Hacker News Reader

Comment by UmbertoNoEco | Hacker News Reader

400 USD for a 16GB upgrade is daylight street robbery. The power of brands.

Actually, when you consider how many banks of memory it would take to obtain 100GB/s, it's a bargain. Desktop DDR5-4800 tops out at 38.4 GB/s, so you would need three, desktop DDR5 memory sticks to get that - but it would not even matter because a 12th Gen desktop Intel Core i9 can't handle more than 75GB/s at once. Now, DDR5 is falling in price, but low-power laptop grade DDR5 is still quite a specialized part, let alone with such bandwidth potential.

In a nutshell, not all RAM is created equal.

Apple charges $400 for 32 GB when you upgrade the memory in computers with M1 Max. That used to be a decent price, at least before DDR5 prices started falling. The M2 memory upgrade is twice as expensive.

Edit: 16 -> 32 GB with M1 Pro is $400. 32 -> 64 GB with M1 Max is also $400. 64 -> 128 GB with M1 Ultra is $800. Memory upgrades for the high-end Macs are surprisingly cost-effective.

This is not true. The M1 Max machines start with 16GB of RAM, upgradable to 32GB, so you are adding 16GB more for $400. The new M2 machine starts with 8GB of RAM, upgradable to 24GB for $400. They are both adding 16GB for $400 or 8GB for $200 if you check, so the cost of upgrades is exactly the same.

For slow-ass DIMM memory, sure. But we're talking on-die integrated memory that's leagues ahead of any PC memory in performance.

Its on package not die

It's actually in-package, not on-die. It's still insanely fast, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com