tcthome wrote:
The studio & mini are small enough so that added cables & not being able to add your extra ram at a cheaper price is the only downside. Anyone know if the ram is upgradeable in the 24" imac?
Apple no longer makes ANY Macs with user-upgradeable RAM or storage. You can ADD internal storage devices to the new Mac Pro, but they must fit into a PCI slot. All storage upgrades to other Apple Silicon Macs must be external (Thunderbolt 3/4 or USB4 or any USB-C supported protocol).
Buy what you need, upfront!
There are many engineering reasons why they did this. Most of them have to do with SPEED. In the M1, M2, M3... family, memory is SHARED by the CPU cores, the GPU cores, the NPU (neural engine) cores, and all other sub-processors for audio, video, and imaging. That is why the RAM DIMMs are mounted right onto the system-on-a-chip die, directly adjacent to the processors.
The ARM-based architecture of the Apple Silicon family (including all other Apple processors in the iPhone, iPad, Watch, Apple TV, etc.) is based around Reduced Instruction Set Computing and is radically different from x86 architecture used in Intel chips. It uses two thirds less power for the same performance, generates far less heat, and does more work with fewer clock cycles. It's worth doing a little reading on it to understand its strengths.
One of Apple's long-standing issues with warranty claims and board failures had to do with users installing their own RAM. It was impossible for them to control what RAM users bought and installed, or how well the user understood static protection procedures, or whether the user would seat the memory modules correctly, or...
Soldering the RAM and storage modules to the SOC and motherboard solved a lot of reliability problems. And yes, it pissed off a lot of us...
When I bought my 2020 M1 MacBook Air, I configured it with 16GB Unified Memory and 1TB SSD Storage, knowing that I cannot upgrade it. It has proven to be a wise choice. My next Mac will probably come in 3-4 years. Based on the software I use now, I should be comfortable with what I have until then. But if I were buying today, I would get 24GB memory and 1TB storage on an M3 device.