Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrlk | Hacker News Reader

Base 14" M3 MBP comes with 8 GB RAM at $1599 USD. That's pretty stingy.

That's what happens when there's no competition. Come up with an equivalent product with more RAM at the same price and I'll buy it.

Sadly (or perhaps gladly, depending on your perspective), there just is no equivalent to a macbook for many people.

Yup, it seems that the "Apple tax" has gone up quite a bit since Apple shifted toward soldered RAM and storage for their products. You get excellent Apple Silicon chips with their performance and energy efficiency, as well as the most polished desktop OS (macOS), but it comes at a steep price, especially at non-base configurations. There seems to be plenty of deals for base-config Macs at places like Amazon and Costco, but if you want 24GB or 32GB of RAM, it seems that no deals can be found; you must pay full price for a custom configuration from Apple.

I was a long-time Mac user. I remember when my 2006 MacBook cost less than comparable PC laptops. My last Mac purchase was a refurbished 2013 Mac Pro I purchased from Apple in 2017; since 2021 I've switched to PCs. While I love the configuration choices and expandability of PCs, the operating system situation leaves much to be desired, in my opinion. The shenanigans Microsoft continues to pull with Windows as well as the Sisyphean development cycle of the Linux desktop ecosystem (systemd, Wayland, etc.) makes me peek at Apple whenever there's an announcement, but the steep prices for a Mac configuration that fits my needs are too much for me, and so I remain a PC user.

Definitely the main thing preventing me from moving on from Mac is how bad Windows and Linux is.

Around 6 months ago I actually bought a beefy desktop PC to play around with, dual booting both Windows and Linux and they were just terrible. The default keyboard shortcuts on Windows are a joke (not to mention, the lack of an additional modifier key which is present with mac, which makes shortcuts more difficult than it needs to be).

Linux on the other hand, was so limited. People then argue that Linux is customizable, but I spent forever trying to customise it and half the time, the modifications literally don't work at all. I assume because there are so many distros and the eco-system is so fragmented that something is almost guaranteed to break.

What is superior about Mac shortcuts? They seem to be just as inconvenient and requiring a rebind on both systems (though given how relatively easy it is for the basics strange it's a barrier to switching)

Having an additional dedicated modifier key is night and day in terms of creating shortcuts.

I don't see how they're equivalent. F2 is vastly inferior to pressing the enter key to renaming a file. Alt + F4 to close a window as opposed to cmd + w.

Can you name shortcuts that are more convenient on Windows than on Mac?

> Can you name shortcuts that are more convenient on Windows than on Mac?

That wasn't my argument

> They seem to be just as inconvenient and requiring a rebind on both systems

But they exist: Screenshot with PrtScn (or even Windows key + Shift + S) is better than the 3/4 Mac ones

> F2 is vastly inferior to pressing the enter key to renaming a file.

It's actually close to objectively better (though not a good one):

- Enter is a side-ways-stretch pinky key, so one of the worst keys out there (Backspace is worse since it's diagonal stretch)

- F2 is a middle-finger vertical key, so more convenient

Besides, this blocks opening files with Enter in the dumb Mac file manager, so add that to the downsides of superior Mac shortcuts

Fair enough. I guess ultimately it comes down to what you're used to and what you prefer.

I think more than anything, it's difficult to discredit something that you don't actively use and aren't completely familiar with. Like I'm just saying Windows is shit because it's not Mac, but that's disingenuous because I don't actively use Windows as my main OS. But hey, if you like Windows, use Windows. If you like Mac, use Mac.

I am sure if look closely at Windows laptops you can find plenty of competition. Of course the screen and the speakers are not as good and battery life is shorter, but if you can look over that (and I find most people outside HN don't really care) you can go pretty far with a premium Windows laptop (XPS/ThinkPad/HP EliteBook).

And yet _still_ 8GB of RAM as the baseline. It's probably as profitable as it is evil / misleading.

Calling it evil is a bit of a stretch.

I'll admit "evil" is a stretch but I was thinking in terms of the amount of e-waste this causes due to insufficient RAM hurting the longevity of a $~2k+ computer

e.g. https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology-media-an...

Hyperbole like this is necessary for people to justify the extreme negative emotions they feel about a computer they’ll never buy having specifications that they disapprove of.

Is it? Its pretty evil to overcharge and prey on a customer base who doesn't know any better, but would benefit from a more usable starting point, oh say 16...

Tims a finance guy, they are kinda evil by default.

Yeah, Apple customers tend to also just "trust Apple" and get whatever the recommended product is for their price point. Half the reason I find this troubling is ewaste, the other half is I'm sick of having to try to explain RAM to my MIL and ask how many tabs they keep open when asked which computer she should buy. If they had a better baseline memory (16gb) or a simple inexpensive upgrade that's the second option in the lineup instead of the higher storage cost, it'd be a simple, one-sentence "get that one".

Even having to upgrade the RAM is a hassle when price comparing etc. They know this and it's - by design - misleading to the type of affluent less-tech-friendly users who prefer Apple products.

No one should have to care how many tabs they have open, and since browsers kill/suspend background tabs these days, they probably don't have to care about it either.

Except all of the browsers are shit at it. I know someone with so many tabs open it just shows a :)

America is truly a blessed nation. Their richest evil people simply make the most powerful consumer appliances available for a reasonable price. Their good people must be truly saints.

Who? As far as I can tell every American is a psychopathic capitalist murder ready to drive their SUV over the next sand dune/forest/oil field/grandmas house you name it. Bought and sold in 1775 boy.

It's a matter of perspective of course. I think if you claim that this makes Apple evil then you would also need to argue that most of capitalism is evil. Aren't the vast majority corporations just trying to make more money? I would disagree with that.

> I think if you claim that this makes Apple evil then you would also need to argue that most of capitalism is evil.

I mean, surely a mixed bag, and I still participate in it regardless, but pretty much, yeah.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mining-children-trfn/...

https://www.culawreview.org/journal/child-labor-and-the-huma...

Exactly :)

Im just some punk trying to have a good time with some spicy comments on HN. It's ok to both hate and exist within capitalism. It requires a certain level of pain (masochism) to survive that existence, or dare to enjoy it, while also raging against it.

apple silicone doesn't need ram /half the people on HN

8gb is pretty bad. I have an M2 Pro with 16gb, & that limit is regularly pushed, & that without regularly pushing things hard, resource-wise (then again, I've seen plenty of people on both PCs & Macs shut down whatever applications they weren't actively using when they switched between them. If testing shows that to be really common, I could see 8gb being plenty for the majority of users. Crazy user patterns, to be sure, but to each their own). If I get an M3, it will have 36 (or whatever Minis will have available) just for the headroom.

Hey don't be stingy yourself, Tim's people said "it's the perfect MacBook for students and aspiring musicians.."!

Seriously, you can't make up this stuff..

What do you mean, have you set foot on a college campus this decade? It's a sea of macbooks. A $1500 sticker price isn't stopping people.

I proudly use an M1 Mac Mini but the fact that they're so full of themselves constantly makes me laugh(?)

What's even worse are the upgrade prices: $200 to go to 16GB and $400 to go to 24GB. Anything more than that requires upgrading to the M3 Pro model, which has a base price of $1999 and a base 18GB of RAM. Upgrading to 36GB costs an additional $400.

I waited for today's announcement because I'm in the market for a laptop with 32GB of RAM. Today's announcement looked really tempting! However, $2399 + AppleCare + sales tax for the 36GB M3 Pro MacBook Pro is too much for me, and so it looks like it's either a refurbished M2, a Framework laptop, or a ThinkPad for me.

Here in EU, the price I get in the local Apple Store is 2029€ = $2153.

You will need to convince your politicians to lower import duties and taxes.

And that $1599 USD is without taxes. So not the whole US has this price. It was always worth for me to travel to Oregon to have zero tax.

I think you mean, convince politicians to allow for the ridiculous tax-excluded display pricing that’s prolific in the US.

Well the average VAT in Europe is about twice as high if not more than the average sales tax in the US.

So I’d rather have to do some basic math but save 10% (of course different tax rates only partially explain the price difference, it still is significantly more expensive in Europe without VAT)

Why is it ridiculous to allow for tax-excluded display of pricing? You couldn't run a TV or newspaper ad with tax-included pricing in the US since there are so many different taxing jurisdictions here (more than 13,000, as of early 2023).

Perhaps what's ridiculous is that we have so many different taxing jurisdictions.

> ridiculous tax-excluded display pricing

Why is that ridiculous? I don't pay sales tax, what else would you have them advertise?

I think this is brilliant: let the people know how much of the price actually goes to the company, and how much to the government. Helps people make an informed decision on who's to blame for high prices of everything.

Even without the taxes it costs ~$200 more in the EU. Admittedly mandatory 2 year warranty might play a role

This, plus a risk of EUR/USD exchange rate going wrong way in the next year.

It usually comes with a 2 year warranty, which adds to the costs.

Here's some example US->EU Markups for other laptops in the same (EU) price range, sold direct by manufacturers to Ireland (list price to list price, so tax excl in US, tax incl in EU):

- Macbook Pro (M3, 8GB RAM, 512 GB Storage): $1549 -> €2049 ($2179) = 40% Markup

- Dell XPS 15 (i3-13700H, RTX 4050, 16GB RAM, 512GB Storage): $1865 -> €1989 ($2110) = 13% Markup

- Framework 16 (Prebuilt Performance Pro - Ryzen 7840HS, 16GB RAM, 512GB Storage): $1739 -> €1907 ($2023) = 16% markup

Apple's EU markup is an outlier here.

USA/CANADA prices are without VAT/sales taxes.

Is that with or without VAT? The US always gives prices without VAT, since different states have different rates.

With VAT, I think most EU countries mandate advertised prices to include VAT.

Still, US sales tax is low. EU is >= ~20% almost everywhere.

Sales tax is usually ~7% or more, so $2,029 * 1.07 = $2,171.

Especially when a 13" M2 MBA with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD comes in at $1499.

It also supports exactly 1 external display.

Literally the only reason I can’t use my work MacBook for any work that isn’t just testing Safari support. I was even ready to tolerate the terrible ram quantity given it’s so friggin’ insanely fast at javascript.

I think the base MBP from 2015 had 8GB.

Given how much money Apple has, this is simple profiteering. Something governments should look at and come at Apple hard, given this behaviour is inflationary.

I agree and I think it's going to happen eventually. At least something is going to happen. It already looks like customers have been a bit wiser and stopped buying the most egregiously priced models. They are running their computer division to the ground with their outrageous financial mastermind strategy. They put up a good marketing front for their proprietary technology but there is no serious advantage to their stuff anymore. Most prosumer performance focused customers are switching or are thinking about it.

You just need patience and enjoy the fall. Just a few years and soon enough nobody is going to care developing stuff for their platform, it will be mostly empty shells, but at least they are pretty, I guess. Patience my friend, karma will do its thing eventually...

It’s actually enough for light work, but you can get more ram just pony

Reply on news.ycombinator.com