2011 MBP RAM Question

By darkz
in Apple (macOS)

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darkz

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I want to upgrade an early 2011 Macbook Pro, it's running a little too slow.

It officially supports 8Gb, but some people say it can run 16Gb just fine.

Replacing the RAM after purchase would be a relatively huge hassle for me.

So if anyone has already done this (put 16g in early 2011) on their MBP, I would love to hear your experiences.

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Gotenks98

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I want to upgrade an early 2011 Macbook Pro, it's running a little too slow.

It officially supports 8Gb, but some people say it can run 16Gb just fine.

Replacing the RAM after purchase would be a relatively huge hassle for me.

So if anyone has already done this (put 16g in early 2011) on their MBP, I would love to hear your experiences.

How is it a huge hassle? Its as simple as remove 8 screws on the bottom and swap out the ram chips. Nothing hard about that.

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I did mine 3 days ago and its worked great! typing the message on it right now. I went to kingston

http://www.kingston.com/en/memory/search/devices?DevicesType=Desktop

You have to choose notebook from the menu and then it recommends what you need. I only put in the 8 gig in mine, yes it might run 16gb but i would rather stick with a supported configuration. I have had kingston for years, and its been great RAM. You might be able to put 16 gig in it but what happens if you boot into os x and it only shows 8 gig? I would save the difference for coffee!

  • 4 months later...
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darkz

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With "replacing" I meant getting the shop to take back my 16GB and replace them with 8GB in case it turned out my mbp doesn't support them.

Got 16GB of Kingston working for half a year now, great, if the next OS X is not going to be any more memory hungry, then you're right about the coffee.

It's a good thing there isn't much going on in the Mac Discussions, else I wouldn't have found this post.

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Matthew S.

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You MBP will support 16GB fine. I have a Late 2011 15" MBP and it has 16GB in it. even my Late 2009 13" MacBook only officially supported 4GB but I put in 8GB and it worked fine :D

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DeadEndAccount

Posted
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I want to upgrade an early 2011 Macbook Pro, it's running a little too slow.

It officially supports 8Gb, but some people say it can run 16Gb just fine.

Replacing the RAM after purchase would be a relatively huge hassle for me.

So if anyone has already done this (put 16g in early 2011) on their MBP, I would love to hear your experiences.

If you're doing it because it is a 'little slow' then I think you're better off maybe checking the computer, clean install, what applications you have running in the background - maybe investing in an SSD maybe a better investment and then putting the old rotating disk in an external hard disk case (maybe an external hard disk case with Thunderbolt?).

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