Late 2008 Unibody MacBook Pro owners - RAM discussion

[UMHurricanes34]

I know a lot of us early adopters of the redesigned 15" notebooks have been wondering why we can't use the same 8GB of RAM that the newer revisions can. I'll be relying solely on my notebook for a year to complete all of my work, so I'll be running much more RAM intensive apps more often than usual and 4GB just isn't always enough. There have been successful tests of 6GB of working RAM, but there's a roadblock in the way of us being able to have 8GB of happiness. What gives? It's a firmware problem that could be easily resolved by Apple, are they really trying to force an upgrade?

Thoughts on the technical restriction to this? The new revisions use the same motherboards with exception of the removal of the Expresscard, so why aren't we able to use 8GB?

Let's discuss.

 

[Althandir]

I agree. This is very annoying. Is it possible the firmware blocking this will be re-written in Snow Leopard? I'm hoping so as I'm finding that there are times where more ram would be a real god send, but not a godsend enough to justify 2k on a new notebook! I don't know anything about the technical side of this. Is there anything actually blocking an installation of two 4GB chips? We know it must accept 4GB ram in one slot as it was one 4gb and one 2gb that made up the 6gb accepted in previous tests...

 

[Beaverfish]

I might be wrong, but i thought the only reason we couldnt use more than 4 GB or ram was because of limitations in OS X leopard. I believe that once snow leopard is released we can use upto something crazy like 320 GB of ram???


Some please tell me i can use more than 4gb in my Macbook Pro ?-

 

[delude]

I'm annoyed too. I had read somewhere about a difference in hardware between the 2.4ghz model, and all the others above, as our model seems to have an older component

 

[clyde2801]

It honestly would not surprise me either way.

 

[Althandir]

i have spoken with someone from Apple on this and she did say that late 2008 MBPs can only take up to 4GB of RAM (as is said in the manual). However, we do already know the laptop can take 6GB no trouble. Does anyone have any experience of how reliable these Apple Store people are?

 

[delude]

i have spoken with someone from Apple on this and she did say that late 2008 MBPs can only take up to 4GB of RAM (as is said in the manual). However, we do already know the laptop can take 6GB no trouble. Does anyone have any experience of how reliable these Apple Store people are?

Most of them don't know and only say what they are told, but even if they did they can only tell you what is official.