PSA: You Won’t Be Able To Upgrade The New Mac Mini’s RAM Yourself

If you’ve ever owned a Mac Mini, there’s something you should probably know about the recently-announced latest generation: the RAM? It’s soldered to the board now. In other words, you won’t be able to upgrade it yourself.

Past generations of Mac Minis allowed the user to crack open the case and install RAM they’d sourced themselves (generally at a price quite a bit cheaper than what Apple offered it for).

Word of the change comes from Brian Stucki, who runs a Mac Mini hosting farm in Las Vegas. He also notes that the latest generation Mac Mini now has tamper proof screws, making things that are user serviceable that much more difficult to get to:

Confirmed: RAM in the new Mac mini is not user accessible. Hard drive can be replaced/upgraded, though not keeping warranty. — Brian Stucki (@brianstucki) October 17, 2014

If people didn’t like to hear the confirmation of soldered RAM, wait until they see the foot of the Mac mini with tamper-proof screws. — Brian Stucki (@brianstucki) October 18, 2014

An Apple support page found here seems to confirm the soldered-on RAM:

The memory for Mac mini (Late 2014) computers isn’t user accessible and is integrated into the main logic board. You can configure your computer’s memory at the time of purchase.

Compare that to the same page for the 2012 Mac Mini, which tells you exactly what sort of RAM to buy.