1) Back up data, wipe drive
2) Sell MBP on eBay
3) Buy new MBP with desired amount of RAM
4) Restore data
Now stop it. You're buying a Mac because you don't like to waste time dicking around with your computer, remember?
My fiancee, who is practically hardware illiterate, just installed brand new RAM and a new SSD into her 4-year-old MacBook. If she had originally purchased it with those upgrades, it would have been $500+ extra at the time of purchase. This week, it cost $150 for the parts on Amazon.
User-serviceable operations that don't require completely replacing the computer are important, and will surely affect many people's buying decisions. You don't get to say that everybody who wants a Mac will never want to waste time dicking around with their computer.
And I do like to waste time dealing with backups and Craigslist scammers? I'm buying a Mac because I want a Unix workstation with a solid UI. Lots of MacBook Pro owners are not terrified of screwdrivers.
Ha. Best of luck, friend.
Not to mention if you hit your HD limit after a year the bigger drives are going to be drastically cheaper.
The same goes for memory, hard drive, and other parts of the computer.
Also, the SSD makes you need less memory, since reading from it is so fast
So 16Gb will go a long way really.
"X MB/TB of resource Y will be plenty for a while" is almost always something we laugh about 2 years later.