Dell bumps Apple to ship world’s most expensive RAM

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Dell has knocked Apple off one pedestal this week. Last year, we highlighted how an upgrade from 4GB RAM to 8GB RAM on the 17in MacBook Pro would cost a whopping £839 — over £200 a gigabyte.

Dell’s Mobile Precision M6500 manages to top that.

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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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