Officially done with Apple (small rant)

[CrystalDawnFog]

I have been a long time apple fan until now. I recently traded in my i5 macbook for a new m1 macbook and I wanted to upgrade it to 16gb of ram. Only to find out nothing in the M1 macbook air is upgradable (well unless you are a super soldering expert, I am not) not even the internal ssd is upgradable. They have gotten so greedy. 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

6 minutes ago, CrystalApple said:

I have been a long time apple fan until now. I recently traded in my i5 macbook for a new m1 macbook and I wanted to upgrade it to 16gb of ram. Only to find out nothing in the M1 macbook air is upgradable (well unless you are a super soldering expert, I am not) not even the internal ssd is upgradable. They have gotten so greedy. 

MacBooks haven't been upgradable for years... way before M1. This isn't new... In fact... many laptops these days are not upgradable... Hope you liked the Lenovo ThinkPad X Series because the RAM is soldered on there too now.

 

6 minutes ago, CrystalApple said:

They have gotten so greedy. 

Which company isn't... Google, Lenovo, HP, Dell, Boeing, GM, Ford, your Federal Government, EA... Bungie. 

[emosun]

3 minutes ago, CrystalApple said:

Only to find out nothing in the M1 macbook air is upgradable

really? that was the tipping point? lol

[lewdicrous]

4 minutes ago, CrystalApple said:

Only to find out nothing in the M1 macbook air is upgradable (well unless you are a super soldering expert, I am not) not even the internal ssd is upgradable.

This has been the case for a while.

5 minutes ago, CrystalApple said:

They have gotten so greedy. 

Always have been.

[YellowJersey]

11 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

 Hope you liked the Lenovo ThinkPad X Series because the RAM is soldered on there too now.

 

IIRC, even the T400 and T500 series now have soldered ram.. could be wrong about that, though.

[saintlouisbagels]

It looks like they haven't had upgradeable RAM in laptops in over 10 years?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201165

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

5 minutes ago, saintlouisbagels said:

It looks like they haven't had upgradeable RAM in laptops in over 10 years?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201165

Yea it started with the Retina MacBook Pros. The Touch Bar MacBook Pros that succeeded removed the M.2 slot. 

[RONOTHAN##]

49 minutes ago, YellowJersey said:

IIRC, even the T400 and T500 series now have soldered ram.. could be wrong about that, though.

At least with the T14 Gen 2 I dealt with a bit ago, it did have upgradeable RAM. Half of the memory was soldered directly to the board, so your upgrade path was limited to 48GB or 64GB depending on the initial capacity you went with, but you di still have the option to go with more or less RAM in the future if you need to. 

 

As to OP, this is nothing new, no Macs since about 2017-ish have been upgradeable, they've all had soldered RAM and soldered SSDs, and IIRC since 2019 they removed the connector on the board to access the SSD data internally to get your data off in case of a board failure. I get wanting to avoid them from a right to repair standpoint, but the problem is most other companies do the exact same thing, so either you go with something like a Framework or a slightly older T480 to get ultimate upgradeability, or you go with one of the many other companies that have followed Apple's lead with limiting upgrade options. Personally, I'm going to avoid them exactly the same amount I have been for the past 10 years, meaning unless they make a very compelling product I won't get one. The M-series Macs are that very compelling product to me, insane battery life without being crazy expensive, and would still recommend (and did buy) one of them, given you buy a high enough spec out of the box. 

[CrystalDawnFog]

1 hour ago, saintlouisbagels said:

It looks like they haven't had upgradeable RAM in laptops in over 10 years?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201165

Yeah my last mac was a mac mini 2012 ram and hd was upgradable

[LIGISTX]

30 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

The M-series Macs are that very compelling product to me, insane battery life without being crazy expensive

This. 
 

The amount of computer you get for the money is insane. 0 fan, amazing battery life, great screen, and honestly a great operating system… hard to pass up. 
 

Apple has a walled garden, but man, it’s a really nice garden. Lol. 
 

1 hour ago, CrystalApple said:

I have been a long time apple fan until now. I recently traded in my i5 macbook for a new m1 macbook and I wanted to upgrade it to 16gb of ram. Only to find out nothing in the M1 macbook air is upgradable (well unless you are a super soldering expert, I am not) not even the internal ssd is upgradable. They have gotten so greedy. 

Unfortunately, this is extremely common knowledge. This is a good lesson in doing research before making large purchasing decisions. Almost every single review I have ever seen for Mac’s over the last ~5 years reminds the reader/viewer there is nothing upgradable about them. This is just the unfortunate future we are moving towards, but it’s also how apple is able to get such fantastic performance while also retaining best in class battery life…. And slim chassis. It takes tight integration to do that. It just is what it is. 

[LIGISTX]

2 minutes ago, CrystalApple said:

Yeah my last mac was a mac mini 2012 ram and hd was upgradable

Well, thankfully, even with 8GB of RAM it’ll run circles around that machine. 
 

Apple’s tight integration means their RAM has insanely high bandwidth, and can talk to their nvme SSD super fast as a result. I honestly bet 8 GB won’t be much of an issue for you. It is unfortunate, and if it’s a huge concern, if you are still within the return window you can return it and get a 16GB model instead. But I bet the 8GB will be fine unless you do highly RAM intensive stuff. 

[YellowJersey]

43 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

At least with the T14 Gen 2 I dealt with a bit ago, it did have upgradeable RAM. Half of the memory was soldered directly to the board, so your upgrade path was limited to 48GB or 64GB depending on the initial capacity you went with, but you di still have the option to go with more or less RAM in the future if you need to. 

 

 

I've currently got a refurb'd T450 that I use for slouched on the couch light computing using Linux, so, thankfully, other than storage, I don't need much more than 8GB anyway. But, I understand that there are a lot of people out there who can't afford to have multiple machines.