OK. GEEK HELP WANTED. MAC BUYING DECISION QUESTION. Upgrade HW or Buy New? I use

OK. GEEK HELP WANTED. MAC BUYING DECISION QUESTION.

Upgrade HW or Buy New?

I use two Macbook Pro’s. A 17″ and a 15″ from mid 2010. (I take good care of my equipment.) Both have 8GB of RAM and 500GB HD’s. The 15″ looks brand new. The 17″ has little a bit of wear (one little dent on the side) from life in my backpack; and the battery is going and needs to be replaced. But for all intents and purposes they are adequate machines for a guy who basically writes for a living. (Albeit, I have 50 browser instances open at any given time.) And yes, I use both at the same time. Almost always.

The last release of OSX was optimized for SSD’s and drive performance has been an issue for me. I was going to upgrade BOTH of the laptops to 500GB or 1TB SSD’s, and replace the battery in the 17″. That’s just over $1.3K in cost.

The new Macbook Pro 15″ comes with the Retina display, 16GB of RAM, an SSD, and battery life is on the order of 8 hours. And it’s about $3K.

So, given that I am wired to these machines full time: do I go for the Retina display, the extra RAM, the performance and the battery life, and spend another $1.6k – and then use a new one, and the 15″, and leave my 17″ at the office. Or do I just save myself some cash and and upgrade machines from 2010 because they’re largely adequate for what I do?