What’s the first thing you do after buying a new computer? Apart from a good few fingers of scotch to dull the pain of your dwindling bank account? For me, the first online purchase with a new Mac is RAM, and after picking up a shiny new unabomber MacBook I made the traditional trip to Crucial.com, memory suppliers to the smart and beautiful.
And I mean traditional. One of the "features" of the Mac is that the memory comes in matched pairs. This means that it takes up both slots, and therefore bumping up from 2GB to 4GB means buying a pair of 2GB sticks and throwing out the old ones. I have a box somewhere around here full of useless RAM. Can’t use it, can’t sell it. Maybe I’ll make a nerd-necklace for the Lady.
The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros are designed to be easy to open and operate upon. Pop open the battery hatch and you can simply tug the hard drive out — a huge improvement on the old MacBook Pro — changing a drive on that thing was like playing a particularly tricky game of Operation.
But oddly, adding more RAM is actually harder on the new MacBook than on the old white plastic one. Not much harder, but certainly a lot scarier. Read on to find out why. Warning: Lots of pictures
In the old MacBook, the RAM slots were reached through a hatch in the battery compartment. You undid a few captive screws and pulled out the L-shaped cover. Once there, you flipped a couple of levers and out popped the RAM, ready to be replaced. Total time taken, five minutes. Experience level needed — n00b.
With the new aluminum MacBooks, there is a little more work. First, flip the little lever to remove the battery cover:
The battery pulls out by the little plastic tab, just like the hard drive. Go ahead and remove the battery. Then the work begins. You’ll need a small Philips screwdriver to take out a total of eight screws, three long and five short. Check the data sheet and diagram and print it before shutting down the computer. Or just look in the instruction manual that came with the Mac. Or, failing both of these, do what I did and pull it up on another device:
And we’re in! See what I said about being scary? The machine is barely two days old and already it’s opened up on the slab. I don’t have a problem with this (I once took a hot air gun to the inside of an iBook to reflow solder on a dry joint) but for the average user this is probably a little too much. But then, I guess that’s what the Genius Bar is for.
Next up, the RAM. I always use Crucial. The prices are good, the online selector means I always buy the right sticks and the stuff turns up fast. This order was placed on Wednesday afternoon and arrived this morning, and that’s slower than usual.
I bought 2x2GB of DDR3 memory, running at 1067 MHz, to give me a total of 4GB, the maximum allowed in the MacBook. The price was OK, at €56 (about $70) plus taxes and shipping. All in, €73.07 ($92.05). Certainly not the least I have paid, but then Apple always wants us to put the good stuff in our machines. Actually, buying the extra memory from Apple would cost $150, double the price, and much less fun.
Here it is, freed from its anti-static bag. The new stuff is at the top, with twice as many chips. I guess that’s better.
The instructions for memory removal say to flip a lever, but in my Mac you just pull a plastic retainer to the side and the memory springs up.
Then you take out the second one and pop in the new sticks. Pretty simple, and almost no pressure required. Then the back plate goes back on. Make sure you don’t let the tiny screws stick to your arm and then drop onto a cowhide rug like the one in this room. Just saying, is all. Before it goes back on, here’s a quick look at the bottom plate:
It’s every bit as solid as the rest of the machine. After screwing the plate back in place and replacing the battery and hatch cover, its time to see if we broke anything. Hopefully it will go well, as I pulled of some rather important stickers from one of the sticks:
Oops. Let’s switch it on and see:
It lives! Fantastic. Now to see if it’s working properly. Here’s a before and after of the About This Mac panel.
All working fine, although the Startup Disk section seems to have gone missing. The disk is still there – I saw it – so I’m not too worried. Total time, including going to buy a new set of tiny screwdrivers and digging the lost screws out of the rug, was around 20 minutes. You could do it quicker by not taking so many photographs.
Does it feel faster? Yes. Lightroom, where I processed the images you see here, screams along now. Flipping between library and develop modules, for instance, feels faster than my old MacBook Pro. €70 well spent, I’d say.
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