While the MacBook Pro with Retina Display has been getting a lot of press around here lately, the real unsung hero of WWDC 2012’s new Macs is the MacBook Pro 15”.

Though it’s lacking the thinner profile and high-resolution screen, the 2012 MacBook Pros offer two things that the Retina Display model doesn’t which mean everything to performance: an optical drive and a standard SATA hard drive.

Those two components themselves aren’t particularly great; the platter-based hard drive is a dog-slow 5400rpm and nobody seems to use their optical drives any more. The real potential here comes, not from the components, but from the space they occupy.

The hard drive is easily replaced, and replacing it with an OWC 6G SSD is a natural upgrade path for those looking to max out their performance. The bay will handle SATA Revision 3.0’s 6Gb/s speeds just dandily. It’s the optical bay, though, that really opens up possibilities. Article Continues…