Apple ships world’s most expensive RAM

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

If you think the £1,950 price tag on the new 17in MacBook Pro is a touch on the steep side in the credit-crunched netbook era, take a look at how much it costs to upgrade the laptop’s RAM.

According to the Apple website, an upgrade from 4GB to 8GB of RAM will cost no less than £839.99. That’s over £200 a gigabyte (my mother always said the A-Level maths would come in handy).

For that money you could buy five of the original Eee PC 701s from Technoworld.com and still have over £50 to spare. 

What’s more, Crucial is selling a near identical 2 x 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 kit for £469 – about £370 less than Apple. That’s quite some mark-up, even by Apple’s standards. 

(Thanks to PC Pro forum member big_D for the tip off).

Technological progress: lost on the masses

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

I loaded up Steam for the first time in a while last night and was promptly asked to participate in Valve’s ongoing hardware survey. I’ve done this before, and the results are always fascinating, so I jumped right in. A few clicks later, and a quick scan of my cobbled-together PC, and I got to see the breakdown of nearly 1.8million gamers’ systems – with some surprises.

Just 41% of polled users have made the much-needed step to a dual or quad-core processor – the norm in pretty much all new PC systems sold today – and 38% have shelled out on 2GB or more of RAM. Assuming a correllation between the two, that leaves a huge proportion of PC players who are still trundling along on 1GB of RAM or less and a single-core CPU.

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