Why tf can’t they sell mac with upgradable parts?? They are “so” into renewable and recycling stuff and saving planet and stuff. Then they should start selling shits with upgradable parts. Even cpu’s if possible. Now apple fan boys argue with that. And don’t bullshit me with soc should be near cpu for faster optimisation they can redesign the mobo.
There are legitimate advantages of the RAM being soldered right next to the SoC. However, if anyone could figure out how to create a proprietary RAM module, that slots in right next to the SoC (or even just an SoC module including RAM) that can be swapped out and that doesn‘t have any meaningful performance impact, it would be Apple. Just that it never could be Apple…
The problem is the electrical resistance of the socket. Most of the performance on apple silicon is achieved through extremely high bandwidth, low latency memory. Unfortunately that necessitates a socketless design at the moment, and you can see that happening on the snapdragon X too.
Yea, not just snapdragon and apple. Even intel and amd processors usually get paired with higher bandwidth soldered ram on many mobile offerings.
And on GPUs soldered VRAM has been a thing for a loooong time, with HBM memory being the prime example for what RAM close to the chip can do. AMD‘s Vega cards were highly sought after during the mining craze, even though they weren’t that fast in general computing, simply because their memory bandwidth was so beyond any other consumer cards…
Because that gives the user as much or more control over the device as Apple themselves have. One of the fairly consistent things about Apple over the years has been a desire to maintain tight control for themselves over the products they make.
They certainly used to. My wife’s 2012 MacBook Pro has upgraded RAM and SSD parts I’ve put in over the years and still runs fine, though it isn’t used much anymore and OS upgrades stopped a while ago.
Their current environmental marketing is pure greenwashing bullshit and their stances on upgradability and repairability are terrible.
It’s basically just greenwashing. They pretend to be into renewables and recycling only when it doesn’t disincentivize people from buying the newest product. Ex: iPhone trade in for recycling - Yes, they do recover some raw material but you can only do it if you’re buying a new iPhone with that credit, and its probably also an attempt to keep cheap used iPhones off of the market.
From an engineering standpoint they made a set of design choices with the m series chips that sacrifice easy upgradability for the benefits of ram soldered in very close to the chips that are gonna use it that smartphones, tablets and most laptops have. Before someone jumps in and says it’s possible to have replaceable ram in that same space, yes, that’s true but you’d have to pull the heatsink off every time you wanna swap it out, and for what? Almost all users never upgrade their ram and choose instead to get anew computer (this has been true forever, btw).
From a sustainability perspective, if no one is upgrading anyway and getting the ram socket off the board saves a few grams of plastic, that’s a net win. Plastic recycling is fake and made up, metal and electronic recycling are real for better or worse. Is it better to keep the 5% of devices that will ever be repaired or upgraded running or reduce the amount of plastic in the waste stream on the other 95%? Idk. But I know that apple has a recycling program for devices.
Why tf can’t they sell mac with upgradable parts?? They are “so” into renewable and recycling stuff and saving planet and stuff. Then they should start selling shits with upgradable parts. Even cpu’s if possible. Now apple fan boys argue with that. And don’t bullshit me with soc should be near cpu for faster optimisation they can redesign the mobo.
There are legitimate advantages of the RAM being soldered right next to the SoC. However, if anyone could figure out how to create a proprietary RAM module, that slots in right next to the SoC (or even just an SoC module including RAM) that can be swapped out and that doesn‘t have any meaningful performance impact, it would be Apple. Just that it never could be Apple…
The problem is the electrical resistance of the socket. Most of the performance on apple silicon is achieved through extremely high bandwidth, low latency memory. Unfortunately that necessitates a socketless design at the moment, and you can see that happening on the snapdragon X too.
Yea, not just snapdragon and apple. Even intel and amd processors usually get paired with higher bandwidth soldered ram on many mobile offerings.
And on GPUs soldered VRAM has been a thing for a loooong time, with HBM memory being the prime example for what RAM close to the chip can do. AMD‘s Vega cards were highly sought after during the mining craze, even though they weren’t that fast in general computing, simply because their memory bandwidth was so beyond any other consumer cards…
Because that gives the user as much or more control over the device as Apple themselves have. One of the fairly consistent things about Apple over the years has been a desire to maintain tight control for themselves over the products they make.
They certainly used to. My wife’s 2012 MacBook Pro has upgraded RAM and SSD parts I’ve put in over the years and still runs fine, though it isn’t used much anymore and OS upgrades stopped a while ago.
Their current environmental marketing is pure greenwashing bullshit and their stances on upgradability and repairability are terrible.
There is what they say they are in favor of, and there is what they really are in favor of.
They are in favor of apple getting all the monies, the end
Because then they can’t gaslight people into thinking their 8GB is magical.
It’s basically just greenwashing. They pretend to be into renewables and recycling only when it doesn’t disincentivize people from buying the newest product. Ex: iPhone trade in for recycling - Yes, they do recover some raw material but you can only do it if you’re buying a new iPhone with that credit, and its probably also an attempt to keep cheap used iPhones off of the market.
From an engineering standpoint they made a set of design choices with the m series chips that sacrifice easy upgradability for the benefits of ram soldered in very close to the chips that are gonna use it that smartphones, tablets and most laptops have. Before someone jumps in and says it’s possible to have replaceable ram in that same space, yes, that’s true but you’d have to pull the heatsink off every time you wanna swap it out, and for what? Almost all users never upgrade their ram and choose instead to get anew computer (this has been true forever, btw).
From a sustainability perspective, if no one is upgrading anyway and getting the ram socket off the board saves a few grams of plastic, that’s a net win. Plastic recycling is fake and made up, metal and electronic recycling are real for better or worse. Is it better to keep the 5% of devices that will ever be repaired or upgraded running or reduce the amount of plastic in the waste stream on the other 95%? Idk. But I know that apple has a recycling program for devices.