Chosen Solution
I’m building a 15 inch Macbook powered pen-enabled tablet computer designed for creative professionals. I need more than 16GB horsepower to run the OS and my extensive amount of software.
Please note that MacOS doesn’t natively support touchscreen displays, well, at least not for the touch option. So, you would have to find a tweak that would enable this, or it wouldn’t work anyways. Now for the actually answer after my little roast on MacOS for being not touchscreen display compatible lol. So, for the soldered connections, there is really no space to install a slot for a stick of ram, which is how they crammed all of the power into the laptop. The only way to upgrade the CPU is to have micro-soldering skills, and a CPU compatible with the socket and the model identifier. For the GPU, it is soldered to the board like the CPU, and you would have to have a GPU compatible with the socket and the model identifier. So, in conclusion, there is really no way to install a ram slot in the place of the soldered ram, and the CPU is pretty much limited to CPU’s compatible with the model identifier, e.g MacBookAir7,2, but with a Pro instead of Air.
In order to build a powerful graphics or CAD/CAM design workstation, there are 4 main requirements: A motherboard that provides quad channels for memory and plenty of memory slots. You were correct in saying that 16 GB is the minimum amount of RAM required.A multicore processor with a large CPU cache. A processor with 6 cores and a 15 MB cache is a good bet.One or more fast hard drives with plenty of capacity. For instance, two Solid State Drives that total 2TB of storage and support SATA III connection cables.A high-end video card. Probably the best chipset manufacturer for high-end video cards is NVIDIA (www.nvidia.com). Their Quadro family of GPUs are relatively high-functioning. That being said, it will be difficult to get the highest-functioning graphics station components by building a laptop or tablet device.
You’ll have a hard time here as MacOS or even the older OS-X doesn’t offer touchscreen support. The best you can do is a Watcom tablet as an input for drawing not much else. The older 2012 Unibody will allow you to go to 16 GB of RAM and the drive is only a SATA III (6.0 Gb/s), but the CPU is soldered to the logic board and there is no upgrade possible as the newer Intel CPU’s use a very different pin array. A Pro today needs as many cores/threads as possible. The latest Intel i9 offers 6 or 8 cores but the needed cooling for this chip to really sing is what Apple encountered as such its throttled very badly. High speed RAM & PCIe/NVMe storage is also needed. I doubt you can modify any MacBook Pro to meet your needs. If you have the cash I would just go to China to the one of the custom PC houses and work on building from the ground up a system that meets your needs. I think Apple beat you to the punch with the iPad Pro tablets as being the best you can do today.
