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by ThePhysicist
2183 days ago
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Of course, you can select a 16 GB memory upgrade from Apple for 400 $ when you buy your laptop. On the other hand, a user-serviceable laptop would just enable you to buy that RAM yourself for around 100 $ and put it in the laptop. Also, you could do that after you buy the laptop, as sometimes people just realize they need more RAM or storage after using a laptop for several years. With an Apple laptop you're just out of luck in those cases, the only thing you can do is sell it and buy a new one. Same story with the hard drives or almost any other component. I don't think that the reason they do this is to make the laptops 1-2 mm thinner, I think it's just economically way more interesting to be in a position where your company controls the entire value chain from software to hardware. That's where Apple is headed and it's great for them as a company, for end users it's not so great though. I would really like if the EU restricts this kind of behavior as I think it would be good for Apple users as well. |
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An example of that: when I started working at my current company, the 4GB of RAM I had on my several years old laptop was no longer enough (I could work fine, but it got annoyingly slow when I used the IDE). Since said laptop is a Dell, I just bought a matched pair of 8GB RAM sticks (dual channel, total 16GB), followed the instructions on the repair manual (available as a PDF on the manufacturer website, no login required) to open the back cover, and exchanged the memory. Took me only around an hour, and would have taken only a few minutes if I hadn't insisted on running the full memory test to make sure the new sticks were good (built-in hardware test program, launched from the BIOS, no installation or operating system required).
I some time later used that 4GB stick I had removed from the laptop to upgrade another computer from 4GB to 8GB. That is: even the part I had to remove for the upgrade wasn't wasted.