I remember in 2007, buying my first MacBook. It came with an enormous 2gb of RAM. I asked about upgrading it. The guy leaned in conspiratorially and told me that Apple’s RAM upgrades were a rip-off, and that I’d be better of buying it elsewhere. So I did, for half of what Apple were asking.
This is a grift that Apple have had for far too long, and there’s a part of me that’s convinced that their move to soldered RAM was to stop people upgrading after the fact more than it was about SOC efficiencies.
Very smart.
Apple knows Apple customers don’t buy no stinkin base model.
They buy “Pros”, “Plus”, and “max” models, ……because they are important people, working on big projects and need the extra power
FWIW, not all flash memory is created equal. Apple does tend to use premium chips with better error correction, etc. All that said, it’s still not worth it for most of us, most of the time.
I wouldn’t have thought Apple are using flash chips that are two or three times more expensive. They’re just price gouging at a point where consumers have literally no option.
A big part of it is that Apple literally places the memory on the same package. It’s literally inside the black package that has the CPU, GPU, and some other dedicated processing units. This system-in-a-package configuration allows the M series chips to have memory bandwidth that basically no other system can match.
Intel tried to put memory on package, but has announced that it won’t be doing that anymore, probably because it’s so expensive to do so.
This does make me wonder whether the entry level mini is something of a loss-leader at this point. Literally just a way to get people into the ecosystem.
Might be yeah. Some of it is getting people in the door who then buy another model. Some of it is getting new people into the ecosystem. Their MacOS business is tiny compared to iOS these days. I scratch my head a lot wondering what they’ll do with it long term.
I’m no expert in business, but I guess that maintaining the Mac side of the company goes a long way towards the popularity of the iOS side. What they make from Macs might be tiny in comparison, but it all helps towards the amount they make from iPhones and iPads. It’s all symbiotic, y’know?
iOS (and android) is also propped up by phone payment plans. My carrier offers me a new phone every two years for like $10/month which works out much cheaper than buying the phones outright.
If they were offering a Mac for the same deal every two years, people would upgrade those more often too.
Tl;dw Default config is 16gb ram, 256gb ssd
32gb ram is 450$ upgrade, 2tb ssd is 800$ Amazon prices are 120-150$ for 64gb ram or 2tb nvme ssdSo maxing out both costs 1250 for a ~300$ (retail) upgrade, if that were possible.
It might be possible. The mini uses socketed ram, though the connector is revoltingly proprietary.Ram is on the soc, the SSD isn’t really an SSD. It’s just nand chips on a pcb. The controller is on the soc.
You’re right. I was thinking of the SSD.
It does make me wonder what value there might be in a third party offering, tied with a local repair shop who have a Mac running Sequoia that can be used to restore it. Assuming the boards are reasonably easy to produce (easy for someone who is able to do that kind of thing), it’d be pretty straightforward to take your Mac in to a shop to have it restored.
The boards are already in production by some company iirc. Dosdude1 on YouTube did some upgrades on various M series machines
You can buy a Ryzen 9 32Gb 2 Tb mini pc that seems to have a similar form factor. It’s capable of running 3 4K diaplays, not too shabby. at Amazon in Europe for 446€. Or, if you’d prefer, a Ryzen 5 pro 16 Gb 512 SSD for 289 Link so half the money and you get 2x storage… Link sure, no thunderbolt, but considering the specs, I know what I’d buy.
