[douglas.martin]

What brand of RAM does Apple ship with the PowerBooks and the iMacs? Is there any advantage in terms of reliability or value retention by using factory installed 9or separately purchased) o.e. Apple RAM over the "premium" aftermarket stuff? I'm about to spring for one or the either of these machines and qualify for the educational store discount, bringing the cost of a BTO with upgraded RAM within a couple hundred bucks of the current Apple retailer offers with free aftermarket RAM. Any insight here greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[ibook_steve]

Apple always charges too much for memory. You should always get the lowest memory configuration available and find a better deal for extra memory elsewhere. Apple uses DIMMs and chips directly from Samsung, Micron, Hynix, and occasionally Infineon, stuff you can't buy directly from them. But aftermarket RAM is usually fine and made from components from these vendors. I always check DealRAM: http://www.dealram.com.

Steve