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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Does that mean the discount is only for Americans? I don't see anything about it on the Dutch version of the Apple site.

Still looks pretty affordable. Until you look at the upgrades. € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price.

I suppose doing your own upgrades isn't an option anymore? (My last Mac was a 2011 unibody.)

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Since the first ARM systems (may be before) you can’t upgrade things on your own, i had an Air which can be SSD upgraded but not memory upgraded. Memory can only be upgraded from factory.

You could just solder on a new ram set

The amount of people for whom this is a "just" kind of task is very very low. I don't think "just" should be in that sentence ;)

"just" at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRRNR4HyYaw

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631130

Unless you are dosdude on Youtube

"MacBook Air 16GB RAM Upgrade"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxbVxaScZQ4

One thing that will potentially future-proof the new Mac Mini is that the SSD is on a removable board. It's a custom Apple design but someone's already hand made their own upgrade. Wouldn't be surprised if there will be 3rd party upgrades commercially available within a year.

> € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price.

"Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent [...] because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture."

- Bob Borchers, Apple vice president of worldwide product marketing (who apparently never heard of zram)

windows also uses memory compression

Yeah, that doesn't explain why the Intel Mac Pro cheesegrater wanted $3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM that OWC would sell from the same manufacturer, same speeds, for $1,000 for 192GB.

Sorry Bob, architecture may be different now, but Apple has always been egregious.

But what's the point in Borcher's comment? Because there's efficient software use of memory, it's legitimate to put a tenfold price marker on the hardware?

They have variations of the program in some European countries. It's been a long time for me, but in the UK they used to just whitelist university domains (we didn't use .edu TLDs either).

AFAIK, in most of the EU they validate you are a student or an academic through UNiDAYS.

We use .ac.uk though (and much of the non-USA world uses .ac.ccTLD similarly) so no need to whitelist individual university domains. I don't know about Apple, but that's a common approach. (And does irritate some where they don't use either and get missed, Canada for example.)

Some countries place no restrictions on registering domains under their .ac second level domain though.

€23 for 8 MB of RAM sounds a bit too expensive, to be honest.

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