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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of folks use an iMac as the primary family machine - email, homework, some Netflix, kids' basic games. 8 GB is entirely sufficient for that. Hell, four probably is.

If you're doing Photoshop plus a half dozen VMs, you buy it with more RAM.

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For the 5k model, an additional 8GB in DDR4 RAM for a total of 16GB model costs +$200 [1]. This is beyond unreasonable compared to market [2].

[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac?product=MRR12LL/A&st...

[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

Sure, but with a user-accessible RAM bay built into the back of the machine, I can't work up the energy to be too mad about that one.

In 2019 how many apple products have user (or technician for that matter) upgrade-able anything? honest question. I'm not a Mac person and all I see is anecdotal reports of "soldered in RAM here" "fully bonded case there" etc.

Both new Mac mini and 27" iMac have upgradeable RAM.

The 27" iMac used to have upgradable RAM, but the text for the new version says "configurable to 64 GB", not "upgradable" like it used to. I'd love to be proven wrong, though, I'm considering getting an iMac.

Unless something changed with today's update, it should be upgradeable via a hatch on the back of the machine. I upgraded my 2018 model to 40GB less than a year ago.

Interestingly this article says it's upgradable, but the quote they pulled from the spec sheet isn't mentioned on Apple's website (any longer): https://www.imore.com/can-you-upgrade-ram-27-inch-imac

Only a matter of time before they solder the RAM in the imac like they did in the macbook.

I most definitely give you that point.

Has there ever been an investigation in how the average consumer app - email, browsers, word processing, etc - has changed over the years in terms of memory usage? I mean browsers are memory hungry (but that's because they use as much as is available, doesn't mean they reserve it from other applications), but a lot of modern-day apps are Electron ones, which easily cost a few hundred MB. Office has also moved from a set of native apps to heavier webapps.

OTOH, Apple is still all about native apps, mostly their own software packages, as well as an app store that up until recently didn't allow anything but native apps (not even sure about that). They also introduced memory compression, and IIRC Safari does some smart stuff with memory as well.

Chrome + Slack alone took up ~3 GB of RAM on my 4 GB machine and forced me to upgrade.

I use Slack in the browser instead. No more Electron crap.

I turned slack into a chrome “shortcut” (which seems to be a PWA minus the service worker), which lets it run in chrome instead of a separate electron instance, but also have a separate app window.

Ive also found having slack be ~another chrome tab, instead of a copy of chrome via electron, to be really nice

So what did you replace Chrome and Slack with…? </snark>

You'd think so, right? See my comment elsewhere on this thread - I had to re-sell an iMac b/c 8GB (combined with the latest OS) was a disaster for simple tasks.

Given the improvement in technology, you would expect a decreased price in that case.

Not if the cost savings went into other stuff, like the 4k/5k displays.

Or the CPU. But we're talking an $1800 machine with a 5400rpm disc and 8gb of Ram. That's one hell of a screen and CPU.

It's probably no longer true, but when the 5K iMac came out it was the cheapest way to get a 5K screen. You got the computer for free, essentially.

I think the high quality 5k screen is still the bulk of the cost. There's nothing else like it on the market except for LG's, and that's ~$1300USD.

The high DPI monitor market is practically dead (for now) so there's no pressure forcing prices down.

It's still pretty much true. 5K screens unfortuantely barely exist at this point.

Or if you allow all family members to stay logged on with their apps running like we do, you can upgrade to 16GB or 32GB. :)

I bought an iMac a couple years ago because at the time it was the only consumer level Mac being sold new where you could upgrade the RAM yourself.

On an older iMac running 10.11, going from 4gb to 6gb was a big improvement.

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