Sorry, this goes on a bit longer than I intended
Like others I've got to say that the fact that the RAM in this machine is not user upgradable
really doesn't matter. None of the 21.5" iMacs have user upgradable RAM. Clarification: none of the 21.5" iMacs have
normal user upgradeable RAM. We, the people who come on forums like this one, would probably consider the future but the normal user (my parents, my wife, my Mother-in-Law) probably wouldn't notice or care.
I'm running Mavericks on a late 2012 iMac - the first batch of the new shape - on 8GB RAM and to be honest it's coping very well. Only the other week I had the following on the go:
Lightroom with some image editing going on
Safari with about 20 tabs open (trying to do 50 things at once!)
Handbrake encoding a 15 item queue of mkv into m4v
A messages conversation going on
Spotify streaming
2 FTP Apps downloading from two different sources
Text Wrangler editing a couple of php files
And the iMac performed wonderfully. Admittedly, Lightroom was a big hogger there - I wish Adobe would sort that out - and there were occasional slow downs, but to be honest I experience more slow downs waiting for my external HDDs to spin up on a regular basis. I am thinking of adding another 8GB but that's just to be able to keep the page in/out ratio to a more reasonable level and
maybe keep Lightroom a bit happier. Ruddy thing.
Now, I'll admit that this was on one of the 3.2GHz quad core versions but, taking into account that the sort of people I mentioned earlier will rarely come close to doing half, or even a quarter, of this amount of stuff at the same time and maybe 8GB non upgradeable RAM isn't the issue it's being made out to be.
Replace "non upgradeable" with "non servicable" and you might have a point. Even Apple stuff fails, and the ridiculous efforts that need to be gone through to fix something as simple as a bad RAM issue on these sealed units (Airs, rMBP and iMacs) is nothing short of ludicrous. Logic board or complete machine swaps for a faulty batch of RAM? Really?
I'm another one who thinks the machine is just overpriced for what it is, especially it seems here in the UK. Our 20% VAT takes it to £899, but even taking that off it makes the base, pre sale tax price, £749 which I think is around $1275. I don't pretend to understand US sales tax rules but a 6% sales tax still takes the US version to less than $1200. This machine could, and should, have been a real "entry level" contender and at £700 (inc VAT) I don't think I could argue against it. But at £900? Not a chance. But, it has to fit in Apple's product line hierarchy and there's no way they'd sell it cheaper than a MacBook Air. Or put another way, only slightly more than a 64GB cellular iPad Air. Personally I think that means that a company with around $150 billion in cash should rethink their product hierarchy and pricing on a section of their business that brings in negligible revenues compared to iPhones and iPads, but we all know that's never happening.
My worry, like others, is that this is a "toe in the water" by Apple to see if a completely soldered down iMac sells well and that the next gen iMac will be as thin as a MacBook Air with solid state PCIe storage, soldered RAM and no chance of repairing anything that goes wrong on it at all. At least my current system can have its HDD and RAM replaced. RAM by me (27"), HDD by Apple.
Personally I do not want thin. Not just on my desktop, but even a laptop or - don't hate me - my phone. As consumers, do we really
want thin or is what we are being
told we want? I know my view.
Edit: to be clear my own view is that even before this soldered version, the 21.5" should have user servicable RAM. But they don't. We can't compare this soldered version with the previous generation of 21.5" iMac, we've got to compare it against its current product line. And that doesn't have user serviceable RAM.
