Apple adds Radeon 5600M 16-inch MacBook Pro & Mac Pro SSD upgrade kits [u]

A week prior to the start of the 2020 WWDC, Apple has added a new 16-inch MacBookPro GPU configuration, and is now selling user-installable SSD upgrades for the Mac Pro tower.

The Radeon 5600M upgrade to Apple's 16-inch MacBook Pro was made available on Monday morning. It comes at a premium, however — the enhanced chipset sells for $700 more than the base model.

Apple says that the upgrade will provide up to 75% better performance over the 5500M configuration.

The Mac Pro SSD user upgrades come in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB sizes. The order page notes that the 1TB upgrade retails for $600, the 2TB kit sells for $1000, with the 4TB kit coming in at $1600. The 8TB upgrade retails for $2800.

When initially purchased, 1TB of storage is a $400 premium versus 256GB. The larger 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB configurations add $800, $1400, and $2600, respectively

The purchase page notes that "software reinstallation requires a second Mac running Apple Configurator 2 and a USB-C cable. Compatible with Mac Pro (2019)," suggesting that a Time Machine backup or similar may not be sufficient to move to the upgraded drives. AppleInsider has reached out to Apple for more information on what this means to the end-user.

Update June 15, 2:00 P.M. Eastern Time Added the purchase page on Apple.com going live, and information on what may be required to migrate to the new drives.

Update June 15, 2:22 P.M. Eastern Time Updated the post with upgrade pricing.

48 Comments

tht 23 Years · 5654 comments

About 4 years ago

Nice to see!

Just keep making incremental updates and options. Hopefully upgradeable SSDs will be available for all of the other Macs in the future.

CheeseFreeze 7 Years · 1339 comments

$800 for a GPU upgrade is offensive. It's like Mr. Cook randomly pulls a lever and takes that value. As an upgrade price, $400 would be more reasonable.

KITA 6 Years · 402 comments

Radeon Pro 5600M - 5.3 TFLOPS
Radeon Pro 5500M - 4.6 TFLOPS
Radeon Pro 5300M - 4.1 TFLOPS

(All numbers are FP32)

Nelson1986 8 Years · 4 comments

The updates for the 16” better be more substantial soon. Tech upgrades usually mean newer parts for the same price (I.e. a CPU upgraded their latest Generation, Faster RAM, etc.)

This isn’t an update, it’s just another add-on option for more $$.

Apple, while i still love their products & think they are quality has definitely completely lost its vision & has turned more into a corporate $-grabber

rob53 13 Years · 3312 comments

tht said:

Nice to see!

Just keep making incremental updates and options. Hopefully upgradeable SSDs will be available for all of the other Macs in the future.

They won't be unless Apple makes a total change in the enclosures. You can open a current MBP and iMac but the iMac is not that easy. We'll see if Apple goes back to an easy to open front or rear case for the iMacs but I don't see them changing from soldered RAM and SSD on some of the MacBooks or changing back to a screwed on case. Most CPUs are also soldered to keep the height of the motherboard as thin as possible. Adding a CPU socket doubles the height of the CPU.