Snippet: New iMac Has Soldered Memory ☇

OWC takes apart the new low-end iMac that was introduced Wednesday:

Now that we’ve had time to teardown the new iMac, unlike the $1,299 iMac, we found this iMac has the memory soldered to the motherboard removing any possibility of adding additional memory. Users will be permanently locked in to the 8GB of memory, as there is no Apple factory upgrade option.

Normally, I’d be crying foul, but 8GB is a pretty generous amount of RAM on a Mac (4GB tends to handle everyday tasks quite well and will likely for awhile). This probably cuts costs, simplifies the build process, and it’s not like 21.5″ iMacs have really had easy-to-upgrade RAM since 2012. I’m more concerned about a likely-failure-prone hard drive in those machines.