Expanding MacBooks storage

Mar 9, 2018

I recently had the occasion of buying an used 2015 MacBook Air.
The Air lacks a retina display and many of us are curious on what are Apple's intention with this model, but it's lightness and portability could have made a great gift to my sister, an every day commuter whose polycarbonate MacBook is heavy and living its last days. The Mac's specs were fine: the i5 processor is surely better than the Core 2Duo and 4GB of RAM are sufficient for what it was going to be used for. What worried us most were the 128GB of internal storage, because for what my sister uses her Mac, 128GB are tight.
Apple has implemented quite a few solutions for situations like this. iCloud Documents, for example, allows to locally have only the most used documents, uploading the others to iCloud to save space on local storage. But, for some reason, every Mac in our house has more than 128GB of actively used space. The issue seemed definitive, we couldn't force my sister to go around all day with an external HD plugged in - both in terms of comfort and data safety.

My girlfriend's PC is a tiny laptop with an even tinier internal storage. When I met her, she was struggling to get everything to fit in and the solution I had found was to buy a micro-SD card to plug in and leave it there. The card does barely come out of the PC and she has been using it with no hassles to store files for a couple of years now. This solution could have also been used in my-sister-to-be Air, the only problem being the Air can host only regular SD cards, having a big portion of them coming out of the unibody. Right when we were abandoning the idea, I remembered something.
Few years ago I had stumbled upon Transcend SD cards for MacBooks. The idea they had, was to build an SD card fitting the MacBooks so well, it could be left in all the time and even blend it with the Aluminum unibody design. It was as simple as smart, but back then it was pricey too, as making small SD-cards was not so widespread. Nowadays, it's almost more common to find micro-SD rather than regular SD-Cards and this has allowed other producers to step in making cheap adapters for using any micro-SD card for expanding the MacBook storage.

In the end we changed our mind and didn't buy the Air, but the solution was interesting nonetheless. So interesting, my father has used it to expand his 13" MacBook Pro internal storage (since swapping the built-in SSD isn't feasible, nor allowed).
It might not be the fastest option around, but I believe it's one of the smoothest and cheapest. Buying an adapter instead of a standalone SD gives you the opportunity to change the memory size at your need or as high capacity sd cards' price drops.
Choose a size, plug it in, forget.

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