On the other hand, they are limited in capacity. It is a trade off, it is silly to pretend they are just limiting memory capacity out of the vileness of their hearts or something.
No, but their marketing department would like you to think so.
> It is silly to pretend they are just limiting memory capacity out of the vileness of their hearts or something.
They are limiting memory capacity and charging you 8x-10x reasonable retail price for upgrades, so that their profit margins stay high. Whether or not that's vile is something I leave to you to decide.
Can you link to a teardown that finds RAM somewhere other than the CPU package?
Or were you in too much of a hurry to notice that the comment you replied to didn't make the common mistake of claiming the RAM is on-die not just on-package?
I think I was thrown off by your use of the term "inside," vs other terms like "on" or "part of," which led me to believe you were asking about the memory being part of the SoC proper. If that's not what you meant, I apologize.
The memory consists of standard DDR4/5 memory chips, soldered on a PCB, directly next to the M-series SoC. So my point was that while it is likely faster than any memory you could get on a standard consumer PC, it's not in any way special (read: more expensive) for Apple to source or assemble.
Side point: I don't think it's necessarily fair to compare most Macs to consumer PC hardware, given the price differentials involved.
No, it's obviously because they can upcharge on upgrades? That's just market segmentation. I doubt it can have much to do with technical limitations or actual costs (the the difference the wholesale price between 8GB and 16GB is relatively marginal).
> I think it might not be possible to put together a system
No, but you can get a Lunar Lake laptop with comparable bandwidth. Dell is also "only" half as "greedy" as Apple or MS, e.g. 16 GB -> 32 GB is only $200 instead of $400.
There's a ton of ram types with varying performance levels, and in apple's case it's RAM with direct and performant access from the graphics card (unified memory).
Apple's marketing department would be happy for you to think otherwise, but the "secret sauce" of their high memory bandwidth is completely due to having more memory channels built into the SoC than a standard x86 CPU.
Of course MS overcharges on upgrades as well... because they can. Can it really have anything to do with cost, though? I wouldn't be surprised that the slotted RAM in laptops that support it and which Lenovo/Dell/etc. sell pretty cheap ir as or more expensive than the "Apple Magic Unified Max Marketing RAM" wholesale?
The cost to Apple for going from 16GB to 32GB is less than $40. So of course it's priced at $400.
I'd love that, seems like a fantastic deal. I assume it's DDR4, though? Which makes it an even more apples to oranges comparison.
However if we're being fair Dell seems to be charging about 50% less (and Lenovo 75% at least for some models) for soldered LPDDR5X upgrades than Apple and Lunar Lake seems to have comparable bandwidth
I've paid €200 for 128GB RAM in my PC. How much does Apple charge for 128GB of memory?