Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Memory in New $1099 iMac is Soldered and Not Upgradable
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
mmm.. No, younger people would buy 21" and want to upgrade themselves. By doing this, you will lose out younger market and future loyal customers.
----------
Sound very much like Dell Computers. The computer company that customers hate! Making things cheap, and Apple wants to be like Dell?
how many original purchasers of this particular machine are *still* going to own them by the time it *needs* a RAM upgrade beyond 8GB for the sort of general day to day stuff they were originally purchased for?
I suspect a good chunk of those sold to end users (rather than corporate/education) will have been sold on in favor of the next years model (or the next next years) long before that '8 gig can barely boot' day arrives.
In which case there's not much of a down side to Apple if the only folks ending up disappointed are second or third-hand owners looking to squeeze an extra year out of it and who haven't paid Apple a dime*
*I accept there's an element of depressed resale values that could in turn have an impact on firsthand purchasers willing to pay Apple a premium price for iMacs, if the expected resale values become substantially diminished (though there's already a downwards trend in Mac resale values in any case).
Hey, worst comes to worst and they no longer cut it for OSX? then they'll make for lovely looking Linux boxes
I suspect a good chunk of those sold to end users (rather than corporate/education) will have been sold on in favor of the next years model (or the next next years) long before that '8 gig can barely boot' day arrives.
In which case there's not much of a down side to Apple if the only folks ending up disappointed are second or third-hand owners looking to squeeze an extra year out of it and who haven't paid Apple a dime*
*I accept there's an element of depressed resale values that could in turn have an impact on firsthand purchasers willing to pay Apple a premium price for iMacs, if the expected resale values become substantially diminished (though there's already a downwards trend in Mac resale values in any case).
Hey, worst comes to worst and they no longer cut it for OSX? then they'll make for lovely looking Linux boxes
Last edited:
Read it again: "one of". I've seen a ton of power supplies fail; most were using those cheap Chinese capacitors. Almost as many motherboards. I saw imacs have both the motherboard and power supply fail within weeks of each other due to crap caps. But if you're not using crap power supplies, failures are not common.
Source: 10+ years working in IT.
But it can go to 2.7GHz due to the thermal headroom presented by the iMac, vs the Air. It's on par with the fancier spec'd model above it as long as the application doesn't benefit from additional cores. This model isn't to be purchased for video encoding, etc.
It's actually a very respectable CPU as long as you don't need a quad.
facts are there, the industry is moving twoards soldered components because of cost savings and also the pc industry is dying on users keeping their computers for 5+ years. You can't change business, a business' first priority is to make money, not to make sure your dollar stretches.
if apple strategy doesn't work, apple will fail. that's how businesses work. people here complaining and moaning won't do anything but annoy other forum posters. you're acting like children whose mom took your ice cream away.
i love how people are even accusing apple of being unethical, as if apple forced you to buy a product you don't want. laughable.
if apple strategy doesn't work, apple will fail. that's how businesses work. people here complaining and moaning won't do anything but annoy other forum posters. you're acting like children whose mom took your ice cream away.
i love how people are even accusing apple of being unethical, as if apple forced you to buy a product you don't want. laughable.
The average consumer wouldn't care about how much free RAM his/her computer has. All the user cares about would be if the system is responsive or not.
Honestly if apple keeps pushing $800 logic board replacements on people that get failed machines within a couple years of buying them, they will ruin their reputation.
I know, Apple users are rich and a $1000 machine is pocket change. Still, it'll piss people off. I still don't understand their justification for this bull! I think it'd be possible to fit slotted ram into a macbook air, but that aside, why would they skip out on it in an iMac? Using modules is probably cheaper than buying chips and having to put those on the board. It also will have a higher yield rate, and piss off fewer customers if their memory fails.
It's also much better for the environment, since those machines can live on for a decade as 2nd/3rd/4th hand machines, and end up in someone's computer collection instead of a landfill or "computer recycling facility" .
I don't get it.
I know, Apple users are rich and a $1000 machine is pocket change. Still, it'll piss people off. I still don't understand their justification for this bull! I think it'd be possible to fit slotted ram into a macbook air, but that aside, why would they skip out on it in an iMac? Using modules is probably cheaper than buying chips and having to put those on the board. It also will have a higher yield rate, and piss off fewer customers if their memory fails.
It's also much better for the environment, since those machines can live on for a decade as 2nd/3rd/4th hand machines, and end up in someone's computer collection instead of a landfill or "computer recycling facility" .
I don't get it.
Does the current 21.5" iMac have a RAM slot door? No. So again, will it matter if the RAM is soldered or not? No, because even if you wanted to replace it, you have to rip the iMac open. This outrage is silly, when the hard-drive, a spinning platter that WILL fail, has not been user accessible since the inception of the original iMac (and nobody is complaining about that).
Seriously, apple uses the same mass ram manufacturers other makers use.
How long will it be until all of the imac's have soldered in ram? At one time people thought they would never solder in laptop ram.
Last edited:
So in other words just like Steven Colbert.
----------
What do you figure ram slots cost in china, about 10 cents? Less?
It's about taking away the option to upgrade it and requiring the purchase of another unit, period.
I agree.
A pity it is far from cheap, then - this seems like a significant miss.
----------
As was pointed out earlier, per Intel Ark, it can only reach 2.7 GHz by turning off the second core.
This same CPU installed in the MacBook Air is capable of 2.7 GHz as well.
----------
While it may only be able to reach 2.7GHz when one core is idle, it can reach speeds above 1.4GHz with both cores active. I've seen reports from MacBook Air owners of both cores operating at 2.4GHz when stressed.
I guess it's possible that the CPU would have a longer life in the iMac due to potentially reduced temperatures.
All steps on the same road. The nMP has most pieces soldered/bolted in. (removable parts don't count when there is nothing to replace them with)
The shareholders will retire off their stock profits, and every single bad RAM chip will lead to :
1. New Logic Board ($800)
2. New iMac ($1,000)
Win/win for Apple
Not all of us, I saved for over a year to get my 27" iMac last year.
I chose it for the bigger screen, user upgradeable RAM and fast GPU. Also it should last longer before I need to replace it for something faster.
I suppose.....
Apple had to make compromises to build this new iMac model. In PC terms , 8 GB is more than plenty for most tasks. And Apple hardware/software always seems to me better suited to manage RAM. The thing where the new iMac is on subpar terms for me is the CPU. The 1.5 Ghz, even as a i5 chip will make some people wonder.....A 2.0 GHz, by the other hand, will be more than acceptable for most people.....
Apple had to make compromises to build this new iMac model. In PC terms , 8 GB is more than plenty for most tasks. And Apple hardware/software always seems to me better suited to manage RAM. The thing where the new iMac is on subpar terms for me is the CPU. The 1.5 Ghz, even as a i5 chip will make some people wonder.....A 2.0 GHz, by the other hand, will be more than acceptable for most people.....
I am going to assume that you haven't really read the debate in the thread. If you have, and you truly don't understand it, let's talk about precedence.
A few short years ago all of Apple's laptop batteries were removable. Presumably this was because the battery has the shortest average expected lifespan of any component in a laptop, and therefore it is reasonable to expect a new battery will be needed before the product reaches end of life. Apple started soldering the batteries in the name of making the machine thinner (and maybe lighter, not sure if those claims were made) with the MacBook air. Now, ALL of their laptops come with a soldered, non-removable battery. Should this be something you want to service, you will need an Apple (or otherwise certified) professional to do it for you; certainly it is within the realm of possibility for many hobbyists, but for the average user, not so much.
Now we move forward to a soldered RAM which, to my knowledge, Apple hasn't come out and made any claims about why they went this route. Is the machine thinner? Lighter? Will this become the new norm? We have seen on this very site various configurations where it is cheaper to buy directly from Apple using configuration X and then upgrading with parts from company Y, rather than going with Apple's own upgrades. Are they testing the waters in order to see how sales go to perhaps, one day, move over to 100% soldered ram? Who knows? But that is the fear and discussion, for the most part, that is happening in this thread. Who is being served here? Is it the customer? Or is it actually just Apple?
I thought I would add my own experience with a late 2009 27" iMac. It came with 4GB of ram and 1TB 7200RPM HDD. Those were fine, at the time. I recently upgraded to 16GB RAM and a 250GB SSD with a 2TB external for media. In total, this cost me around $400, and I feel like I have a brand new computer. The RAM is easy for just about anyone to do, even a person who has never done it (jus ****ch a youtube video). The HDD to SSD swap was more challenging, and not likely something the average consumer would try and tackle, though it was doable. Even so, had either of these components been soldered, we would be talking about a new computer, more than likely.
TLDR: Today Apple stills sells a soldered and an end user servicable RAM configuration, much like they did with MacBook batteries, initially. There is absolutely risk of soldered ram bleeding into future releases of the higher end models of iMacs as well.
Last edited: