3 ms·
Not to mention the e-waste and the inability for users to upgrade their own devices. I wonder what the performance cost was of having standard memory modules.
by djsumdog 6y ago
Not to mention the e-waste and the inability for users to upgrade their own devices.
I wonder what the performance cost was of having standard memory modules. I suspect it wasn't significant and this is more of a move to prevent upgrade and increase consumption and waste.
This is another reason I really don't ever want to own another Apple device. They want more and more control over the system and they keep moving to policies that reduce the ability of regular people to repair. The performance benefit doesn't really seem worth it if I can't run any other operating systems except macOS on it.
- gjsman-1000 6y agoEven if you could boot other OSs, you forget that there are no drivers written for them. Windows and Linux both would be unusable for potentially years after launch.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoIt would certainly help if Apple would release specs, or even just liberally-licensed XNU driver sources, but Linux has certainly gotten drivers without manufacturer help before.
- spijdar 6y agoStandard memory modules which were soldered onto the mainboard? Given how Macbooks have had soldered memory packages for ... 8 years now, I don't think moving the memory onto the SoC was to lock out upgrade potential. It doesn't make upgrading any less possible than "completely impossible", and probably (slightly) reduces the overall cost/complexity of the board, slightly reducing the material cost/impact. FWIW, in the future I imagine most processors will look like the M1, with additional memory available over a serial bus like OMI, used in POWER10. The "unified memory" will effectively serve as a giant cache for the CPU/GPU with slower peripheral memory used as a backing store.