATA compatibility, the Late 2008 MBP has a well-known but unacknowledged hardware issue based on its graphics chip set. The problem manifests itself in random blinking of the top third of the built-in display. While not destructive, this bug is very irritating, and there’s no clear fix. On the Apple Support Communities, replacing the logic board is the usual course of action but that doesn’t always lead to a fix. In fact, several board replacements is sometimes followed by a whole computer swapout. I haven’t reached that extreme yet, but it’s sad there is no clear way to solve this.