And you know what, what a waste of money for the 95% of consumers, who wouldn't be able to notice the difference between the i5 and the i7, as well as the 4GB to 8GB upgrade. Even a power user would be hard pressed to notice the difference performing the everyday tasks such as web browsing, word processing, and watching videos. Honestly, I've always been a proponent of a well-balanced laptop (thus, my affinity for the AMD Llano APU), as a well-balanced laptop gives the best performance in everyday tasks. So it makes the most sense to start by upgrading the HDD to an SSD. Even though it's a $600 upgrade, it's the best $600 upgrade you can make on the XPS 15, aside from going to the Nvidia GT 540M for gaming. On the Mac, things are a similar affair. The 256GB SSD is also a $600 upgrade, and in lieu of a processor upgrade and graphics card upgrade, it's definitely worth it.

Reasons why the SSD is the best upgrade

Why you might ask is the SSD the best upgrade on both PCs? Well first of all, the average user is immediately going to notice a difference. Booting up, the SSD is going to be twice as fast. Opening apps is going to be instantaneous. Everything is just going to feel much, much snappier with the SSD - so much so that the average consumer will easily notice a difference. An SSD is so much faster than a normal HDD that when I compared the speeds of a Macbook Air (with an SSD) to a Macbook Pro (with a normal HDD), the Macbook Air felt much faster, despite its lack of RAM and slow, ULV processor. When a $1000 machine feels much faster than a $2,200 machine, you know something's wrong.

But you might point out $600 is really expensive; and for less storage too. Well, external HDDs are super cheap now and for $50, you can probably get an extra 500GB to put all of your photos and videos on, while keeping the OS and programs on the SSD. Another point of contention is the GPU, and as we all know, laptop GPU's are very underpowered compared to their processors. But remember, most consumers aren't going to notice a difference between a 520M compared to a 540M or a 6490M compared to a 6750M; instead, they're going to notice the much snappier performance that you can get from an SSD.

Conclusion

Clearly, the SSD is the upgrade to have now, for both consumers and power-users. The performance benefits are just too hard to turn away nowadays; just look at the 2011 Vaio Z with its 14 second boot time into Windows 7. And if you're really hurting from the extra price, remember that manufacturers always inflate the price of the SSD upgrades by a lot, so buying on Newegg and installing the drive yourself makes SSDs an even better option. And of course, for those who need more space, an external HDD is the way to go, as it offers lots of space for cheap, so buying say a 128GB SSD would save you about $300.
SSD Drive

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