this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Personally, I think there is absolutely no reason why in something like the iMacs, HD and RAM shouldn’t be user replaceable and upgradable.
They always used to be until Jonny I’ve got his thinness bug.
If Apple went for it and introduced a new aesthetic where there were small visible screws which became a symbol for cate about the environment, they could probably push the industry in that direction
Storage and RAM not being user upgradable is an environmental nightmare for sustainability.
Not having internal slots for storage and relying on USB or NAS is not an appropriate alternative for professionals regardless of what their leadership says is what professionals want.
We’ll never know, but RAM being part of the SoC is probably contributing substantially to their performance capabilities compared to competition. The only real way to know that probably requires being an engineer at Apple. I’d wager $3.50 that they’d get a substantial performance deficit from switching to DIMMs, and that terrifies them since that would further push everyone to x86 workstations.
Perhaps. But they started removing upgradable RAM in the Intel era. It’s not a new thing that came with the M1
Simple: user-replaceable RAM is too slow. Apples M-series SoCs combine the CPU and GPU and both share the same memory. This has massive performance advantages, especially for GPU-compute tasks. Performance of GPU code is very dependent on memory bandwidth. You cannot have high-bandwidth memory on a user-replaceable module, you have to have the memory chips physically close to the processor. This is the reason there are no user-replaceable RAM modules on GPUs either.
With GPU compute becoming more and more important, I expect the PC world to get rid of user replaceable RAM and GPUs as well in the future.
That doesn't really explain why they removed the ability in the Intel Macs. But that's very informative, thank you.