No unfortunately this isn't a user-replaceable part in most modern MacBooks.
> In the end it's a "Pro" machine no ?
Not sure what that has to do with it? Most professionals don't want to be changing their RAM.
Depends on the field and location.
Unscrewing a cover and popping up some ram is not a “professional” task. It’s something anyone with passing familiarity could achieve.
Shove your ram in some obscure place so the owner can’t access it, now you need a professional if simply to offset the risk something goes wrong while you’re fiddling.
User serviceable parts are just not an Apple priority.
I thought everything was soldered to the main board for years now.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/upgrading-2013-2014-mac...
People complain about the new thinner macbooks all the time. The keyboard is atrocious, the touchbar, the dongles... Seems to me they would've totally bought a modernized 2015 model if it existed.
Edit: The Mac Mini does as well, but apple doesn't consider it 'user-upgradable'.
It has the maxed cpu and performance is fantastic.
I'm writingh this on a 2010 mbp on it's third battery, second ram upgrade and new-ish SSD and i'don't know if my next machine will hold up ~10 years when nothing is easily replacable.
Between his computer repair business and video productions, he financially benefits from Apple products being relatively difficult to repair.
It's not as trivial as people think to switch to removable RAM. See e.g. this informative reddit comment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2dyuxa/can_any_engin...
The rest of the thread is also worth a read.
We replaced most of MacBooks last year when we got sick of waiting for a non-defective keyboard and maintaining a spare pool of $3000 laptops. The thin models use soldered memory, but are priced at a much lower margin. The slightly thicker models are still thinner and lighter than the MacBook Pros they replaced, and have user replaceable memory as well. In most cases, we just ordered more memory because HP doesn't gouge you, and our budget was built around MacBooks.
There was some grousing initially about leaving MacOS for Windows 10, but it went away fairly quickly, as Catalina really fubared stuff that our Mac users cared about around the same time, running MacOS in a business sucks anyway, and the Windows 10 linux stuff is good enough for our folks who were using a Mac for Unixy reasons.
Apple's thin and light principles make sense and are ultimately correct from a technical POV, but the business side uses it as a margin mining operation. 2020 isn't 2010 from a competitive POV, where Apple blew everyone away -- they lost focus in the 2014-15 timeframe and now focus on the ARM transition. Today, competitive forces drive thin & light among other vendors and ultimately result in a better outcome for most scenarios.
1) RAM slots take up more space.
2) There is not a standard socket for all kinds of RAM (particularly some kinds of energy efficient RAM).
Which thin non-Apple laptop are you referring to?
I seriously doubt Apple gives a crap about whether or not people can upgrade their RAM. Hardly anyone does it even when they can, so it can't make much difference to their business model. Do you really think Apple are doing this so that a tiny fraction of people who would have just upgraded their RAM buy a new laptop instead?
I’m sure Apple doesn’t care at all — they removed the iMac memory slots and made storage replacement impossible for no real good reason at all as well. That combined with the gouging for additional capacity and the borderline fraud of shipping the defective keyboard for years was enough for me.
I liked MacOS a lot, but the companies behavior is a textbook example of why you need competitive forces in hardware.
Soldering on ultrafast SSDs does make sense for a number of reasons beyond just saving space. The higher the bandwidth, the more difficult it is to get data transfer working reliably when part of the electrical connection is made via a connector cable. Apple have some of the fastest SSD speeds out there.
There are similar issues with RAM. There's lots of crappy RAM on the market. If people started putting third party RAM in modern MacBooks, you'd get lots of issues with e.g. reliable suspend/resume. Some good discussion here: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-valid-technical-reason-for-....
The laptop options that are hyped up as being better than Apple almost always turn out to have a mythical element, on further investigation. If you want removable RAM and SSDs you can get them (yay free market!), but there's a real downside.
Reduce and Reuse is the best way to help pollution, yet Apple is known, famous for Planned Obsolescence and non-repairability
you can not be Environmentally Friendly and maintain the only solution to any problem is to just toss it and buy a new one
And it‘s easily recycled afterwards. The RAM is rarely the issue and I know few non-technical people who ever changed their RAM in a notebook.
Sustainability is really important, but I don‘t think upgradable notebooks make a significant difference at all.
Hardware can be both long-lasting as well as upgradable.
There is a popular myth among the lazy-minded about this, but the fact is that Apple's hardware lasts a lot longer, and is intentionally supported for a lot longer, than competing hardware. This is true for Macs as well as iOS devices. If Apple is "planning" for anything, it's for their stuff to last a lot longer than others' stuff, not the opposite.
This is not planned obsolescence - this is going out of your way to make the repairs harder. I can understand when certain decisions are made for engineering reasons(like say, having the ram soldered on), but this kind of thing when Apple goes to the manufacturer and asks for a version specific only to them so that no one else can buy it, ever - that's just anti-consumer, and I hope the hand of the law will come on them super hard due to this.
As someone who has bounced in and out of Apple products for ~10 years at a time (1985-1995 and 2005-2014), I have a couple of nits.
The last two Mac laptops I had (2009 plastic Macbook, Early 2011 MBP with known heat issues) - both can still run the latest version of Windows 10 adequately for what they are hardware-wise. Every "modern" (as in OSX capable) Mac I have had at some point lost support from the latest version of OSX (which means you lose the ability to upgrade some apps). In some cases, like the 2011 MBP, for seemingly no reason, as it is still a decent computer even now.
While I know a lot of people here like to change their computer every couple of years like it's nothing, I still like to use things I buy for as long as possible before recycling them.
In terms of "hardware lasts a lot longer", I generally agree with that statement, but there have been notable instances of bad designs combined with bad support (and I generally think Apple's support is a notch better than everyone else).
The most notable (in recent times) being the Early 2011 15" MBPs with overheating issues. That thing was a lemon that was poorly handled by Apple. There's still a good chance that I'd still be using a Mac right now had that experience not left a sour taste in my mouth. I've never had a laptop die on me in 20+ years of having laptops (my very first was a Powerbook 170, and I've had a pile of PC and Mac laptops since) outside of that early 2011 MBP, which lasted just over 3 years before it died. It died again after the recall service was performed on it, because they basically just replaced the logic board with the same board having the same design defect. (FWIW, someone else I know who bought the same model had the exact thing happen).