But isn't this the most important thing?
Yes this RAM is expensive... but it's just a few hundred dollars for something I use every day for all my income and most of my hobbies and the alternative is something hobbled.
Whether the polish is worth the significant premium is up to each individual buyer.
Is the difference between a Toyota and a Mercedes one of being "hobbled"?
Also, I only recommend that people TRY it, not make the jump.
A single stick of ddr3 is $20-30.
Apple is charging $200 for that same stick of RAM.
It likely costs them $10 or less since they buy in bulk.
Their UI isn't work paying them a 10x margin. That's fucking ridiculous.
All I care about is is it worth it to pay $200 more for a MacBook with 16 GB rather than 8 GB. Yes it is to me, because I can get that money back and more from the value it gives me.
I don't care how much you can buy the RAM for elsewhere, because what can I do with that? It's not of any use to me when it's not inside a MacBook, is it? It's irrelevant.
Right, forgot this is Apple we're talking about
I'd be fine with just an "Apple tax" added on top of the bill. The average consumer might not have the same reaction, so maybe this is the only way of adding the tax.
I can't understand this point of view - why do you care how the person you're buying from is breaking down their charges?
If you're a rational person all that should matter to you is are you getting the value that you want from the transaction. If you are and you can't get better value elsewhere then go for it. How the price came to be determined is completely irrelevant. Either it works for you or it doesn't.
Besides, why shouldn’t they charge for a RAM upgrade? It costs them money to add more (RAM chips aren’t cheap), so they pass that cost on to the customer with a markup that the customer is willing to pay.
For my money maker I need it to work reliably 100% of the time. I don’t want to ever tinker with drivers. I just want it to work in a polished way.
Windows is pure garbage and the only time I ever touch it is in a VM running on my MacBook, and even then I strictly require it to be Enterprise version so that I never have to deal with the adware bloat or forced updates. On regular Windows 10, you can disable updates, but never permanently. It always comes back like a specter.
My MacBook has never forced me to restart or install an update. The UI for updates can get a little annoying, but there are Terminal tricks to disable it, and I still have choice.
The shell library is not as good on Windows. I cannot muster the motivation to learn PowerShell.
I never feel safe installing anything on Windows. What I mean is I never understand what is actually changing on my computer if something installs on Windows. On a MacBook, I can drag and drop to Applications. If I need to uninstall it, I delete it. It's that simple. For anything that forces me to install via pkg file, I am happy that most of the time, homebrew cask has a formula for it, so uninstallation is handled for me cleanly.
The only good thing I can think of for Windows is that GUI automation is much better due to AutoHotKey. MacOS GUI automation is basically deprecated at this point (AppleScript) on most apps, so you are forced to find third-party options.
AirDrop between my iPad Pro and MacBook is so fast, it allows me to copy my iPad's handwritten notes into a pdf in an instant.
One good thing I can say for Windows is backwards compatibility for compiled apps. Most open source projects I see with a MacOS binary have a high chance of not working relative to Windows. On Windows, if I see a compiled binary, I already know it will probably work.
The OS is what keeps me to my MacBook, and if no other competitor can produce the equivalent experience, I can't move away.
Look at all the software engineers in the Bay Area, and you will see waves upon waves of MacBooks. This "standardization" of hardware has also somewhat reduced the instances of coworkers using the excuse of "Oh it works on my computer, must be a hardware issue." If both of us are using MacBooks, I know it's a software issue, and so it's something we can probably figure out and fix.
I'm desperate to move away from the dark, abuse direction Apple is taking macOS, and I love the software so-much-so that I made a desktop Hackintosh, but getting it to run was more work than getting hardware to work on Linux (still was worth it). I only wonder when the final time will come where Hackintosh doesn't work and my 2015 MacBook Pro stops working. 2015 MBP was the last year for selling MBPs with removable storage. 2015 MBP will be remembered as the best laptop for its replaceable SSD and laptop keyboard.
Didn't use Mac for some time. Is CMD+K behavior different in some way?
Yes... pure garbage. Very objective vision.
> On a MacBook, I can drag and drop to Applications. If I need to uninstall it, I delete it. It's that simple.
This is a lie. Applications in macOS save files outside of Applications, sometime you don't know where, and you need other apps if you want to completely delete the data. There are also installers for macOS and portable apps for Windows (where you put it where you want, and to uninstall it just delete it). There are also package managers like homebrew for windows (chocolatey for example) but all of these are not made or endorsed by Apple or Microsoft.
> AirDrop between my iPad Pro and MacBook is so fast
It's fast when it works and many many time it doesn't at first, you need to fiddle around with it. And if any excuse is somethin like "it works with newer machines" they're not valid.
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With this, I don't want to convince you to switch, but I think Windows can be valid for many people that are not considering it right now, as I wasn't. And it is only getting better, whereas you can't really say the same for macOS.
I just wanted to explain to anyone who was wondering why people would be willing to pay $200 for more RAM unnecessarily. It is be because we are trapped in macOS and there is no good alternative (again, an opinion, not objective). Many people have commented confusion on why we subject ourselves to pricing like this.
Windows UI and Linux Subsystem is a whole other set of things which I disagree with, but I don't want to get into it. All I want to say is that I grew up with Windows, I used it for decades, and it took leaving it for me to realize how much more fun software development could be without Windows.
For gaming purposes, I can be found using Windows, no problem. Either way, this is a very subjective discussion that has been beaten to death by different sides over the decades, so we should temper our expectations on whatever productive discussions can be had over such topics, and the best I can say is that I am happy that we, as users, ultimately have freedom to choose, rather than be forced into a monopoly.
I personally think Linux (smartphone, desktop, laptop) has the biggest delta and promise as of recent, so we should all cross our fingers and hope for the best for an open-source, generally usable OS for everyone.
I try to use Scoop whenever I can exactly for this reason: I want to use portable apps every time it's possible, they're just cleaner