“I am a disorganized person. One of the ways this manifests itself is in my browser tab usage, which has been described by colleagues and loved ones as ‘anxiety attack-inducing,'” Jason Koebler writes for Motherboard. “While I am comfortable having 100 tabs open at any given moment, my computer often isn’t.”
MacDailyNews Take: Cripes, and here we thought we were bad with the tabs!
“My behavior is beyond repair. And so I recently decided to be better to my computers, in the form of buying one that could actually handle the abuse I put it through,” Koebler writes. “Because browser tabs use a lot of RAM, I decided to get one that had a lot of it. I wanted to stick with an Apple computer because I like TextEdit and iMessage… The obvious catch is that I would have to open my brand new, very expensive, very fragile computer and remove almost every single part from it. While the 27″ iMac has a ‘RAM Door’ in the back of it — which means RAM upgrades take 30 seconds — the 21.5″ iMac has RAM located in perhaps the least convenient portion of the computer.”
“For the first time since 2012, the new 21.5″ iMac has upgradeable RAM slots as opposed to soldered-down RAM. To support my tab habit, I decided to buy a (relatively) cheap iMac and soup it up with as much RAM as possible,” Koebler writes. “Apple overcharges for RAM. To an offensive degree… The mid-tier [21.5-inch] iMac can handle 32GB of RAM, Apple just won’t sell it to you that way. And you can buy 32GB of RAM from any number of places online for about $300. This is all a long way of saying that it’s possible to upgrade a new iMac to 32GB of RAM for $300 instead of $600.”
“I’ve done simple iPhone screen replacements and swapped the batteries in old MacBook Pros, but this was an entirely new level of upgrade,” Koebler writes. “The iFixit RAM upgrade guide notes there are 64 steps, says it should take ‘1-3 hours,’ and notes that the repair is ‘potentially dangerous.'”
Read how Jason upgraded his 21.5-inch iMac’s RAM here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, Jason, having a ton of RAM most certainly is great!