ram in future not compatible?!

[Bass108]

ok. there is highly respectable gentleman who is telling me that with third party ram there is high risk for it to not be compatible in future revisions of osx. he says this particularly why ocz refuses to put out a newer version of mac pro ram because apple will update the model and put them in a bad place. he also told me that this is what happened with many people with G5's a few years ago.

i can't find any info of this on the net. does anyone have any knowledge of this?

he is suggesting the apple has plans for the ram to evolve and they won't release 100% specs and this in turn causes many manufacturers not make newer apple ram.

 

[Jonny427]

I don't understand what you're saying. If you mean apple switching to 800MHz RAM, thats just part of the normal computer evolution process. IIRC 667 MHz RAM will work, it will just slow the other DIMMS to its speed.

Future versions of OS X do not change RAM specifications...

 

[CanadaRAM]

Bull Hockey.

Apple will bring out new machines in the future with different STANDARDS of RAM -- such as when they moved from using DDR to DDR2 from the Powerbooks to the MacBooks, and like the new MacPros which need 800 MHz vs 667 MHz FB-DIMMs

Happened with G5's --- umm, yeah, Apple brought out a new line of G5 machines Oct 2005 with new processors and motherboards with DDR2 RAM, which was different from the older DDR RAM. Those were entirely new models, not an OS update.

Apple will not "obsolete" any 100% compatible third party RAM on a given machine with an OS upgrade.

There was one incident in the past where this happened -- Apple upgraded Firmware on machines, and the new firmware tested the RAM more stringently to see that the SPDs were written to the published standard. This caused marginal RAM and generic RAM that was NON-standard to fail. But that was 10 years ago -- and it was a situation where Apple did not change the rules, they just started enforcing them and it caught out the substandard parts.

As for speculating that's why OCZ does or doesn't do something -- dubious in the extreme. OCZ has never been a serious player in the Mac RAM market or the server market.

Also, Apple does NOT drive the evolution of RAM -- Apple uses industry standard RAM components now and they will follow the JEDEC standards.