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If it saves a step during assembly and makes the final product more reliable, it'd make business sense to do it. Very few people upgrade their machines after b

If it saves a step during assembly and makes the final product more reliable, it'd make business sense to do it. Very few people upgrade their machines after buying them, it's a small percentage of their user base that ever bothers to. The inconvenience there is worth the trade-off: Any Mini coming in for service is using factory memory, no questions, past this point. It's was always a nice to have, but it's not exactly a deal-breaker now, their prices aren't anywhere as crazy as server vendors can be. It just means you need to build-to-order a machine as they rarely stock the upgraded models.

Someone1234 11y ago
That's a really Apple-apologist answer. You're essentially justifying it because it makes "business sense [to them]." Of course making more money makes business sense to them, that was never in question.
- astrodust 11y ago
  Given Apple's target market is not hobbyists, that there is already an embarrassment of components you can buy and build your own system from, being able to add after-market memory was never a priority for them for this spot in the product line. Historically it wasn't advantageous to lock it down like that, people would typically upgrade their memory several times over the course of a system's lifecycle. If you look at what the original G3 case was like, where there was a latch on the side that lays the case open with easy access to memory and hard-drives, a design improved upon throughout the early Mac Pro models, you can see they were never intentionally user-hostile. In the interests of shrinking components and improving reliability, though, in an appliance-like product such as the Mac Mini, it makes sense. Notice that the new Mac Pro has extremely easy access to the memory slots. For most people, the memory that comes with their computer is the memory that computer dies with. This holds true for all kinds of systems, especially laptops where in most cases people don't even know or care how much memory they have. It was nice to be able to save a little by buying third party memory, but it's not the end of the world that you can't. The Mini can only go to 16GB, so the savings are minor. The Mac Pro can go to 128GB, so it's almost expected you can do that.

Someone1234 11y ago

That's a really Apple-apologist answer. You're essentially justifying it because it makes "business sense [to them]." Of course making more money makes business sense to them, that was never in question.

astrodust 11y ago
Given Apple's target market is not hobbyists, that there is already an embarrassment of components you can buy and build your own system from, being able to add after-market memory was never a priority for them for this spot in the product line. Historically it wasn't advantageous to lock it down like that, people would typically upgrade their memory several times over the course of a system's lifecycle. If you look at what the original G3 case was like, where there was a latch on the side that lays the case open with easy access to memory and hard-drives, a design improved upon throughout the early Mac Pro models, you can see they were never intentionally user-hostile. In the interests of shrinking components and improving reliability, though, in an appliance-like product such as the Mac Mini, it makes sense. Notice that the new Mac Pro has extremely easy access to the memory slots. For most people, the memory that comes with their computer is the memory that computer dies with. This holds true for all kinds of systems, especially laptops where in most cases people don't even know or care how much memory they have. It was nice to be able to save a little by buying third party memory, but it's not the end of the world that you can't. The Mini can only go to 16GB, so the savings are minor. The Mac Pro can go to 128GB, so it's almost expected you can do that.