I still use a 2012 macbook, which was the last one where Apple graciously let you replace most of the parts including the RAM sticks yourself before soldering them to the logic board. According to official documentation this computer could have only been ordered with 2x2gb sticks, can only support an upgrade up to 2x4gb sticks, but here I am running 2x8gb sticks without having to do any fiddling, just plug and play. Unlike OP though, windows 10 over bootcamp is luckily able to pick up the 16gb just fine somehow.
I do wonder if that Mac Mini from 2011 I have but haven't used in a long time also secretly supports 16 GB. I upgraded it to 8 GB ages ago and the docs said that's as far as it goes.
Funny timing: I just upgraded a 2011 Mac Mini from 4GB to 16GB yesterday, and it works just fine. After searching around, I found a site (can't remember the name) where they specifically call out that the actual amount of RAM that various Macs support, regardless of what Apple's official specs say.
(Had to crack it open because the old spinning-rust hard drive was starting to go bad, so I replaced it with an SSD, and figured I should upgrade the RAM while I had it open. I have Linux installed on it, and it's a nice media server box, running Jellyfin and a few other things. Only downside is that its support for HW video decode/encode is kinda limited -- no h265 -- due to its age.)
I use my 2011 Mac Mini with 16GB. Been running it that way nearly since the day I bought it. It’s on its 3rd HD, a 120GB SSD. Wikipedia article mentioned it would work with 16GB so I upgraded it as soon as I could.
Same here! I'm bummed that Catalina, the last OS update to officially run on it, probably will hit EOL in 2022. I'll likely begrudgingly replace it, rather than look into workarounds to install newer versions, in an unsupported and slow way.
You could install big sur using some patch if you don't mind the built in wifi card stopped working, but I heard you can swap the wifi card from later model and big sur would recognize it.
Had one of those notebooks, and did the same thing. it was my second or third macbook, and I was used to buying the lesser spec'd machine and then beefing it up with more memory and a better HD or SSD
