hard drive upgrade and warranty issues

The answer to that is a resounding "maybe". The hard drive is not considered a user replaceable part in the MacBook Pro. Replacing the drive, unto itself, would not invalidate your warranty. However, any damage you may cause in doing so would not be covered... although... this is also the case if you damage something by replacing a part that is user replaceable. The bigger issue is if you experience problems down the road. If you replace your drive... and five months later you start to experience problems, when Apple service examines your machine and determine the drive has been upgraded, there would be no way for them to know that the damage was not caused by the replacement of the drive. It's possible that a small static discharge may have damaged something when you replaced the drive... and it took some time for it to fail... or some other component may have been connected loosely or incorrectly causing it to fail a few months later. As such, Apple may not cover the service under warranty.

I'd say that was a good reply from Joey.

If you read the warranty itself, it indicates that the drive and damage caused by installing it is not covered. The issue is that sometimes, Apple service technicians may erroneously blame the drive install for subsequent trouble.

Getting the install done by an Apple authorised service provider - prevents the problem, or install yourself and be prepared to argue your case if you need to based on the clear wording of the warranty. Apple employees themselves give out conflicting opinions.

Best of luck.

PS - it's really not that hard. Take a look at www.ifixit.com for instructions.

After upgrading to Leopard and adding some other new programs, I found I had less than 10 gigs left on my PowerBook Pro. I happened to be at a genius bar getting service on a dead HD on my iPod and mentioned I would be upgrading the MGP HD. The genius told me the HD was user replaceable on the regular MacBook, which has easy access to the HD bay, but with the MacBook Pro, which doesn't have easy access, it will void the warranty to self-replace the drive. It has to go to an Apple-authorized shop to be done. And, make sure the technician enters it into Apple's system. While searching various boards for this info, one guy had his one with an Apple-authorized place, but they didn't register it with Apple, and when he had problems, they wouldn't recognize his warranty.

Just so you know, there is NO legit upgrade path for MacBook Pro hard drives. If you are under warranty, such as Apple Care, you are dealing with golden handcuffs. Apple has no upgrade program, and ANYBODY who opens the computer causes the warranty to be voided. My local authorized Apple repair place would not touch my computer, since it is still under Apple Care.

The way Apple has it set up, it is Apple Care OR the ability to install a bigger HD, but not both.

I am considering going to Leopard soon too and was wondering about this myself. Then, I purchased a bus powered FireWire drive (160gb for $139 at OWC). I think this is a good solution. Put a lot of my data files on that drive and was able to sweep of 20Gb of data from the boot drive (lots of space for Leopard now). Nice thing about 160gb is that I could partition it into 1 bootable clone of my current drive and the other partition for data. This way when I DO upgrade to Leopard, I still have a safety net. Hope this helps.

You should think twice. It has some new features that are nice, but nothing you can't live without for a few more months. I had a much better experience moving to 10.3 and 10.4. Those basically worked. Leopard has real bugs, and I would not have minded if Apple had pushed back its release another few months. Right now, it can do more harm than good. Make sure you have several clones of your old system and that you are willing to revert to Tiger. I should have been, because it is better to have a working system than the nightmare I am in right now trying to get Leopard to work as well as Tiger did.

It doesn't "just work". My wife's Macbook seems fine, but my Mac Pro is seriously screwed up. Lots of things don't work right. The path I originally took of putting in the Leopard disk and hitting upgrade, left my system unstable, with lots of error messages, crashes, and permissions issues. I am doing a clean install now, that is taking an eternity. Time machine is nice, but you can't control it. I migrated my user account off it, and now instead of picking up where it left off, it is making an entirely new copy of my system drive (350 GB of stuff).

If I were to do it again, I would wait until SuperDuper! or CCC is working on Leopard. OS X is a big complex animal that we probably take for granted because it usually works so well. I hame having that old but familiar Windows feeling right now.

I just got off the phone with an Authorized Apple Repair Center. They said that the computer will still be covered by AppleCare, but the new hard drive will not.

Of course, they want my business.

I also talked to an AppleCare rep. and he initially did not know. He had to ask the supervisor. He came back with the reply that the entire computer warranty would be void. So much for upgrading my drive.

This has always flown in the face of logic for me. In the PC world, upgrades are a no-brainer, even for laptops. Why would Apple alienate is dedicated fan base by creating this situation. If I buy into a product for the long run, I should be able to stay with it, by making upgrades right up until the time that it won't do me any good any longer.

For the macbook pro, six months after I bought my core duo with an 80gig drive, the core 2 duos come out with 160-gig drives. If the model supports this larger drive, why shouldn't I be able to upgrade to it? Just doesn't make any sense.