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Topic: Specs vs. Reality (Read 2092 times)

Specs vs. Reality

As noted elsewhere, there's plenty of hardware where specifications on the box don't agree with actual hardware capabilities. Apple is a serial offender here - many Power Macs for example, can take much more memory than Apple says they do. In this case it's understandable, assuming they only want to guarantee what they could test, but designed the hardware to take whatever the standard allows ( example - the iBook G4 has a single SO-DIMM slot, supposedly takes up to 512MB DDR modules. I stuck a 1GB one into mine, just works. )
Slightly more sneaky ( but still Apple ) - the PowerBook 3400 has two PCMCIA slots which are keyed for 16bit cards. The hardware behind it is a CardBus bridge though, and if you can get the card into the slot ( many newer CardBus cards, if you can still find them, don't bother with the keying ) and actually set up the CardBus part ( which the firmware won't, but for example NetBSD will ) then these cards will work. Very useful for adding USB ports to something that old.
A more egregious example - Gdium. The overpriced MIPS-based netbook that hardly anybody wanted to buy. Comes with 512MB RAM, supposedly not user upgradeable. In reality it's a bog standard 512MB DDR2 SO-DIMM, I stuck a 2GB one into mine and guess what, it works. The memory controller is part of the CPU, so the netbook design should have zero influence on what memory modules work.
I'm sure there's plenty more.

Re: Specs vs. Reality

Reply #1
Apple is a serial offender here - many Power Macs for example, can take much more memory than Apple says they do.
It's obvious. Apple wants you to buy their newest product. ;)

Re: Specs vs. Reality

Reply #2
Another big one these days is that phones tend to claim they only support (µ)SD cards up to a certain size. Now there are actual concerns like whether it's SDHC or SDXC (basically almost anything post-2010 should be SDXC) but even so most list a maximum of 32GB. It's not completely deceptive; I think Windows only allows making FAT partitions up to that size, so on the flipside you'd have a real point if you said that most consumers wouldn't be able to use more than 32GB.

Re: Specs vs. Reality

Reply #3
Good news, then. Perhaps I'll be able to upgrade my notebook's RAM if needed, against its spec that says I cannot upgrade more.