Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

^^ just keep the old ram and drive and if you have problems pop them back in, take it back - they dont have any of those void stickers or such like to know if you have opened it.
I always buy after market 3rd party ram as its cheaper than the "apple" branded.

^ This. I'm about to take the superdrive out of a new MacBook Pro. It's really not that hard - 3/4 screws and a press-on connector.

RAM is a user-upgradeable component, so Apple doesn't care if you switch it out.

SSD is a good option but as I've noticed with a lot of designers I deal with they need drive space, so they end up putting their OS on the 64Gb SSD and their files on the the 500GB SATA drive, which kind of defeats the point of installing the SSD if your going to be working with files off the mechanical drive, unless you have the money to go straight in for a 512GB SSD ;)

Sort of (I am doing the above). The speed-up from having an SSD for the OS disk is huge - because it's used for swap. Having your working files on a regular HD isn't as fast, but IME it doesn't make a huge difference. Aperture went from run-like-a-dog with everything on a HD to shit-off-a-shovel with the images on an HD and OS on an SSD.