10-17-2014, 04:34 PM
decay wrote:
I only see this serving Apple, not its providers (us) or customers.
A significantly lower failure rate would be serving the customer.
I had a school that had over 1000 early unibody laptops that transitioned to MacBook Airs. Their failure rate with the Airs is less than 40 per year including accidental damage. They haven't had any identifiable ram issues with the Air. They had well over 2000 repairs on the old machines, some of them were ram related. Between bad sticks, or bad slots I would guess 100 repairs total over the 3 years. I've followed up with other schools and all of them have encountered similar decreases in failure rates with the more integrated models. The blade SSDs and the soldered ram are far more reliable than tradition drives and sticks.
With the way that Macs hold their resale value it isn't a big deal to sell the machine in 2 or 3 years if you need more ram. There are always going to be people who just need a machine for light use that are fine with a 4GB machine. My home machine is a MacBook Air with 4GB of ram. Runs 10.10 great, only reason I might want more ram is if I was running a VM. Otherwise, for general laptop use, 4GB is plenty.