In the past six years, I’ve upgraded its RAM from 8GB to 16GB and so far it handles macOS 11.3 Big Sur with aplomb. In 2015 (after nine years with my iMac), I pulled the trigger and purchased the 27-inch iMac 5K. (For what it’s worth, the machine is still operational, albeit on an outdated version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard). It was an epic machine that in my opinion blew all Windows desktops out of the water.

There was a lot more stuff that should have worked that just didn’t though.My first iMac purchase was back in 2006 when Apple announced the first Intel-based Mac. There have been parts that Apple didn’t use that were merely so similar they worked anyway. They might try that next, perhaps, but if it worked it would be dumb luck. If they wanted to demo something that would probably work they’d have to imitate the systems Apple used. Might it would be something that would “just get through”? Perhaps. Well no, but Apple wouldn’t help any either, and if it’s not something they use they generally don’t allow it. You can go look at spec sheets of old model Xeons and they will specify a maximum amount of ram supported, thing is this is based on the current point in time maximum DIMM capacity, the CPUs support more ram than that and I have installed more than the maximum on the spec sheet with newer larger DIMMs that did not exist before.įor example an E5-2690v1 is not limited to 384GB ram, you can install 768GB using 64GB modules just fine. You don't go designing CPUs and SoC's and put limitations like this in place, nobody does that without inviting pain and suffering on themselves. Since you can only purchase M1 hardware from Apple and it comes packaged on a single BGA package that very few people could even possible contemplate trying to alter the hardware of there is actually no requirement to put any limitations in place.įuture device refreshes that may still use the same M1 SoC might have a 32GB option, and while that will likely also come with a microcode update it's unlikely one that would allow more than 16GB ram. Now there might be a microcode limitation in place but I also doubt that, the reason is pretty obvious, there is no need to. I also highly doubt there is any limitation in the OS specifically for M1 hardware to only allow 16GB ram.

Not really no, I highly doubt there is a hardware limitation in place on the IMC to restrict it to being only able to address 16GB ram, Apple would never do this. If Apple did a 32 VG version one might be possible but since they haven’t it isn’t.

Mac pro 2007 upgradable