the website i linked earlier said it can go up to 16gb ram, unless if they lied, confirm with shop before buying, easy job..
Ability to expand is later is useful, but I wouldn't pay a lot for it. In 30 years of owning laptops (first was a PowerBook 100), the vast majority of which were upgradable, I can't recall ever actually upgrading one more than a week or two after initial purchase (i.e. planned to buy cheap 3rd party RAM or disk from the outset). Usually by the time any pinch is felt there is something with vastly better CPU etc anyway.
my normal web browse few tabs and cad and eda can easily go up more than 8gb.
When OP says "A family member wanted some help" without further explanation, CAD and EDA is not the first thing that crosses my mind!
'quality' is a marketing stunt, fruit brand unit wont survive 1 floor level drop either...
What I know is people who buy HP and Asus and those kinds of laptops seldom use them for long. I have *never* had a fruit-brand laptop fail. Sadly, I sold the PowerBook 100 and Duo 230 when I upgraded them. But I still have a 1998 G3/266 and (battery aside) it works as well as the day I bought it. I also, sadly, don't have the 17" G4 as I sold it when I got a Core 2 Duo. However that still works. As does the 2011 quad core i7 17".
A couple of years ago my 80 year old father complained that some old photos (specifically a range of serial numbers, but they were from a specific overseas trip) had gone missing from his iPhoto database, and could I see if I could find them. He was indeed correct, they were not there on his Retina MBP. I pulled his previous 2011 17" i7 (same as mine, but he's retired his) off the shelf and looked. The same photos were missing there too. I pulled the Core 2 Duo off the shelf. Same deal. So I grabbed the 2000 500 MHz G3 "Pismo". Aha! The iPhoto database stopped at the exact photo serial number before the missing range. I think he upgraded computer after returning from the overseas trip and somehow simply lost or overwrote the memory card containing the missing photos and never actually had them on his computer, ever.
But, again, the point is that every single obsoleted and replaced machine booted up and worked perfectly. Even the 20 year old one.
If anything, the quality is perhaps excessive. Not only mechanically. They also seem to not have capacitors that go bad, or similar.