You might have wondered how to get more RAM on your mac. You can replace it yourself, but you need to be careful where you buy it from.
In case you haven’t yet realised, Apple Memory is different to normal PC RAM, so if you go to a cheap PC shop or ebay and buy some memory it probably won’t work in your Apple computer. Here’s a reliable place I have found to buy RAM that works well in your Macintosh.It’s not that you need ‘Apple’ memory, but you do need high quality RAM with certain specifications that are not obvious so you need to buy from someone who knows the differences. You can buy RAM that is the right speed (eg 667 MhZ DDR2 FB-DIMM etc) but it still won’t work.
If you can recommend a good reliable MAC RAM supplier leave the details in a comment below!
After much trial I have found a very reliable source of Mac RAM to be ‘Crucial’. (Crucial is the name of the shop!)
Check them out at Crucial.com They even have a little program here that you can download and it works out what computer you have and then pops you onto their webpage on the page showing the memory you need to buy!
Their prices are very good too.
The other place I’d suggest to buy RAM from is OWC. Last month I was upgraded my RAM and SSD in my new macbook pro and I ordered the RAM from OWC and the SSD from Crucial.
They are both were reliable brands.
[…] for your Macintosh after you purchase it, and I have previously written an article about this here. If you live in Australia there’s often some good pointers to mac bargains here. […]
OWC (Other World Computing) & Newegg are two other sources for DIMM online. Although, since Crucial is a consumer products division of a major manufacturer (Micron) I’ve went with them lately.
Purchased 2x8gb crucial…major faults started within days…repair by Apple techs took time, and by the time both had been replaced…beyond 45 days. “Too bad so sad” from crucial. Beyond 45 days all they will do is replace with the same – which I had apple replace. Pathetic customer service. Stay away from Crucial brand…pay the couple of extra $ and get real quality. I did not want a refund, rather a credit to get “something else”. Save yourself the hassle I have had…and yes, Apple installed Samsung.
Thanks John. Interesting, I’ve never had problems and have used them for years.
A quick search turned up this discussion at Apple. So maybe try OWC instead – they are the other ones I suggest, but some people here on this forum still swearing by crucial despite a ‘bad batch’ of RAM perhaps.
I’d be interested to hear if ANYONE else had a bad experience with Crucial??
I’ve used crucial for the past 5 years and touch wood never had a problem .
I have also experienced memory faults with Crucial So-DIMMs, two 4GB DDR3-1066 boards in my MacBook went south, causing mysterious system faults and disk errors, which I finally tracked down with the hardware check software, which reported faults at multiple registers.
(replacing the original Samsung DIMMs confirmed that the Crucial boards were the problem.)
I’ve been dealing with Crucial, without issues, for 15+ years.
I recently bought some memory for my Mac Mini and it is not very heat tolerant. I bought it in December and didn’t have a problem until things started warming up. It took me a while to figure out why my Mac was crashing multiple times per day. I finally took the Crucial memory out and put the original Apple memory back in (4GB – Ugh). Didn’t have any other issues.
I sent the 16GB modules back to Crucial and they replaced them about 2 weeks later, free of charge. No crashes at all with the original Apple memory. I put the new Crucial memory modules back in and it immediately started crashing again. I called and they worked me through the standard process before saying, “You’ll need to call level 2 support during business hours at this point..” I never did. I figure that, at best, they’ll just send me more modules that can’t take the heat of a Mini.
I’m just going to either try OWC or Apple. Apple will be more expensive (by quite a bit) but I very likely won’t have to deal with random crashes.
I also tried the crucial recently and it would not work. This was an *mb RAM upgrade for my mid year 2011 iMac. No joy to even get it to work with multiple attempts. I am also looking for a better solution. Thanks all. keep the ideas coming because I am still searching.
I bought 16gb of Crucial ram Jan 2015. 1 has just failed on me. It’s been 14 months, and a first time ram fail in my 15 years of Mac laptop use