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Comment by edblarney | Hacker News Reader

I just bought a new Macbook, and I can say that it's a great product.

Probably the best on the market.

The problem I had was cost - they are over-priced.

Yes, I've heard the argument that if you want 'x RAM with y CPU' etc it will 'cost just as much' - but this is just no longer true. The Macs with 16G memory are crazy expensive.

My Mac has 200-ish G hard-drive which is f-ing retardedly small. They should all have 1T. But if you want those upgrades you have to pay massively more.

I fundamentally believe the issue is simply price.

If you could get a sub-$2K macbook with 16G RAM, good CPU and lots of disk-space - this conversation would never be had.

I really do think Apple has the best boxes, but they are barely worth it, and just not worth it in many cases.

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> Yes, I've heard the argument that if you want 'x RAM with y CPU' etc it will 'cost just as much' - but this is just no longer true. The Macs with 16G memory are crazy expensive.

What boggles my mind is how many of them max out at 8G. I couldn't care less about CPU, and I'm flexible about storage, but 8G RAM is ridiculous. I'm currently using a couple of MS office apps and a web browser on my 2015 MBP and it's using 12G. I had a 2011 (or earlier, but I think it was the 2011) MBP that was happy to accept 16G. I'd gladly settle for a 12" MB for most work if I could just get >8G in one.

> but 8G RAM is ridiculous

8G RAM is not ridiculous. Statements like this just show how far out of touch people are. Many workloads benefit from more RAM. And for some it's a hard requirement (e.g. VMs), but web browsing and a bit of office is not one of them. This is why virtual memory/swap space is a thing - and with an SSD that's also not as horrible as it used to be.

Web browsing and a bit of office is offered as an example of the lightest imaginable load for someone actually using a computer. My daily needs are much heavier than that.

To offer a line of laptops with 8GB of RAM as the max in 2017 is ridiculous.

Ridiculous to sell them or ridiculous to buy them?

Well. I'm not buying, even though I like the form factor and would accept the other limitations of a 12" MB. And I do think it's ridiculous of Apple to not sell reasonable things I want, because right now it means I'm just sticking with an older laptop and waiting to see if maybe I will find something more to my liking from another brand after 15 years of buying Apple.

I have local "spin-up everything but pint-sized" dev environments for our developers to use and they far surpass 8gb even at the most minimal. I had my card out and was ready to buy the 2017 MBPr if it had 32gb to upgrade from my 2015 MBPr.

Some people do actually need a lot of ram. Specifically, I work on kubernetes and docker and it's a hard requirement. I'm severely limited in my work now and have to continue using aws+gke for full blown dev environments when if I had the proper amount of ram (what I've had on my desktop for years) I could have full blown testing on my laptop which is always plugged into monitors and a keyboard.

Sure, I'm %1 of the market but I will pay the money if it's available. Next year if I can't get an OSX laptop with 32gb of ram I'm going to wind up traveling down other roads.

Sure, which is why I mentioned VMs. But we're talking about the MacBook here, not even the MacBook Pro. Simply put the MB just isn't build for VM workloads. If the RAM weren't the bottleneck, the CPU or available storage space would be.

Besides, I don't buy it. I also use VMs. And the underlying host doesn't really matter, i.e. it doesn't really matter where the VM is run. So I don't quite understand why you'd spend $$$ on a beefy laptop instead of a nice laptop and a server. Maybe if your internet connection is really bad?

The host OS doesn't matter, the ram does greatly matter. The delay in development between having to spin up and down servers for testing on aws/gcp is MASSIVE vs. launching tests via minikube.

Evidently I missed that this was about the Macbook and not pro, I couldn't care less about the Macbook.

I'm on a fully loaded i7 2015 MBPr and need a new one stat, new as in more ram (limited to 16gb).

No I mean you can use the capex savings from "just" an average laptop to buy/build really beefy servers. In a professional setting this scales quite well. At home, you could also use that server as a NAS or gaming rig. That way, you can also upgrade the server separately from the laptop.

It's maybe not for everybody (e.g. photo/video editing), but pretty underrated IMO. Further advantages: RAID, easy to replace the laptop if you lose it or it gets damaged, server are easier to set up with fast, reliable connections (intra or internet) for pulling VM images. Disadvantages: More maintenance/admin?

> I'm currently using a couple of MS office apps and a web browser on my 2015 MBP and it's using 12G.

You can't take the RAM usage reported in Activity Monitor and extrapolate performance. If you were running the same apps on a recent Mac laptop with 8GB RAM, you'd see them taking 6GB of RAM and running just as fast as they do for you.

The only way to tell when you need more RAM is to load down a machine until it swaps too hard to keep up--then you know you need more RAM. And one of the things to keep in mind about new Mac laptops is that they have very fast SSD I/O, which also helps mitigate swap slowness.

I would really love to love Apple. But at this point, my eco conscience kicks in. Buying a laptop that cannot be upgraded in any way, be it RAM, SSD, or WIFI card... that's just too much. I have no idea how big the ecological footprint of a laptop is, but it has to be huge. Once my 2012 Macbook Air kicks the dust, I'll look at Lenovo laptops.

Apple does tout how recycleable it is though. And they have a recycling program. And they run a lot of their stuff (all?) from renewable energy. If you really cared about this from an environmental pov there is far more to it than is it upgradeable. The resale on the mac is much better and people are willing to buy them for way longer, too.

I'm seriously considering an x260... most of the components are replaceable/upgradable. Of course it's not as svelte as a MacBook, but you don't have to throw it away when you start hitting swap all the time...

I think the x270 is coming soon, you might want to wait a bit!

Macs generally maintain a lot of resale value, and are generally worth selling on even after 3 or 4 years— so, even if it doesn't meet your needs, it is unlikely to go into a landfill.

There are probably some people out there still making the argument that macs aren't more expensive, but I think most people have stopped, because the facts have changed. I'm having trouble finding it, but if I recall correctly, Joanna Stern was on John Gruber's podcast and flatly said the prices weren't comparable. Gruber either agreed or was silent.

As recently as 2-3 years ago there were Macs out there that cost less than any comparable PC. Ultra light laptops with retina screens were cheaper from Apple than Asus or Dell. Any machine with a 27" retina screen was $1000 cheaper from Apple. For five years before that, any 27" screen at all was much cheaper from Apple.

For many years, a $2000 MacBook Air was cheaper than its competition because there was no competition.

But today the PC vendors charge less than Apple once again. The universe is back in order and Apple's tech lead is confined to mobile phones.

Oddly, it's a self-inflicted wound. The totally useless expense of wedging a long, narrow Apple Watch into every keyboard is driving Apple's prices way, way up.

> The totally useless expense of wedging a long, narrow Apple Watch into every keyboard is driving Apple's prices way, way up.

Not only that. Also Apple's anorexia, making a useless gigantic trackpad, providing a DCI-P3 screen which is useless for most people, etc.

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