Comment by resters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by resters | Hacker News Reader

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Apple's refusal to make RAM upgradeable is something that many have tolerated because of the other strengths of the hardware platform.

But it is not without cost to Apple's brand reputation. It is painful to upgrade to a new machine when a few hundred dollar RAM upgrade would have given the old machine 1-2 years of additional useful life.

Some customers don't realize this, but for those who do it makes Apple seem greedy and not concerned with value or the investment of the customer's dollars in its ecosystem.

Apple sells under-powered machines to naive customers who then need to upgrade sooner. It's really sad that one of the great tech companies employs used car salesman style deception into its pricing structure and aims it at the least informed of its customer base (grandmas and people who can barely afford it anyway).

This is why people hate capitalism, but it's actually greed and shortsightedness that they should hate. Competition should make tactics like this unsustainable, but Apple has a lof of entrenched advantage and employs many questionable forms of anticompetitive behavior to create lock-in. Overall it's bad citicenship due to tremendous greed.

> Apple's refusal to make RAM upgradeable

I'm not sure they can make RAM upgradeable at this point and still keep their unified memory. If you look[0], they have the memory under the heat spreader, butted right up next to the SOC, and my impression is that this is what allows them to get that nice memory bandwidth.

[0]: https://www.ifixit.com/News/46884/m1-macbook-teardowns-somet...

They do it this way because it cuts manufacturing cost. Its cheaper to use POP ram when ram upgradeability is not in your design constraints.

Apple even has a patent (garbage one, describes something obvious) for second non POP slightly slower ram channel.

https://www.techpowerup.com/277760/apple-patents-multi-level...

"With two types of DRAM forming the memory system, one of which may be optimized for bandwidth and the other of which may be optimized for capacity, the goals of bandwidth increase and capacity increase may both be realized, in some embodiments,"

They are sitting on a solution while extracting value while market bears it.

LCAMM2 should be fast enough: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/micron-unvei...

And they could combine onboard unified RAM with a slightly slower non-unified expandable RAM slot. There is some precedent for such configurations in computer history.

Perhaps true of recent models. However RAM-starved machine upgraded with slightly slower (but still fast) additional RAM would still be much better value in performance per additional dollar than a whole new machine.

It would be worth to add a slow RAM slot or two to use it purely as an SSD cache or a substitute for swap. There's no need to eliminate the unified memory in the process of adding upgrade options.

Lack of upgradability also damages Apple’s credibility with regard to their environmental aspirations.

The lower amount of RAM enables more people to get into Macbooks at a lower cost instead of choosing less expensive alternatives that will only last a few years.

"at a lower cost" except the actual cost difference between 8GB and 16GB is less than 50 dollars (and that's being very generous)

Edit: checking Mouser, 16GB (the actual DRAM chip) costs between $15 and $25

Cost to the consumer, not Apple.

Cost to consumer of 8GB DDR5 is $25

Not when you buy it from Apple.

Non-upgradeable RAM and SSD. Why? To save $1 in manufacture or 1mm in case height?

I completely agree - would love for the RAM and SSD to be upgradeable.

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