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This ghost of "loosing the warranty" is one of manufacturers best beloved technique to cook their customers and make them responsible for failures which are cause by poor design or manufacturing.

 

It's not entirely correct, even if there are seals: If a replacement of the HD is done properly by you or a service institution, that can not be made responsible for the failure of a motherboard. Within the first half year the manufacturer has to prove it as your fault. After that, but within the first two years you have to prove that the failure was there from the moment you bought the device. That's customer protection law in Germany and I think, in EU as well, but with the latter I'm not sure.

 

You're right, but they rule. For instance, consider the replacement of the optical drive in older models with the Optibay for mounting a SDD/HDD. I did it myself, as many, when the warranty was expired. AFAIK, after reading some posts in users' groups, some repair shops "tolerated" this, after inspecting the quality of the job, and didn't consider it voiding the warranty. Others did.

 

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<p style="font-size:12px;background-color:rgb(247,247,247);">There's already a 4 GB SSD for 1400 €, I read last week.

 
 

 
I suppose it's the Samsung one, SATA bus. Unfortunately, Apple uses SSDs with the PCIe bus (well, this has a reason, the form factor and it's much faster (*)) - as Brightcolours mentioned, they can be found but only at specific dealers; they are much more expensive, and I'm not aware of pieces larger than 1TB at the moment.
 
(*) One might wonder what's the purpose of all that disk speed in a laptop. I mean, it's a "wow" thing when you run the typical lab benchmark, such as copying a 4GB file to /dev/null. But in the real world? There must be an application which processes data at that speed, and the most powerful MBP - the one I've bought - can't do that e.g. with Lightroom batch processing. When generating 1:1 previews or exporting JPEGs are the heaviest operations I do and I see that the bottleneck is the CPU. The SSD is accessed at speeds much, much slower than the maximum available.
 
My little tool to compute fingerprints of photo files to verify their integrity is actually much faster now - still it doesn't reach the maximum I/O speed, but I could probably upgrade it - but it's not something worth the extra costs...
 
Perhaps it's meaningful for video makers.