alt Hacker NewsActually that is relatively cheaper than Apple has ever sold ram. They would always charge $200 for each ram upgrade and it might have been only 4gb or less back then.
The twist now though is they started soldering in the RAM with the retina macbook, so you can't run around apple's extortionate pricing like you could in the past and just buy components off the market.
Such a stupid cartoon evil villain move too, just to force us into getting RAM from them. I have never been memory bandwidth bound (Apple's excuse for soldering in the RAM) in my life and yet I am forced to buy computers that optimize for this at the expense of things I actually care about like serviceability. And also consider the fact it incentivizes people to buy more RAM than they need today in effort to future proof their device, in a time of RAM shortages. And who knows maybe by the time that RAM amount is relevant the CPU can no longer keep up so the hoarding might not even be for anything either.
> I have never been memory bandwidth bound (Apple's excuse for soldering in the RAM)
This isn't even a plausible excuse. For the entry level machines, the soldered RAM only has the same memory bandwidth as ordinary laptops. For the high end machines it likewise doesn't have any more than other high end machines (Threadripper/Epyc/Xeon) which just do the same thing as Apple -- use more memory channels -- without soldering the RAM.
And it's especially a kick in the teeth right now because it means you can't buy a machine with less RAM than you might prefer and then upgrade it later if prices come back down. If it's soldered then only what you can afford at the right now prices is all the machine will ever have.