I remember in 2007, buying my first MacBook. It came with an enormous 2gb of RAM. I asked about upgrading it. The guy leaned in conspiratorially and told me that Apple’s RAM upgrades were a rip-off, and that I’d be better of buying it elsewhere. So I did, for half of what Apple were asking.
This is a grift that Apple have had for far too long, and there’s a part of me that’s convinced that their move to soldered RAM was to stop people upgrading after the fact more than it was about SOC efficiencies.
I will hold on to my upgradeable 2018 mac mini which I put 64gb into for as long as I can (which will likely be pretty long since RAM is the only bottleneck in most macs and 64gb makes everything instant), then I will probably leave the Apple ecosystem.
When the software ecosystem gets too old, slap Linux on it for a fresh lease of life. Did that with my old macbook pro back in the day. Got years more out of it.
Yeah I’ve had a lot of old Mac mini Linux servers around. Ran home assistant on it for years.
Wait… the 2018s are upgradable?
Yes the RAM is. For SSD I have all my home folders on an external 3TB SSD RAID array that’s about the same speed as the internal storage. This allowed me to buy the base model and save a few thousand $$ by upgrading it.
Weirdly. I don’t know why they went back to upgradeable RAM for one generation.
Which happens to be the one I have… :D
I do periodically look up their prices on eBay, but because of that weird aberration they’ve retained their value pretty well.
Well I think my Christmas gift to myself this year is now a RAM upgrade instead of a new Mac then. And I’ll add 12TB of storage to my media server.