If I buy a Macbook Pro with an ordinary hard drive now, how hard would it be for me to install a solid-state drive later?

If you’re talking about the new MacBook Pros, it’s really rather easy to switch the drives.

1) Buy a new laptop SATA drive. In this case, a solid state drive.

2) Use Time Machine to backup your entire machine to an external USB hard drive. Enable Time Machine from inside System Preferences.

3) Switch off the machine, and pop open the cover on the bottom.

4) Remove the old drive, and insert the new drive. This can be done by sliding the drive out of the slot by pulling on the tab, and pushing in the new drive until it clicks. You’ll have to pop out the battery to get to the drive bay, but it’s obvious when you see it.

5) Turn on the machine, and insert the Mac OS X install discs that came with the laptop.

6) The installer will tell you that the drive isn’t formatted properly. Choose “Disk Utility” from the “Utilities” menu. Choose the drive from the left hand menu, and select the ‘erase’ tab. Type something like “Macintosh HD” (or something else you think is fitting) as the drive name, and ensure that “Mac OS X Journaled” is selected as the file system. Format the drive by clicking on ‘erase’. This should take a minute or two.

7) Reboot the laptop by choosing “restart” from the Apple menu. The installer will launch normally, and just click through the windows to install Mac OS X. At the end of the install, you’ll be asked if this is a new machine, or if you’d like to restore from a Time Machine backup. Choose restore from a backup, and connect the USB drive.

Done. Once it’s finished restoring from the backup, your Mac should be just like your old machine; only insanely faster.