“The top-selling MacBook Air dominates the thin and light notebook market, but forget about upgrading RAM,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “Apple’s product designers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to solder the memory chips onto the logic board. I appreciate the space savings, but I’m also sure Apple’s engineers are smart enough to devise a scheme to allow you to easily open the case and replace RAM, yet not increase weight or physical size. Instead, the MacBook Air is meant to be a closed box for customers.”
“The same is true for the MacBook Pro with Retina display. The only Mac notebook that allows for memory upgrades is the regular MacBook Pro, which is pretty much regarded as an endangered species,” Steinberg writes. “On the regular Mac lineup, things are a little more user friendly, except for the 21.5-inch iMac, which has no convenient method to upgrade RAM.”
Steinberg writes, “What this means is that, if you buy one of these closed boxes, prepare to spend as much as you can to buy one with the maximum amount of RAM you ever expect to need during the computer’s expected useful life. It’s not that you’ll be able to go back a year later and buy more memory. I suppose that could be one reason why OS X Mavericks, the next great Mac OS, is designed to make more efficient use of memory with such features as compressed RAM.”
Read more in the full article here.