So there's a new Mini, but I didn't see any mention about...

[rgG]

C(-)ris wrote:
[quote=decay]
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.
I am not happy that Apple is making it so that you can't add RAM later, but let me tell you, after trouble shooting a MBP with an intermittent bad RAM slot, it was a nightmare. With two slots and all the permutations of which slot is it, or which stick is it, it was awful. Also the fact that it would sometimes work and not others, made it lots of fun for everyone trying to figure out what was wrong. It seemed to be that the RAM would just work its way loose, after a certain period, so I guess the slot was just slightly out of spec, or something. Fix was to get one bigger stick of RAM and only use the good slot, after we figured out which slot it was.

If each new OS didn't seem to require more RAM, then picking your RAM needs at the outset would be a lot easier. It does seem that the last couple of OS updates having needed any more RAM to work well, but maybe I am wrong about that. If Apple could address that issue, then making your RAM decision at purchase would be a lot easier.