Pretty hilarious, 32gb sodimms are only 150 GBP in the UK, Apple charging 200 for 16. Similarly, 2TB disk for 800 GBP, open market it's 219.
Some PC laptop vendor could do a whole TV campaign based around the idea of turtle-necked folk setting fire to money and smiling, because it makes them feel better, and that's really all that matters[.. right?]
Wouldn't LPDDR be more expensive for the retail customer because it is not used that often? Most of the Wintel laptops have standardized on regular DDR4 SODIMMs and it looks like Macs use LP variants, where Apple is surely getting volume discounts.
Partly in their defense, the RAM is soldered to the board.
This limits the spaces available to RAM so they're probably swapping out higher density (i.e. more expensive) chips. They also can't just pull a Macbook off the shelf, slap an extra DIMM in it, box it up, and ship it.
Yeah, on those rare spec chips that are not on the retail market, Apple probably have to place custom order to the memory chip manufacturers for a low-yield production, which is definitely causing the unit pricing to be much higher than the mass produced memory chips. Economy of scale. (even if Apple is still a big customer, it's still a small order to make if no other computer makers use that spec of the chips)
>Apple probably have to place custom order to the memory chip manufacturers for a low-yield production
Except LPDDR3 is not a custom low yield part since they're present in phones, game consoles, SSDs, cameras, VR headsets, etc. They're as off the shelf as they get.
Normal DIMM's have a SPD flash chip soldered to the board which identifies the ram/timing parameters for the firmware/OS. At least on phones, to save a penny they forgo this and frequently the RAM capacity is tied to the model via hardcoded tables in the firmware. It wouldn't surprise me if at least on some of these "laptop" devices with soldered on ram something similar isn't being done.
So, at a minimum your flashing new ram parms to a SPD, or hacking the device model number somewhere. AKA, even with a rework station its likely a lot more than just swapping the chips, if there is sufficient PC/etc linage you might be able to swap the SPD chip as well, otherwise its going to be more than a mechanical heat it up, clean the pads, and drop/heat the new chip.
A lot of Apple hardware is locked down nowadays via hardware identifiers and the T2 security chip; it’s likely the RAM modules are not replaceable by the user even if you had the skill to solder a BGA.
What? I have never seen that as a problem, and I've probably consumed thousands of benchmarking articles over the years. Benchmarks either use the (in my pov stupid) "X percentage units faster" or x faster/slower method. The latter is obvious, the former is not.
As to 'times as fast' vs 'times faster' vs 'times slower': I don't see how there could be any confusion.
> What? I have never seen that as a problem, and I've probably consumed thousands of benchmarking articles over the years.
Possibly you gloss over the words as you're used to them, but don't stop to think what each paper really means? I didn't either until one day I stopped and did.
I wrote a blog post about this, but unfortunately never got around to posting it because I think it came across as rather pedantic. I surveyed the language used to express speedup in systems papers using benchmarking in top conferences and produced this table:
Each row is a different way to talk about the same thing, then the English way to say it, then each column is what this looks like for a different example value, then the actual mathematical expression.
Just to emphasise this - each column is the same empirical result, and then each row in the column is a different way to express that same result, that I've seen in a paper.
> The latter is obvious, the former is not.
I'm afraid it isn't as obvious to everyone, and other people may think it's obviously something different to you. You'll notice that some English phrases can be interpreted in multiple reasonable ways. Is running in half the time '1 times faster' or '2 times faster'? You'll see both in the wild.
> As to 'times as fast' vs 'times faster' vs 'times slower': I don't see how there could be any confusion.
Is '2 times as fast' the same as '2 times faster'? Some papers think so, others not.
Have you read the root comment of this thread... that's an example of real-world confusion right there! Just with markup not speedup. It's the same maths and the same confusion.
Not that I agree with Apple’s pricing, but you have to assume this isn’t adding an extra 8GB, but changing the existing packages out for ones with double the density. That presumably is more expensive than just adding the same amount again of the lower-capacity packages.
I was looking at that teardown myself to see whether this was the case, and I don't think it's enough information to say -- that's a teardown of the model with 16GB of RAM, so it's not impossible that the 8GB model might leave some of those areas empty rather than switching to lower density chips.
It's also possible that it varies depending on DRAM prices. You might have models with 8GB populated single sided and others double side. Same goes for the 16GB models.
Some PC laptop vendor could do a whole TV campaign based around the idea of turtle-necked folk setting fire to money and smiling, because it makes them feel better, and that's really all that matters[.. right?]