12 inch power books waste of ram?

[eazy_e]

When you buy a 12' powerbook it comes with 512mb ram standard like the 15' and 17'. The problem is thethe 15 and 17 have 512mb cards, while the 12' has 2 256mb cards. Why would apple do this? To upgrade now you have to take out the 256 and put in say a 1gb and you get 1.25gb of ram, but in the 15' and 17' you'd get 1.5gb of ram for the same price . I've already decided on the 12' powerbook because It would be easy to take to class but i wish it came with an empty slot to upgrade ram

 

[AppleMatt]

It's clearly to save money, the 12" is at the lower end of the Pro-sumer (ok it's at the bottom) market.

AppleMatt

 

[Patch^]

Yea it is to save money, but 256Mb of the ram is built into the mother board to save space etc... so only 256mb is removable :/. You could buy a 512 or gig stick from crucial or newegg to save some money.

btw nice choice on the pb

 

[musicpyrite]

The reason the 12" PowerBook only has 1 removable RAM slot is because the other RAM (256 MB) is slodered to the logic board.

I would guess it costs more or something to have 512 MB soldered to the logic board. I'm not really sure though.


The 12" PowerBook has always seem just like ramped up iBook.

 

[YS2003]

After doing memory upgrade for PBs, I now have 4 256MB sticks in the box. It is a waste since there is no use for those small memory sticks.

 

[TDM21]

Yea it is to save money, but 256Mb of the ram is built into the mother board to save space etc... so only 256mb is removable :/. You could buy a 512 or gig stick from crucial or newegg to save some money.

btw nice choice on the pb

Actaully, its cheaper to upgrade the ram to 768 through Apple then Crucial. Apple charger $75 for the 512 mb stick while Crucail charges $86.

 

[djbahdow01]

Actaully, its cheaper to upgrade the ram to 768 through Apple then Crucial. Apple charger $75 for the 512 mb stick while Crucail charges $86.

Hate to say it but the $75 is for 256 through Apple. Apple charges 150 for a 512 stick.

 

[TDM21]

Hate to say it but the $75 is for 256 through Apple. Apple charges 150 for a 512 stick.

I meant to say the upgrade to 768 mb for the 12" pb was $75 if you get the laptop BTO.

 

[slooksterPSV]

I think Apple's 1GB RAM sticks are too expensive, even for BTO. Heck I could go on to Crucial, Tigerdirect.com, Kingston and get a 1GB stick for $159 min.

 

[Sun Baked]

The 12" PowerBook has always seem just like ramped up iBook.

It's a crossover machine they introduced with the PB12, a consumer machine in the entry level professional lineup.

They did the same thing with the iMacs and PowerMacs, putting an iMac G5 in the PowerMac lineup with the new SP PowerMac (uses the iMac G5 chipset.)

Of course the iBooks/PowerBooks share the same chipset in any case... so it's more of a "feature set" and the case that sets them apart.

 

[andrewfee]

I think Apple's 1GB RAM sticks are too expensive, even for BTO. Heck I could go on to Crucial, Tigerdirect.com, Kingston and get a 1GB stick for $159 min.

This is Powerbook memory, not a desktop. Crucial.com are $366 and I've read about many people having to send back their memory two, even three times to get a stick that works properly and doesn't cause the machine to crash. (Apple hardware is very picky about memory)

Personally I would rather pay the extra money to save the hassle, and I know how easy it is to add memory to Powerbooks; I've replaced the 512mb in mine with two 1gb sticks. (Apple sent me a stock 17" Powerbook instead of the BTO one by mistake)


As for the memory being "wasted." It's actually better the way Apple does it. If they were putting in a 512mb stick in the 12" Powerbook, you would then have to replace it with a 256mb stick and a 1gb stick, as the maximum they can take is 1.25gb.

The way they currently have it, you just need to swap out one stick, and you then have one you can sell, rather than taking out one stick and buying two to put in it.

It might be a good idea to get the 768mb upgrade from Apple (a very cheap upgrade) buy a 3rd party 1gb stick and sell the 512mb if you don't mind "risking" buying a Crucial etc stick though. You'd probably end up saving even more money this way.

Or, if you go with stock memory and add 1gb yourself, the 256mb stick will probably still sell to someone with a 15" or a 17" Powerbook, as they can add it to give themselves 768mb. (which enough for most people)

 

[plinden]

I think Apple's 1GB RAM sticks are too expensive, even for BTO. Heck I could go on to Crucial, Tigerdirect.com, Kingston and get a 1GB stick for $159 min.

They are indeed too expensive, but they're not the worst - IBM charged our IT department $535 for the 1GByte stick in my Thinkpad. Of course, not being the worst is till no excuse for overcharging.

 

[brap]

It's clearly to save money, the 12" is at the lower end of the Pro-sumer (ok it's at the bottom) market.

That's a problem.

The 12" shouldn't be a different class of machine, and treated as such -- it should simply be the Powerbook with the smallest screen. I bought the highest specified model I could at the time, and would gladly have given more had the options been there. I think the same goes for all 12" PB owners; we want it to be meaty under the hood. If not, we'd have iBooks.

 

[slooksterPSV]

They are indeed too expensive, but they're not the worst - IBM charged our IT department $535 for the 1GByte stick in my Thinkpad. Of course, not being the worst is till no excuse for overcharging.

Ouch, why are they charging that much. Did you have to pay that $535 or did the company you worked for? That is heavily over priced.

 

[powerbook911]

That's a problem.

The 12" shouldn't be a different class of machine, and treated as such -- it should simply be the Powerbook with the smallest screen. I bought the highest specified model I could at the time, and would gladly have given more had the options been there. I think the same goes for all 12" PB owners; we want it to be meaty under the hood. If not, we'd have iBooks.

I consider my 12-inch Powerbook a very capable machine. Furthermore, if you look at the testing down by MacWorld, it met or beat the 15-inch 1.5 GHZ machine in all but the graphics test, and it was never far behind the 1.67 machines. Sure, you lose the Firewire 800, gigabit, etc, but if you don't use those anyway, the 12-inch Powerbook is a very capable machine. I have it connected to the 20-inch aluminium cinema display, and it is a beautiful system, I'd rather have my 20-inch ACD and 12-inch Pbook than only a 15-inch by itself.

Regarding the memory, if it had two slots I'm sure Apple would have included a stick of 512 as they do on the 15 and 17s. Unfortunately, it has the soldered 256, and they obviously didn't want to go and change that. There is always future updates to see some of the changes we desire in the 12-inch.