"you'll finally see that the new Mac Mini's RAM is soldered directly to the motherboard. It's no longer user-upgradeable, so make sure you order all the RAM you need when you buy the computer in the first place."
Instead of spending $1300 for marginal improvements, I bought a $125 256GB SSD and upped my 2012 Mini to a fusion drive.
It's frustrating to know that I am probably a minority customer, and thus Apple will probably never cater to me again. All the while I know that if only I had enough money, then I could be a happier Apple customer (I think the happiest Apple customers live in the middle-to-upper price tiers). If and when I get more successful, I'll consider Apple, but until then, I can see that Apple is no longer the best fit for me.
I know the benefits of RAM upgrades - I even had a Pentium MMX with 128mb in the old days - but I don't see it making sense nowadays for consumer hardware like the Mini.
This wouldn't have been possible if I was stuck with the 4 GB it shipped with. It probably cost a lot more to configure it with 8 GB in 2009 than it did to upgrade the modules last year.
What's the logic in making it upgradeable? Just buy it maxed out now. It's not like you would be able to upgrade it to 64GB in 5 years if it had a slot. Actually, it's likely you won't even find a RAM module with the right specs in 5 years, the industry is changing specs every 6 months.
But if they'd forced me to pay for all the upgrades up front, I'd probably still have bought the same spec (the 8GB RAM option was eye-wateringly expensive at the time, and the SSDs were comically pricey) - and then I'd have had to buy a whole new one after 2 years. Which probably wouldn't have had an SSD, because they were still expensive back then. So I'd probably be buying another one round about now, if not before, and Apple would have had 3 purchases out of me rather than just one.
Multiple people have posted in this thread they were fine with 1-2 GB in 2009, and are happy to upgrade to 4-8gb today, but wouldn't have had the money or even the need for 4-8gb 5 years ago.
And the Mac Mini just removed that option, one of the cool things about PCs that we'd all love to see in laptops and phones: modular hardware we can switch out, increasing the lifespan of hardware, reducing costs and giving users autonomy over their own machines.
Saying soldering RAM is fine because you can just max out your ram when you don't need it, paying a high price to do so, because you will need it a few years later, instead of simply buying some a few years later for much less, just sucks.
I mean I agree with your point completely in that it's not the end of the world. And I agree that a lot of people who want to upgrade after 5 years probably will just want a new machine. But the soldering of parts still sucks, and even if it's got a small impact, it goes against some of the principles I think we should be cautious with to throw out. Don't want to get into a big slippery slope argument here but for a manufacturer to act as if soldering parts is imperative and unavoidable to me has a high burden of proof. You need to make a case for it. In phones I see that imperative mostly. In a Mac Mini? Not so much.
Apple is probably well aware they were losing money on premiums like upgrades and decided to lock people out of that option. I'm sure the loss of sales is probably offset by the increase in profit from forcing people to upgrade via the factory or not at all.
In short I believe this is a conscious decision on Apple's part to maximize profits.
Or getting power users to buy the non-base models. I have a 2012 Mac Mini base model, and upgraded it to 16 GB RAM and a 256GB SSD for little cost. It should go without saying that I'll keep it for a while and probably double the SSD in some point in the future.
B) Apple wants to capture the cost of upgrading their hardware in the future.
I think "capture" is the key word. They're not trying to create wealth for their users with this action; they're trying to capture it for their company and its shareholders.
There is always an excuse. In reality, they have changed their model to 'upgrades only at purchase'. Unfortunately, their machines are so good that we all accept this...
Even if those are quite rare, support incidents can be expensive, so it could be a dollar or two average per mini being saved.
Sure, I've had RAM break, but that was factory installed RAM that was several years old. This is definitely anecdata but it would be interesting to know how much damage static really does these days. If you're going out of your way to pet your cat prior to installing your RAM chips on a glass floor or something like that then you're probably asking for it. But regular precautions (place RAM container on the case before opening package, hold the case while inserting the RAM) seem to be more than enough. On chip ESD protection has come a long way since the 80's.
http://www.amazon.com/On-Chip-Protection-Integrated-Circuits...
They would like people to go buy a higher end model. The profit on RAM is probably pretty good given performance boost vs the cost of RAM. It is an opportunit they would be silly to waste.
I ended getting a PC and throwing OS X on it. It's a pain in the ass when things break but it works for me. I would love a more upgrade-friendly Mini with desktop and not laptop hardware, even if it has to be bigger.