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.
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.
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
The boards that dosdude1 used are specific to Mac Studio. The mini M4 and M4 pro model each use their own unique nand board.
I see. Which is unfortunate but at least there’s a starting point
It is unfortunate. However he confirmed that you can upgrade with blank NANDS if you can solder.
I will hold on to my upgradeable 2018 mac mini which I put 64gb into for as long as I can (which will likely be pretty long since RAM is the only bottleneck in most macs and 64gb makes everything instant), then I will probably leave the Apple ecosystem.
When the software ecosystem gets too old, slap Linux on it for a fresh lease of life. Did that with my old macbook pro back in the day. Got years more out of it.
Yeah I’ve had a lot of old Mac mini Linux servers around. Ran home assistant on it for years.
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.
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.
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.
Sure. But the price is maybe 2x. Apple wants you to pay almost 10x.
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.
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
