I never understood what is so special about "Mac memory"? Does Apple purposefully use non-spec timings in their standard Intel hardware or is it just a myth that one needs "Mac memory"? Seems ridiculous to have to pay what is equivalent to the "Apple tax" when buying non-Apple memory just because it's called "Mac memory". Many times in the past I have used off-the-shelf PC memory with no issues.
You don’t. I just set up my sister’s 2019 iMac yesterday and the first thing I did was add 16GB of Crucial RAM from Amazon (~$115 or so I think?) to whatever brand 8GB was shipped in there. Apple has used multiple brands in the past. You can get Hynix on Amazon, which Apple has used before. They’ve also used Samsung. I’ve bought random 3rd party brands for forever. Apple doesn’t manufacture RAM, and as far as DIMMs go, they source it from the same places we do, they just charge more for it.
I never understood what is so special about "Mac memory"? Does Apple purposefully use non-spec timings in their standard Intel hardware or is it just a myth that one needs "Mac memory"? Seems ridiculous to have to pay what is equivalent to the "Apple tax" when buying non-Apple memory just because it's called "Mac memory". Many times in the past I have used off-the-shelf PC memory with no issues.
You don’t. I just set up my sister’s 2019 iMac yesterday and the first thing I did was add 16GB of Crucial RAM from Amazon (~$115 or so I think?) to whatever brand 8GB was shipped in there. Apple has used multiple brands in the past. You can get Hynix on Amazon, which Apple has used before. They’ve also used Samsung. I’ve bought random 3rd party brands for forever. Apple doesn’t manufacture RAM, and as far as DIMMs go, they source it from the same places we do, they just charge more for it.
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https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MUQP2G/A/apple-memory-module-32gb-ddr4-2666mhz-so-dimms-2x16gb