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Comment by mikae1 | Hacker News Reader

One thing special about Apples hardware is that you can't upgrade the RAM.

Apple's unified memory is great for bandwidth and efficiency and terrible for upgrades.

However, I suspect that a large portion of PCs are used as-is and are replaced rather than upgraded, much like phones or tablets.

It's worth noting that Steve Jobs was originally against RAM and other upgrades for the Macintosh. It was supposed to be an appliance like a toaster, and (most) toasters are non-upgradable. He also didn't want it to have a fan - making it more like a toaster or a MacBook Air.

Which was a terrible mistake on both counts. Having a fan installed and the board bumped to 512k were common mods on the original Macintosh. 128k was just not enough for it. Apple ended up adding the fan and RAM upgrades to the classic Mac line.

There's nothing special about the ram for either bandwidth or efficiency.

I hear people say this, but the fact is my workflow “fits” on an 8GB M1 and doesn’t fit on an 8GB Intel machine. By “fits” I mean “is usable enough that I think about my work, not my machine”

So I really don’t care what anyone says, there is definitely something special about Apple Silicon re. RAM usage. Maybe it’s just swapping really fast. Doesn’t matter, it works.

Macs just use standard LPDDR RAM that's nothing special, but also not replaceable

Yes, but that's a separate issue from whether anyone should be allowed to buy a computer with 8GB in it.

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