The laptop is built on an A18 Pro, a mobile chip first seen in the iPhone 16 Pro, which limits the machine to 8 GB of RAM. Storage comes in 256 or 512 GB, and whichever one you buy is the one you keep.
https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/search?s=sodimm&filter[memoryType_uFilter]=DDR5%2CDDR4&order=product.price.asc
They could have easily made the RAM and Storage user serviceable/upgradeable, and from what I can find, they don’t provide a way for the enduser to expand storage with a secondary SSD/HDD either, so you’re either forced to carry around an external hard drive for a product that is meant to be portable, or use cloud storage where you might not always have reliable access to the internet/data caps.
Anecdotal, but the only component that has ever failed on me is a hard drive, if that happened to me on the new mac book, it would be e-waste.
They could have easily made the RAM and Storage user serviceable/upgradeable
Nope, they couldn’t have, since the A18 pro chipset doesn’t support modular memory at all, of expanding it past 8gb. It’s a phone chip after all. There’s also the fact that Apple has equipped all their devices with unified memory, which, if they even managed to make it upgradable, all chips would need to support massive memory bus widths to have the same or similar bandwidth (requiring more modules), would need proprietary modules or at least rare modules like SOCAMM, and would reduce the space inside the chassis for anything else, like battery, modular ports, etc.
Sure, I hate Apple’s antics in terms of lack of right to repair, but frankly they produce arm based computers, where have you ever seen an arm based laptop or mini pc with modular RAM? I’m sure some exist but they’re likely too obscure for me to have heard of (although I have heard of System76’s Thelio Astra, although again they are a bit obscure outside Linux circles.)
Edit: forgot to add, but yeah soldered storage is really inexcusable.
It was more so a comment that they could have used a connector for the ram to make it user serviceable, instead of soldered on, and I combined it with a sentence that the storage should be user serviceable and upgradable instead of making my earlier comment overly explicit/wordy. The quote I took from ifixit right above even says that the mobile chip is why it was limited to 8 GB of RAM.
Some changes would have to the layout be made to accommodate fitting a physical stick instead of just the soldered modules, but there’s CAD software that plots traces, so that really shouldn’t be an issue.
Not allowing a 1TB option certainly is a choice, and one that can be criticized. But I don’t think it’s fair to say they could have “easily” made the RAM upgrade (certainly not user upgradable) at that price point. It uses the A series because they make billions of them, and ram has not been upgradable in them.
All it takes is putting a SODIMM socket into the device instead of soldering in the RAM, making it possible to salvage the device if the RAM begins to fail. It’s a basic laptop, meant for browsing/writing documents, I can’t really see anyone swapping in 16 gb of ram to a device like this, and seeing any performance uplift.
That is perhaps the silliest thing I can think of regarding these chips. Can you name even a single phone whose RAM is not soldered? Heck, most laptops these days don’t have upgradable RAM.
Yeah, even the effing expensive MacBook pro is no longer upgradable (since the switch to Apple Silicon). You want RAM? Better sell a kidney and buy a new Apple, kid!
https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-repairable-macbook-in-14-years
https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/search?s=sodimm&filter[memoryType_uFilter]=DDR5%2CDDR4&order=product.price.asc
They could have easily made the RAM and Storage user serviceable/upgradeable, and from what I can find, they don’t provide a way for the enduser to expand storage with a secondary SSD/HDD either, so you’re either forced to carry around an external hard drive for a product that is meant to be portable, or use cloud storage where you might not always have reliable access to the internet/data caps.
Anecdotal, but the only component that has ever failed on me is a hard drive, if that happened to me on the new mac book, it would be e-waste.
Nope, they couldn’t have, since the A18 pro chipset doesn’t support modular memory at all, of expanding it past 8gb. It’s a phone chip after all. There’s also the fact that Apple has equipped all their devices with unified memory, which, if they even managed to make it upgradable, all chips would need to support massive memory bus widths to have the same or similar bandwidth (requiring more modules), would need proprietary modules or at least rare modules like SOCAMM, and would reduce the space inside the chassis for anything else, like battery, modular ports, etc.
Sure, I hate Apple’s antics in terms of lack of right to repair, but frankly they produce arm based computers, where have you ever seen an arm based laptop or mini pc with modular RAM? I’m sure some exist but they’re likely too obscure for me to have heard of (although I have heard of System76’s Thelio Astra, although again they are a bit obscure outside Linux circles.)
Edit: forgot to add, but yeah soldered storage is really inexcusable.
It was more so a comment that they could have used a connector for the ram to make it user serviceable, instead of soldered on, and I combined it with a sentence that the storage should be user serviceable and upgradable instead of making my earlier comment overly explicit/wordy. The quote I took from ifixit right above even says that the mobile chip is why it was limited to 8 GB of RAM.
Some changes would have to the layout be made to accommodate fitting a physical stick instead of just the soldered modules, but there’s CAD software that plots traces, so that really shouldn’t be an issue.
Not allowing a 1TB option certainly is a choice, and one that can be criticized. But I don’t think it’s fair to say they could have “easily” made the RAM upgrade (certainly not user upgradable) at that price point. It uses the A series because they make billions of them, and ram has not been upgradable in them.
All it takes is putting a SODIMM socket into the device instead of soldering in the RAM, making it possible to salvage the device if the RAM begins to fail. It’s a basic laptop, meant for browsing/writing documents, I can’t really see anyone swapping in 16 gb of ram to a device like this, and seeing any performance uplift.
That is perhaps the silliest thing I can think of regarding these chips. Can you name even a single phone whose RAM is not soldered? Heck, most laptops these days don’t have upgradable RAM.
Yeah, even the effing expensive MacBook pro is no longer upgradable (since the switch to Apple Silicon). You want RAM? Better sell a kidney and buy a new Apple, kid!
Was sometime before that. It’s been close to, if not fully, a decade since the switch to what they euphemistically call “unified” memory.