For four years now I had been living in belief, that my notebook can not address more than 4GB of RAM, due to the used chipset and that only one of the later Macbook Pro models could be upgraded to 8GB.
Due to the high RAM prices, this was a theoretical issue at the time when I bought the laptop in November 2008 (it was the 27.11.2o08, I remember, because it was a frustrating day for me and buying this laptop was meant to be the start of my career as a freelancer and company founder). So I opted for 2GB and later put in 4GB.
Lately, with Mountain Lion as the operating system on computer, Xcode 4.5 was getting very memory consuming. I had days, when debugging code meant to re-start Xcode every 2 hours, to prevent Xcode from eating up 3.5 GigB of my 4Gig ram, since once it does so, the system is painfully slow until you stop Xcode.
When lately one of the laptop fans got stuck, I opened the laptop case, gave him a little “go” and all was fine again. Just to check for the prices of repair fans, I visited the respective Macbook/Pro Website at ifixit.com. There I read, that this notebook was OK to take 8GB of RAM. I double checked, with apple’s site. There it stood: 4GB. Who to believe?
After some time, it was clear, that this new, that the machine can indeed take 8GB of RAM was correct if you had a newer operating system and one of the newer Bios versions. Now the fan was irrelevant. YES. I MUST HAVE IT! I MUST HAVE 8GB!
But wait! Where are the prices today? A quick check revealed: Some charge $99 for 8GB, some 33€ plus shipping! I finally paid something in between. And since that day, I have a totally new machine. Quick, powerful, fun to work with, totally silent, but: 4 Years old (soon).
Some thoughts at the end:
I still can remember checking the prices for 16kbit and 64kbit RAMS and buying my own 64kbit RAM chips. Eight of them I needed – in order to have RAM for the self-designed Z80 Computer with a huge 64 Kilobyte of RAM I was working on (and never finished, because soon after starting the project I got my hands on real Unix computers at the TU Berlin).