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Apple SOLDERS memory into new 'budget' iMac

No home upgrades for you, tight-fisted fanbois

Apple has soldered the memory into its new cheap-ish iMac in an apparent bid to make sure fanbois have no chance of souping up their new not-so-bargain-basement all-in-one computer, according to a teardown team.

The fruity firm has always been interested in making sure the world's landfill sites are packed with out-of-date Macs, and apparently fixing memory to the mobo in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops ensures they are more or less impossible to upgrade.

Upgrade specialists Other World Computing (OWC) tore down the new £899 iMac, which offers a perfect storm of what the reviewers seemed to feel was poor performance twinned with high price. With a puny 1.4GHz dual core Intel Core i5 processor, it offers 8GB of LPDDR3 memory.

OWC found that the memory was soldered into place, stymieing anyone who wanted to give it an extra speed bump. However, the more expensive models still allowed fanbois to upgrade the RAM.

"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."

To paraphrase the great Roy Walker, the price of the new iMac is good, but it's not quite right. It sacrifices power at the altar of affordability, but kills both in the process.

Our advice? Spend a little bit extra ... or a lot less. ®

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