Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it
macworld.com
macworld.com
For $899 (on sale sometimes), the 8GB M2 Air is absolutely a steal. The screen quality, thinness, battery life, build quality, SoC, quietness, coolness, metal enclosure, touchpad, and speakers are simply unmatched by anything in the PC world at that price - sometimes any price. Those things cost Apple money. Other PC makers cheap out on them. In order for Apple to earn higher margins, they make the RAM and storage upgrades very expensive. So the base versions actually offer great values. It's the upgraded RAM/storage that decreases the value but still good value overall considering what you're getting.
I understand why 8GB is still the base. Everything except the RAM is outstanding and unmatched. Apple makes the money on RAM and storage upgrades.
Perhaps Apple will start at 12GB for M4 generation. Perhaps the arrival of local LLMs will skyrocket RAM upgrade demand such that Apple can start the base at 16GB and still have plenty of people who want to upgrade to 32GB. The problem for Apple will always be if they can increase the base without hurting upgrade profit.
On a slightly related note: $/GB for RAM hit a wall starting in 2011. https://assets.ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/historical...
I understand the business aspect of this for Apple. I'm not mad at them. I'll pay $200 to upgrade the RAM so that I can keep using macOS and have a well-built laptop that makes no noise. Apple knows this. It's just good business in my opinion. But I guess to you, I'm an Apple geek who has Stockholm syndrome.
No, they perfectly explained why that isn't the case. Please read the post carefully instead of knee jerk responding.
That’s hostile. It’s obnoxious as suggesting a difference of opinion is “Stockholm syndrome”. It the same as saying “I’m not being rude, but you’re an idiot”. Yeah, you’re being rude.
HOWEVER, my M1 Air (with 8GB RAM) has and continues to be a great little machine for web browsing, email, Discord and writing. It can comes in clutch occasionally for coding.
Value? No, it's not great value. I bought a $500 Lenovo with 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM as a backup machine and the only areas where the M1 Air beats it are in the trackpad. The Lenovo even has a sleep mode which actually works and the battery life is fantastic. Even the screen is a toss-up - the OLED screen on the Lenovo is in a different class to the Apple screen in some ways but it isn't as bright so less good if you're working in direct sunlight.
For personal and work purposes I use both Apple and Windows laptops and its no comparison on those areas really, even if you go for the nice one's (Lenovo, Dell Latitude, Surface, etc). And if you add the other configurations, you get closer to the MBP price.
Eg. Latitude 7440 laptop was the one left after filtering for all the "high end" attributes (> 8GB mem, highest intel processor available for the series, FHD+ etc). Configured at: 14", 16GB, the highest processor configuration they offer, 14.0-in. display Full HD+ (which is just 1920X1200, way worse than "retina") goes for $1,659.00 on Dell's website.
I'd get the M1 over that anyday, even if I had to pay $100-$200 extra for the 16GB option. Especially since it will keep its resale value way better.
It's often mentioned that macOS is more frugal with RAM, a claim which I flat out found to be untrue. I regularly saw Dock and Finder leak and eat gigabytes of RAM each.
The unfortunate reality is that base Mac models always existed as an upsell. There were a few precious historical exceptions, most recently the M1 Mac, but that doesn't change this rule.
That's why I said normal office workers and students. I never said 8GB is enough for devs. It wasn't enough for me. It was still manageable for that 1 year before Apple Silicon MBPs got released. But of course I upgraded to an M1 Pro 16GB as soon as it came out.
I just gifted a family member an M1 Air 8GB in late 2023. I felt very comfortable that it was enough for the work this person does on the computer.
PS. 8GB is perfectly fine for Chrome web browsing. You can have 50 tabs open and it'll still run smoothly. macOS does some magic with paging. Don't know how it does it. But never had an issue with 8GB and Chrome. It was always my IDE, Typescript, and docker that gave me RAM issues on 8GB.
Costing 9 hundos a piece, Air is not something a regular company would buy for their employees.
They're more likely to buy a budget laptop in the 400-500 range which you can bet will do just fine for office work, and you can always upgrade it if necessary.
If a company really does need their employees to work a Mac, they will have to cough out a lot more for the 16GB version, and this is what the article calls corporate greed.
I happen to think that the enterprise is an untapped market for Macs. Not tech offices. Other industries that run on Lenovos and Dells.
If I'm a small business, I still wouldn't buy $500 Windows laptops for my employees. I'd buy $750 M1 Airs. They last longer, "just work", and have fewer support issues.
As an employee of a company that runs macbook fleets, hell no they don't. Every other year we have had to replace half our inventory because of the 2015 macbooks having faulty batteries that want to explode, and then the next generations being that terrible keyboard, where every single employee needed their entire top cover replaced at least once because the keyboard didn't even last a year.
Meanwhile at my previous company which ran those boring ugly dell "workstation" laptops with the fat ass batteries, Entire generations of older workstations were still in inventory because they just didn't die, and were stupidly easy to repair, and you didn't have to send them away for a month for something like "my N key doesn't work anymore" or "the battery we gave you will burn your house down"
I just don't get how people say "Macs are reliable", because the only laptops less reliable than my work macbooks have been a series of cost reduced dell laptops that screws would literally fall out of, except even when that happened, dell would send someone to come fix it the next day, in your home!
But hey, it's not like Apple has a history of denying problems, right?
IIRC there was a recall/replacement program for those batteries as well as earlier generations of the butterfly keyboard. I'm not a fan of the butterfly keyboard, but Apple did replace it twice for free. The final revision fixed the reliability problems for me at least.
I'd imagine the TCO on those bargain basement laptops is terrible, so I doubt they're really a big sell for corporate buyers.
(B) In my experience corporate machines simply aren't upgraded. You get enough for the job when you order it. If you need more, you get a new machine and the old one is repurposed or retired if it's remaining usable life is short.
Yeah. It would basically be insane for a company to nickel and dime laptop purchases and then pay an IT person to do bespoke upgrades. Like a lot of things that may seem sensible on a personal level where labor is cheap/free, they don't make sense when you're paying someone $50+ an hour to do them.
I remember in a n org I worked a few years ago we got new laptops with SSDs instead of HDDs. Everybody was happy except the people who worked with a lot of data as the first SSDs were very small like 128 GB (still the amount of disk space you would get in an entry-level MBP 2019 I think). So we asked for an upgrade and they replaced our SSDs rather than replacing whole laptops. But I'm sure it's place-dependent.
It is an i3, but still... this is $279! Do some bargain hunting and you can find some pretty decent machines for <$500 now.
Edit: devs get 32G pros though, and we loathe the extra RAM pricing on those. Cheap compared to the cost of a developer, though!
What? NO. 8GB is not enough for browsing and the proliferation of Electron apps these days. The solution shouldn't be constantly swapping, which is what all 8GB Apple devices do. This will lead to early SSD death and since the SSD is soldered on, that means the entire device is useless.
I see it on computers (and phones too) whose owners bought the smallest capacity to avoid spending money on something they didn't think they would use.
Edit: I should clarify this is what I've seen with nvme devices in particular.
On the flip side, the very same laptop has a much better display than competing MacBook Air, and better in a manner that is observable in its entirety in non-professional casual use: visually better scrolling of web pages and documents; easier to see in bright sun; much more superior HDR movie watching experience.
It also has much better laptop speakers - completely irrelevant for professional use (like music production), but very relevant for movie watching.
Base 14" MBP is merely a better Netflix machine than MacBook Air is.
What you said about Pro, and what the article says about Pro, is very fair and quite excellent in fact for, uhm, actual Pro laptops, which is Mx Pro/Max based machines, not the new base 14" MBP on an Mx (small one) chip.
What I indeed find perplexing is the fact that 2 default 14" Mx MBP configurations that do not require any changes (they often ship faster, being default is a tangible difference) aren't 8 GB 512 and 16 GB 512, but 8 GB 512 and 8 GB 1TB. That I find odd, because I think yes, a small subset of office users might find a low core count but bigger RAM version useful in practice (I'm thinking some very heavy spreadsheet hitters kind of office power users, managers probably), but virtually no one in that category would actually care to have 1TB of SSD with everything being web-based and/or stored on company's servers in corporate environment. That is indeed odd. But maybe I'm wrong in my assumptions for this one - it's easy to be lacking any actual stats or data - and it's appropriate as well. I don't know.
Funnily enough, I'm typing this from a 3 year old Thinkpad that I use for work, which has in all likelyhood a slower CPU than even the M1, but it's perfectly usable for dev work, because it has 64GB of RAM.
Of course, 16 GB (or more) is nicer.
But nowadays full dynamic applications are shipped in a browser tab, and a huge number of "desktop" applications are written in JavaScript using electron, so they're essentially an isolated chrome instance for running that app.
People talk about chrome being a resource hog, and maybe it is, but if you have dozens of JavaScript applications running in different tabs, then chrome is just taking the blame for the fact that it's essentially serving as the user application layer of your OS.
Once per day, I maybe got a slight 600ms hang when something was unexpectedly swapped in.
So I can imagine that 8GB will work okay, even if Chrome eats 30% of it.
I'm glad I stuck with embedded development. The biggest resource-hog I interact with regularly is GCC.
I can be productive on a P3 with 256M of RAM.
Make sure to view "Real mem" in Activity Monitor. That's the amount of data actually stored in your RAM, the rest being swapped out. That number can be quite small, even for apps that theoretically use a lot of memory.
I have found Docker to be an "actual" memory hog with not much of it being swapped out, but could imagine that it would be possible in the case of Finder.
If the processes just allocated a lot of memory and never touched it, it might be reasonable to say they don't actually use it because the OS might never actually reserve any physical resources for it. (Happens a lot e.g. in Linux with memory overcommit allowed by default and some processes allocating dozens of gigabytes of virtual memory, most of which they never actually use.)
But would those pages then count towards swap use either? Only dirty pages end up in swap. Unless macOS counts allocated but untouched pages towards used swap as committed resources.
edit: better wording
Also, it's such a controversial thing you would think if the difference was so stark The Verge, Linus Tech Tips or Max Tech, etc. would, you know, actually measure it.
The only kinda objective side-by-side test I could find, on typical workloads, was this 2 year old video on the M1 which stated the 8gb did well on typical multitask workloads. For Chrome tab test the bottleneck was the internet speed, not RAM. Lightroom and Final Cut Export was slower, but typical multitasking workloads basically matched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h487I_5xOZU
Obviously things change so where does this stand today?
And in usage I also find macOS and its Apps to more often than not actually take more RAM. It isn't a bad thing pe se, it often means more speed because more things are cached, available fast and the like.
However, it is quite annoying when Apple simultaneously pretend the contrary and at the same time upcharge for their soldered RAM in a greedy way. If anything, a "Pro" PC laptop in this price range will have not only at least 16GB as default but is highly likely to have 4-8GB for its dedicated GPU when with Apple Silicon, the RAM advertised has to be shared and any GPU activity lower even more what can comfortably be used as system memory.
The more time passes, the more Apple Silicon feels like the ultimate scam. At this you better have a very real need for battery life because it really does not make a lot of sense otherwise. In fact, if it is only autonomy that you need and not true mobility, it would be better to buy cheaper performance equivalent PC and buy one of those large carriable battery.
Note: Customers cannot upgrade the RAM by themselves.
I'm okay with laptops being sold with 8GB of RAM, but I'm not okay with artifically shortened lifespan caused by lack of upgradability. Manufacturers should be regulated to force them offer upgradeable RAM. I don't care what new technological innovations that may require to offer same speeds as current soldered RAM does, it's simply the right thing to do.
Disagreed. You can't make RAM upgradeable and have unified memory architecture that makes Apple Silicon good. Let's not regulate technology like this.
There were studies done that showed most people do not upgrade their RAM/storage even though they could. They just bought new computers. I can't find them now but you could probably find them if you dig around.
Silicon Graphics did it in the 90s, x86 laptops do something similar but it's not true UMA AFAIU mostly due to software / graphics API limitations.
> that makes Apple Silicon good.
Good interplay between CPU and GPU, the major advantage of UMA, does nothing for raw CPU performance. What I find attractive about Apple silicon is that it has very high performance, high efficiency CPU cores. Nothing to do with UMA.
Soldered RAM can be somewhat higher speed and lower energy than replaceable, I think that's the main real advantage. Still, I wouldn't want it.
They don't. They pre-allocate a portion of the memory to the iGPU and the CPU can't access that memory. It's not nearly the same unified memory we're talking about.
>Good interplay between CPU and GPU, the major advantage of UMA, does nothing for raw CPU performance. What I find attractive about Apple silicon is that it has very high performance, high efficiency CPU cores. Nothing to do with UMA.
I didn't imply that unified memory is the only thing that makes Apple Silicon good. Of course everything else has to be good too. But unified memory is a big part of Apple Silicon. Furthermore, going forward, UMA has real advantages over non-UMA architectures for LLMs.
I don't recall the details, yes there's a BIOS setting to assign memory to the GPU, but that doesn't actually limit the memory used by the GPU. With any current OS and driver, the actual amount of memory used is set dynamically at runtime. The rest is as I said an API (OpenGL / DirectX pre 12) limitation.
https://docplayer.net/88302897-Memory-management-in-vulkan-a...
Page 20:
Memory types: AMD APU
● Memory is really unified – all heaps are equally fast.
Meaning the application can allocate a buffer on such a heap, load/generate some data into it, and "hand it over to" (just means promise not to change it concurrently without notifying) the GPU. No copies, the GPU can now use it. [In contrast, different memory types on non-UMA systems are best for uploads (to GPU), downloads (from GPU), frequent use, one-time use... of buffers]
So, what's left of Apple's UMA advantage is, I don't know? Maybe a unified cache. Not a big deal, graphics working sets are much larger than any L3 cache. Oh, and marketing language.
Can we have one piece of soldered RAM and one slot to add more RAM later on though? (at the cost of possibly unmatched speed and other stuff that happens when you mix and match RAM as you like)
Or just don't buy LUXURY Macs. Yes, they are luxury goods, they are Louis Vuittons of the laptop world.
You and a bunch of people don't buy Macs with 8GB and complain a lot and Apple will start selling them with 16GB.
But this will never happen because people will keep buying Macs because of the panache and swagger that owning and using a Mac give them.
Maybe you're European and apple products cost a lot more where you live?
In the states, base model MacBook Airs are frequently ~$800 on sale.
You can get an official refurb MacBook Air or Pro with 16GB/1TB for ~$1300 from Apple's website right now.
Those machines are priced competitively when compared to Dell XPS, new ThinkPads, etc.
They also have much better battery life, screens, and overall build quality compared to those machines.
Also MacOS is, for all its faults, normie-accessible unlike Linux and ad-free unlike Windows.
It's wanting to run big VMs that is the real pain point with 8GB.
The upgrade treadmill from the 20 century computers is no longer relevant for most users, besides storage.
And for most users it will be. If we're talking "forced obsolence" Apple is probably the last to blame, given their stuff retains high ratio of original-vs-resale value (meaning they have long second hand careers).
If you believe that will not make their second-hand value and their longevity much worse, I don't know what to tell you. It is already happening. Even relatively recent Intel macs are worthless if they were not top of the line with lots of storage and RAM. The only thing keeping somewhat of a value is what Apple does not want to sell anymore: big display iMacs (27"). But that's really not surprising since half the value comes from being a good display in the first place...
On top of all that, even low-end hardware is good enough for basic task, so second-hand inventory is piling up, especially at the low end. Macs are nice but old Macs not that much nicer than cheap Huawei's and the likes...
What about them? XCode is quite efficient with memory, and it by definition doesn't pass everything through a interpret+JIT for a higher level language.
Try opening some heinously large project with 100+ dylibs (react-native) compared against a lean, statically linked single module workspace. You can have them open side by side and it’s like experiencing hell and heaven simultaneously.
That's not the target users for the "MacBook Pro" series.
Apple did open themselves up to ridicule for putting 8GB on a $1600 "Pro" laptop.
The article specifically talks about the _Macbook Pro_, which shouldn't target office workers and students.
Now that's just disingenuous, it's a log scale and it shows that memory prices fell 40% from 2012 to 2022.
Apple charges $200 to upgrade M1 Macbook Air from 8GB to 16GB.
A comparable 8GB stick of DDR4-3600 costs $25 retail.
8GB on the Airs is a completely different issue as these are not marketed as Pro devices.
Consumers place a lot of faith in Apple as a brand so when they go and purchase a "Macbook Pro" they should be able to assume Apple has their back and it's actually going to do what it says on the tin. It's 2023, memory demand is higher than it ever has been and selling a "Pro" computer thats destined to be living on swap so they can try squeeze another $200 out of you is pretty shitty honestly. And it's not like you can just upgrade it, you have to toss it out and get a whole new device.
As much of a conversation killer calling people "sheep" can be, as someone who doesn't use their stuff, what is surprising about this?
If you work on large C++/Rust projects you need dedicated build servers with ungodly amount of CPU/ram. A laptop cannot possibly compete with servers that draw 2000 watts each. Desktop PCs also blow laptops out of the water in terms of raw performance. And yet many professional developers have a MBP as their main device because apparently they don't need the extra performance a high end desktop delivers.
Somehow many people here believe that:
- an 8GB MBP is not pro
- a 16GB MBP is pro
- desktop with 1TB ram is unnecessary for pro use
Somehow their preferred device is the "pro" device and should be called "pro" and less capable and more capable machines are irrelevant.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Which is the problem in a nutshell. No one knows what it means.
The parent worked as a dev for a year with the machine and was happy with it. I am also a dev, and am still on a M1 8gb Air that I got in early 2021, and I'm very happy with it. Probably the best laptop I've ever had the pleasure to work on.
For my workload, I don't think the difference between a 8gb and 16gb machine would be measurable. Some people really would prefer the $200.
So watch that and tell me again why you think the difference ‘isn’t measurable’.
Tell me after watching that video you think the 8gb machine which is performing up to 5x worse than the 16gb model is "Pro"
Imagine the reverse - if Apple had a new cpu that performed 5x better they would be screaming it from the rooftops. And yet they have absolutely no qualms selling a machine thats 5x worse performing on the base model compared to the $200 upgrade.
They are basically scamming us and people like you are defending them for it. They need to be shamed and people like you need to stop defending the trillion dollar company doing it.
It should be noted that I'm not saying they should sell the 16gb model for the 8gb price - I'm saying they shouldn't be selling 8gb in a pro model at all. Or at the very least, they need to make it CRYSTAL CLEAR to people buying these 8GB machines at the checkout page that they are far far worse performing than the 16GB machines and the SSD's will wear out quicker.
Don’t get stuck on the Pro monitor, real Professionals simply buy more memory because they know they need it and they should be able to afford it. Apple offers the 8gb models for regular folk with light computing needs who like a nicer machine, be it called Air or Pro.
If anything, you are the one who really needs to prove why he feels the need to defend the indefensible commercial choices of an extremely rich company.
At best you are like a weirdo using short in 5°C winter and telling everyone it is fine and do not understand why everyone is telling him he is crazy and that must be uncomfortable. At worst you are the used car salesman minimizing every single problem the car he is selling to keep the price high.
In any case, your behavior is not normal nor commendable, you shouldn't be the one requesting better behavior from other people...
We’ve had AirPods Pro and the iPhone Pro for years now, the days of the word pro meaning “for professionals” are long gone.
To be clear I have no problem paying the Apple tax, the computers are worth it. The problem is that Apple has optimized the Apple tax in such a way it makes local AI applications impossible, which is a shame because they have such the best architectures for that use case.
My current work machine, a M2 Pro MBP at 32GB actually has less usable memory than my sluggish i9 MBP had - due to unified memory. We know the CPU/GPU is great but the memory story really isn’t, my system is palpably less responsive with a couple of documentation / bad web interface Safari tabs too many… RAM configurations are just prohibitively expensive even for “well off” companies / purchasers at this point so it’s often a struggle to fight for more.
I’ve been a big Apple / Mac fan and loyal customer since Panther but we shouldn’t turn a blind eye here.
These constrained memory configurations - even when streamlined OS / system software optimizations are in place (are they? still?) - are probably playing a good part in their great margins but they do need to go with the time (bloated websites and apps) as well of course their own stacks running on top.
I wonder how that's possible, and whether that's an outlier rather than a case of probable risk to SSDs. I've got the impression that it shouldn't be likely to wear out a modern or semi-modern SSD with any kinds of typical laptop workloads.
I daily drove a 500 GB off-the-shelf SSD in a 8 GB ThinkPad for ~8 years, and while it was for personal device, I used it a lot and even played games on it, often ran into swapping, even hibernated semi-regularly at times, etc., and there were never any signs of problems with the SSD.
4 years sounds like pretty bad luck.
I guess it's possible, it just sounded like individual bad luck to me. My impression has been that you really have to write a lot to wear out the expected life of a non-ancient SSD.
I started using Macs with Mac OS 9.2 but now I want out. The pricing is absurd and there is no way to circumvent that since no upgrade possible.
I don't care much about battery life/power consumption and the actual use case is overblown, if you get one of the powerful chips and push it, you are looking at 30-50W power consumption; so even with a 100kWh battery, we are talking 2-3H at best.
In other words, if you want to game, compute, encode, render, or whatever high performance task you are still going to need a cord anyway. The rest of low power task is actually done very nicely on much cheaper devices that have more than enough battery life (from cheap tablets, including iPads to Chromebooks).
Also macOS currently has a software problem in my opinion and Apple stupidly push for subscription out of greed. If I have to subscribe for my computing needs I might as well get the cheaper devices and use software that can run anywhere, including sub 500$ potato.
Apple has made a terrible mistake strategically; you can't have your cake and eat it too. If they want to sell expensive, limited hardware they need to have cheap non-subscription software that is best in class in enough categories. If their hardware is only useful to run competitors' software and subscription stuff they have to be competitive on the hardware price...
My issue is the heavy price increase for higher RAM amounts. A $2500 machine should come with at least 64GB.
The fact is, 8 GB delivers perfectly speedy performance for many Pro workloads.
It's not enough if you're a dev running VM's, but Pro doesn't mean it's for developers only. There are a lot of other types of professionals out there, where their needs are e.g around CPU not memory.
Technically, comparable Windows laptops do exist, but hardware vendors don’t want to sell them.
For some reason, hardware vendors really want to sell Intel CPUs, and discrete GPUs. Both choices are suboptimal for most people, because modern AMD chips are more power efficient than Intel, and their integrated GPUs are pretty good by now.
If I wanted a new laptop today, I would look for a model with Ryzen 7 7840U. The chip has 8 Zen4 CPU cores, 12 RDNA3 GPU cores, and 15-30W TDP. Quietness, coolness, performance, and battery life should be very comparable to Apple’s M1 laptops.
Sadly, most laptops which have Ryzen 7 7840U include soldered LPDDR5[x] memory, but there’re couple models with DDR5 SO-DIMM slots: Framework 13, and HP EliteBook 845 G10.
BTW, I have an older laptop with Ryzen 5 5600U. It’s a generation older, but CPU performance and power efficiency are already good there. GPU performance is not great as GCN5 cores are way slower than RDNA3.
Prove me wrong? Do something genuinely new, like a mass produced cpu on germanium. Make a modern OS that’s a successor to unix-and plan9. Edit-Or at least a moddable iphone that can plug into a monitor/keyboard/mouse.
Edit2-shame the company though, not the people who walk around carrying iphones or other apple devices. The company is the problem here.
I don’t know where to begin with this, but on topic, the M1 came out in 2020 and was a big tech leap in how PCs are done.
Sure, all the individual technologies within existed elsewhere first. But Apple executed and delivered great products.
You could buy a desktop with 4 gigs of ram in 2010.
There's always research ongoing to improve tech and a lot of it is on the market already, but just because researchers figured something out doesn't mean it's feasible on a large manufacturing scale or that thermodynamics will even allow it to work well. Comparing devices in 2002 to 2023 and not noticing the drastic improvements just shows a lack of understanding and or signs of living in complete denial to just complain.
Given that the next generation Snapdragon offers comparable performance to Apple's M line, it appears that node advances were responsible for a very large percentage of any performance gains.
If you look closely, yes apple is bit better in manufacturing, bit better in materials etc. and I have many apple products, but its products isn't that different from many small companies. Unlike say Google, whose software engineering and scale they can handle for complex services is almost impossible to match for small companies.
Also you missed the point of thread. I said I like Apple products. It's just that the stage they are in, they aren't trying to solve really tough problems which very likely will just loose money like say google does with quantum computing or AI.
My followup question: if it's so easy and unimpressive, why aren't other companies doing it -- especially at similar performance-per-watt? The market is obviously there and they release "answers" to Apple Silicon that aren't really answers (again, perf-per-watt isn't there).
I'm sure it was even more so in the 80's into the 90's, but that's a little before my time.
We have not really had a quantum leap in the last 20 years. Even longer. Apple's M-series chips are the closest we've gotten in recent times I think.
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique
Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
The M series SOCs are just fucking absurd. In every space besides gaming and graphics, they utterly lap PC's. I don't even remember the last time my Macbook wasn't charged enough to use, and I use it away from my desk quite a lot. Moving from my office PC to a Macbook has felt like being flung 6 years into the future.
Yes, especially if you were considering a low-end M3 model. Also consider a MacBook Air, which are great.
Desktop was fine since I was working from home the last 2 years. But I’ve finally got an office and also need to travel so need something more portable
Will be switching over from Ubuntu to Mac as well
If you were considering a 14" or 16" M2 Pro MBP, the equivalent M3 Pro MBP would not be the base model, and WOULD be an upgrade... just avoid the base M3 (non-Pro) config.
If you were considering the M2 MBP w/ touch bar, then the base M3 MBP is the equivalent chip.
On the other hand, if you don't need the GPU improvements, or the mild CPU speed bump, that M3 gives and you can find an M2 Pro cheaper because they're "old", go for that.
edit: Adding "Pro" to M2 and M3 to indicate which were the proper MBPs.
When said Touch Bar pro was the top of the line, the cheapest pro was the one without a Touch Bar, missing half of the USB C ports, basically a MacBook Air in a pro shell.
I’ve never understood why they do this but it must sell well in some markets or something.
The author feigns indignance at Apple's margins, as if the only possible purpose for that markup is to line the pockets of Apple execs. But this isn't pure profit for Apple. Apple develops feature and security updates which they make available for free (at the point of use) for years to their hardware customers. The significant hardware markup is what enables this!
Contrast this to companies that sell hardware at cost. You find phones and laptops crammed with programs to collect and monetize your data, and zero security or driver updates.
A company that charges full price up front is at least in a position to afford to be able to do the right thing by users.
This company is making obscene amounts of profit only to hand most of it over to people whose contribution to apple’s success is zero, instead of spending it on improving the products or customers actually responsible for that success. If this isn’t a condemnation of what’s wrong with capitalism, I don’t know what is. Tim Cook may have no other choice, but it is despicable that he doesn’t.
the lack of (competent) competition is what's the problem, not that that there's return on capital. I don't like Apple, but I hardly can blame them, when they can make all this money by simply being the least shit generally okay-ish option.
People who pretend Apple wasn't different under Job are magnificent gaslighters and should not be taken seriously about anything really...
It's a forced and planned obsolescence and nothing else.
All the required cost for the product and support is already included in the product cost as it being costly compared to its competitors. All other stuff that they do around it is pure marketing and projection to make people believe and have that sense of something super duper is being offered to them which doesn't exist and is unique.
While some of is acceptable, but majority of it is useless or not used or used once or twice in it's lifetime. Except for some professionals.
Just swindling people of their hard earned monies...
Last I checked Apple products get about 7 years of updates. My 2016 MacBook Pro is falling off the edge of security updates about now.
I'd prefer 10 years, but it's more than two.
The exception may be more recent intel Macs which are likely to be obsoleted at a faster rate due to the ARM/Apple Silicon transition. Though I guess you can still run Windows. ;-p
Framing it as greed and lack of innovation seems like a not well thought out argument. Which companies are you buying tech from that aren’t aiming for a profit, and wouldn’t change more if they could? As a dev I feel like I’ve been forced out of the Apple ecosystem, and I’m having a hard time being a fan these days, but I wouldn’t dare claim they’re not innovating. The M-series is a massive innovation and challenging everyone, and it follows behind literally world-changing innovations like iphone. For its time, OSX was an innovative successor to unix built on unix. They have a long list and a solid history of innovation that continues to this day, despite always having had seemingly high prices on RAM, so let’s look for a better argument why they should offer it for less.
It’s like in the 90s when the base ford mustang became a poorly made vehicle with little power that looked like a sports car but really they selling out and taking advantage of their customers.
I would have more respect for Apple if they just charged $200 more for the base and put 16GB of ram it instead passing off machines with insufficient amount of ram as a premium model of their devices.
Look up their Mac sales figure - it's down. And I do believe it is because consumers aren't stupid and recognize that the new Macs have planned obsolescence built-in with their soldered RAM and SSDs.
The Gaslighting is also high with Apple claiming that their "8GB equals 16GB" because they are Apple:
> Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent, because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture. Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently. - https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/08/8gb-ram-m3-macbook-pro-...
I guess this is a factor, but the main reason I haven't bought a new Mac is that they quit making the 27" iMac. Turning that beautiful screen into a paperweight or strictly-retro computer, only to turn around and buy a Mini and Studio Display, seems silly. OpenCore Legacy Patcher has kept me up-to-date so far, but there's an end on it. It doesn't help that my office is part of the "fancy" part of the house and so having exactly one cable (power) running into the computer is a nontrivial aesthetic benefit. It really does look sleeker, because it is.
If Apple laptops have to use their system memory for their graphics stuff, doesn't this mean that their 8GB of RAM leaves even less memory available for applications? I mean, even the cheapest graphics cards out there ship with a few GB of dedicated memory.
Mac isn’t the only product they sell where the storage prices are higher than the alternatives and higher than the cost of the underlying hardware. All of Apple’s products come with SSD and RAM upgrades that are above market rates and above the competition.
I don’t think consumers are stupid either, I think they know the storage upgrades are marked up, and still buy Apple products, for other reasons. I bought Apple laptops and was happy about them despite their cost - they were truly great machines and outshined the cheaper non-Apple laptops I’ve had.
Anyway, Mac sales have been down for a while because what would have been laptop and desktop sales are being now replaced with tablets and phones. Apple’s strategy hasn’t changed yet, and their overall sales and revenue on premium priced products haven’t show any sign of downturn yet.
That's a creative euphemism for price gouging.
You're not going to shame a company into changing how it does market segmentation.
They do this because it makes them more money, and if you don't like padding their profit margins your best reaction would be to simply not buy their products. There are plenty of other PC vendors out there.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=a...
I used it for a week before switching to a personal desktop with 64GB.
I can get an M2 Pro with 32GB for $1800 used easily. That's what I'd spend my money on if I had to get a laptop with $1800.
Imo 8gb is not enough as baseline, today's 8gb is 16.
I remember 4GB being good in 2015.
Personally I won't use a computer (as a daily driver) without 64gb of RAM today. Everything eats memory like it's going out of style.
I like leaving computers running for months (sleep at night) with a bunch of (context grouped) virtual windows the issue is when the OS resumes (windows or Mac) the stuff shifts around it's annoying (multi monitor).
Apple charges $200 to add 8GB, but you can get 64GB for less than $200.
Why? This is what Docker is for.
If you know you're going to be running Docker, and you buy a computer with 8GB of RAM, I'm afraid I have very little sympathy for you. You should know exactly what you're going to get.
The only time I’ve seen the iMac be “better”, was when I had a Java project that had around 20 different packages that you needed to have open IDEs for.
The M3 Pro is the base for actual "professional" users.
My M1 MacBook Pro has actually handled it the best. My old Intel MacBook Pro would constantly be ramping up the fans, at one point burning through the whole battery in less than an hour if I unplugged it. No such issues with the M1 so far. There are still issues, but mostly crashes, not performance issues, which is a first in nearly 18 years of various desktops and laptops at the company.
I've got an 8 GB M1 MBA and run Chrome and an IDE effortlessly, even when connected to a 4K monitor, and with tons of tabs open.
I'm not saying 8 GB is enough for everybody, but it's perfectly fine for an IDE and web browser. I'm pretty sure your issue was something else.
No one goes to a Lambo dealer and complains about the cost of an oil change. Price is the price for luxury goods.
Lamborghini shipped less than 10k units in 2022, total.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/11/apples-mac-market-share-jump...
https://www.lamborghini.com/en-en/news/lamborghinis-record-b...
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/19/apple-shipped-sev...
Maybe one day Apple will lower memory prices. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it...
They did the same with the storage. Even on expensive Mac Studios, even though the SSD can be taken out, it's incompatible with off the shelf SSDs. You can't even buy used, you have to go to the Apple store and pay the Apple premium for an SSD, and they reprogram your soldered SSD controller to work with the new drive.
Windows is so shock-full of dark patterns these days (I’m speaking of the start menu, the upgrade wheel, the survtech in the browser and the OS), that I will be between the sword and a dark place when I need to upgrade my hardware next time. The Windows 11 upgrade is free, which speaks to Microsoft’s commitment to make me their product.
Who knows, maybe I will end up paying five grands for a Mac Studio. In terms of hardware, that same amount of money would buy me a beefy workstation that I could arm myself, but Linux won’t run more than half of the software I use these days.
Apple used to sell an iMac with non-upgradable RAM:
we found this iMac has the memory soldered to the motherboard removing any possibility of adding additional memory. Users will be permanently locked in to the 8GB of memory, as there is no Apple factory upgrade option.
https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/25084-teardown-of-lower-cost...
Lots of returns and refurbs on that model.
You imagine, or you have data?
Apple should be more serious about their environmental commitments
That’s an asinine argument.
Good that that isn't the actual argument made by GP, but just a pretty strawman you managed to think up.
So yes, on average, Macs are significantly better for the environment. Having less RAM does not mean people replace their Macs more often than Windows computers.
If people truly cared about the environment, they'd buy Macs over Windows computers.
With that said, could Apple extend the lifespan of Macs even more by making the base RAM higher? Yes. Not going to argue against that. But Macs are already much better than Windows computers in this regard.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
For the "if people truly cared about the environment" they would probably get the same use out of a similar expensive PC.
It's also a bit tone deaf to gatekeep environmentalism behind a $1000++ purchase, especially one that many can't afford.
I really don't think so. I used to buy $800 - $900 Windows laptops. They often lasted 2 years before some hinge is broken or the display suddenly gets corrupted or it comes unbearably slow.
I had a 2013 base Macbook Air that lasted until 2019. None of my Windows laptops ever lasted that long. The data seems to back up my anecdote experience.
Do you get more RAM on a Windows laptop for the same price as a Mac? Yes, usually. But everything else around the Windows laptop is poor.
Anyways even though it's literally not a Windows laptop my system 76 lemur ultra i bought in May 2013 works fine after a decade of regular use with no hinge or screen problems. I came close to replacing it recently because i need a laptop with vulkan support but then it turned out that mesa actually has a vulkan implementation on ivy bridge (albeit with a warning that it's not entirely functional) so ill be holding onto it for at least a few more months, maybe longer.
When I was a poor college student, I kept buying $500 Windows laptops and they kept breaking after 1-2 years.
Next we'll find out that the system didn't have an SSD, had all manner of crapware installed and had its intake ducts filled with dust. Typical fanboy comparisons.
One hilarious thing I have noticed about those type of peoples, is that they will defend their overpriced MacBook to the teeth but also go for the cheapest nastiest food possible and defend their stingy choices with a "it's the same thing" type of argument even though you can clearly taste a difference and it is clearly nutritionally worse.
It makes you wonder... I try to avoid those peoples nowadays, always more trouble than they are worth...
These also break much faster than Macs in my experience.
I have a stack of old MacBooks I can’t use because they only have 256GB SSDs that can’t be upgraded and I was constantly running out of space on them.
There is something to be said for being able to upgrade a machine to lengthen its usable life.
Not disputing this. But the vast majority people don't upgrade their laptops. They just buy a new one when it's slow.
I can't find it right now but there's been studies done showing that most people never upgrade their RAM/storage even though they could. They just buy a new computer.
For real? With prevalent cloud storage and cheap tiny external devices it's hard to believe they're totally useless.
Why? Because they are upgradable in what matters, battery, memory and disk space.
As much as i love to rip on Apple's overpriced garbage, i think this speaks more to what an embarrassing clusterfuck the web has become. I remember doing all the listed tasks on computers that didn't even have 8GB HDDs.
If it's to expensive, buy another one!
Is there a "humen right" or something that says: NO ONE SCHOUL HAVE LESS THAN 16 GIGS!
A Pro(!) Machine which costs 4.000 Bucks with M3 Max, 36 Gigs and 1TB of SSD and ist used for 3 years or so costs 112 Bucks a month. For an absolute powerhouse which is doing Desktop-class Worstation-Performance on the go! And for a machine i am working on 8 hours a day and earn my money!
And as a Pro who has to buy a 112$/month machine you should have paid this thing in one or two hours work per month.
As a hobyist - well, it's a hobby! Buy whatever you can afford.
"very wide memory bus very close to the M3 chip"
I got voted down here. But the Mx performace you get is partially because of the wide memory bus of the unified memory. The downside is the cost and the you-can't-upgrade-card you have been dealt. Please don't point out again it's "just" DDR5 and not in a system-in-a-package and just like any other laptop.
"We shouldn’t accept this"
Well you raved about the CPU performance and how Apple is genius, you can't eat the cake and have it (the cake is a lie!)
(LDDR5 8gb is ~$25)
For instance, who is this “you” you’re raving against? How is CPU performance related to the cost if 8gb RAM?
Consider re-reading your comment before you hit post and the downvotes might well disappear.
Usually my comments have some upvotes or none. But my Apple comments get consistent downvotes.
"How is CPU performance related to the cost if 8gb RAM?"
"But the Mx performace you get is partially because of the wide memory bus of the unified memory. The downside is the cost"
I did write this in the comment I think and the others - but I agree not as clearly in this one as in others.
(My Apple/M[x]/Memory comments often drop karma below zero and than get upvoted - as a reaction? I do think this is more of a community topic, I don't think my other comments are clear and my Apple/M[x]/Memory comments get downvotes because they are unclear/confusing. If I write "Steve Wozniak is just a human" it seems in the center of the distortion field)
> "But the Mx performace you get is partially because of the wide memory bus of the unified memory. The downside is the cost"
FWIW I still have no idea what you mean here.
Wider memory bus => Better CPU performance + higher cost
Higher cost b/c wider bus with system-in-a-package has higher cost than memory with smaller bus in standard DIMMs.
Better CPU performance b/c a wider bus gets data faster to the CPU.
It’s not about what works: it’s about the perception customers have of the company, and this looks cheap.
Apple is a premium offering and questions like these are a product management failure that can damage the brand.
If you find yourself defending your product for looking inferior as a premium positioned product you have already made terrible mistakes. Apple should raise ram minimums simply to eliminate the perception of value questions. God knows (as does every investor) that they have the margin to do it.
also Docker.
From the article:
> Yes, you need more than 8GB
No, I don't.
That being said. I don't see why Apple wouldn't put 16gb in the M3 pros. I mean, I don't really get why you'd buy the smallest pro instead of just getting the air, but it does seem cheap of Apple to only put 8GB of ram into it.
What's going on is that almost none of the people posting here have used an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB of RAM, and don't realize that it's a very different experience than trying to use a PC with 8GB of RAM.
For the specs I would need it's now over $5k AUD. Sigh.
I had used an M1 Air with 16Gb for work in the past and was impressed by it but was skeptical of the 8 Gb version. That is until I bought one because it was on sale.
If you are doing video editing or using similarly memory intensive applications you will see issues, but you can in a sense say 8GB is ~equivalent to 16 GB on Windows for average use cases.
And so RAM for a mac is now analogous to camera lenses on an iPhone … it going to be the main driver of upgrades when the step change to M / SOC saturates
It also explains why the late Intel modules were limited to 8GB
It would be a strategic signaling mistake for Apple to sell RAM upgrades at actual cost, it would decrease their luxury brand value.
If you don't mind signaling poor and want to pay just actual costs buy a PC.
That may very well be my next computer. My old MBP died, and the cost of a new MBP is extortionate.
Thank you!
Manufacturers want to have a computer with enough memory that it never feels like a constraint to the user (and blog posts like this one enjoin them to do that).
At the same time, developers of software want to consume as much memory as possible-- up to the point where they've used it all and any extra becomes noticeable as perf problems to the user.
So Apple keeping their default memory offering low could be seen in a certain noble light...like honoring a nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
If Apple was asking $600 that might be OK, but at $1600? How many laptops at that price point have 8GB RAM? Heck a $400 Steam Deck has 16GB.
8G is paltry on a desktop computer that should last years.
When people say they need 16gb of ram to have a browser with 200 tabs, a chat messaging program, and an audio player I really wonder what they're smoking. That could be done on maybe 4gb, 8gb would make it easier to handle things like tabs with high resolution video.
You only NEED ram for what is actively being used. If you aren't actively using 199 tabs, you don't need them in memory.
Yes it's e-waste, it can't be upgraded, it can't be amended later those machines are under performing for life for essentially saving a few dollars just to give the false idea the machine is cheaper than they actually want to sell it at.
Yeah it does not matter how memory you have, the system is supposed to use as much as it can from it. So this does not mean anything. I’m not saying 8GiB is enough, just that this particular sentence makes no sense.
Accounting for second-order effects over longer timeframes it could be a net benefit for desktop users.
8GB should be plenty. That it isn't is a software problem.
I’ve never sat in a software development meeting in which the amount of RAM on customer machines was discussed, let alone used as an argument in favor of spending significant time doing software optimizations.
I would be very surprised if Apple selling laptops with 8GB of RAM had any effect whatsoever on software development priorities.
• Devs and their managers don’t use the 8GB version.
• Electron is used because it’s cheap to develop for. You can hate its RAM-eating guts all you want, but for cross-platform UIs there’s no competition. Nobody wants to pay for maintenance of 5 separate front ends in 3 languages.
That we still have to care about memory is insane to me.
Edit: though if I must make a point it was just that it's relatively uncommon to have fully speced out machines as a student
All prices for everything in the brand are overinflated, because you are paying for the brand and prestige.
You want Honda prices for upgrades on your Mercedes.
An equivalent Windows laptop can do mostly everything the Mac can do except have an Apple on the lid.
Or develop / test / use Mac software.
Or even check how Safari works for your SAAS (without resorting to BrowserStack or similar).
Or even check how Safari works for your SAAS (without resorting to BrowserStack or similar).
You're making my point still. Because you are developing software and testing in the Mac environment, over there everything is more expensive.
The machine still works well for development, running VMs, etc. It's no longer my main machine, but it works great for when I have to travel.
I have no problem with low-memory being an option, but why stock only meager amounts of RAM on the models sold in the store?
I suspect that people who have decided to pay extra for the Pro model may actually have some idea how much RAM they need.
There’s no shame in getting your bag.
Apple isn’t the only company that makes laptops with soldered memory, although soldered SSDs are less common. Some of the most popular models from brands like Dell and Lenovo have soldered memory, like the XPS 13 and X1.
Joe Consumer will never take a screwdriver to their laptop anyway, and your company certainly won’t pay for IT people $100 an hour to make upgrades and replace batteries. They’ll just “lease” computers and refresh on a ~3 year cycle because their apes for employees are going to spill coffee and crumbs on the damn thing anyway.
Just call these Apple systems what they are and pretend they cost $200 more than the base price in the first place and get over it. Either the costs makes sense to you or it doesn’t and go buy something else like 80% of the PC market already does.
Nobody seems to mind that brands like Razer and Alienware make overpriced gear because they aren’t as popular as Apple.
Yes, we get it, the base M3 14” “Pro” has “Pro” in the name and it’s not “Pro.” Who fucking cares? There are thousands of products that use the word “Pro” without being “Pro.” And yes the M3 14” MacBook Pro costs $400 less than the M3 Pro equipped model. The $1999 model gained 2GB of memory compared to the previous generation.
I don't want to be overly negative on what is intended by this concluding line, but it's part of the problem.
It should re-state the point that has been driven home - the entry level MacBook Pro is a bad product for its audience. Just leave it at that - it doesn't say the whole line suffers the same fate, but it's OK to say it's a bad offering without making excuses for them.
It does mention the issue again after, but don't say they're unilaterally great on the whole if they're not - it gives them justification to dismiss the issue if they are still "great".
The entry level MacBook Pro is not a device you could recommend to the majority of professionals. We all know it. You should either get the Air, or a MacBook Pro with 16GB+.
Basically the target of companies is avoiding to employ programmers for native applications. These people cost money. And optimization cost money. So they opt to waste our resources. The new ThinkPad/MacBook with soldered RAM does cost us a lot but not them.
And if you just use Googles Chrome - which made all this possible with V8 - you still have a problem. Every website believes it is okay to load JS from literally everywhere and show any kind of animated media. Plus no ad-blocker.
And us, opening hundreds of tabs with Epiphany, Firefox, Safari or Chrome ;)
On Windows the UI toolkit story is just as much of a pain, with microsoft reinventing the toolkit every other year, and it still lacks basic layout features solved in CSS.
Linux? Gtk and Qt are maintained for years. They deprecate the old stuff and then a new major release is published. While the old release is maintained and they even care about keeping Gtk3 and Gtk2 aligend and bugs fixed. People complain about upgrades - but actually there are updates and upgrades.
PS: Don’t mention Silverlight.
Of course you have a choice. If the price isn't right then don't buy it.
> This is pure corporate greed from the world’s biggest and richest technology company, and as Apple customers, we shouldn’t stand for it.
A company is only useful to you if its interests align with yours and if it is producing something worth the money. If a company is not worth your time or money then put your time and money toward something else.
iPhone's have been under memoried at significant periods during their life, but most stores carried an upgraded model. I find the non base model Mac's often aren't available at launch, have longer lead times and force you to go to the Apple Store where you won't get any discount of any kind and often find a longer lead time even there.
And thinking "you shouldn't be paying extra" is just bias. Just select the configuration you need, look how much it costs and figure if this is what you want to pay. You are not paying anything extra. They clearly tell you how much you are going to pay for the configuration you want.
There are other laptops you can buy for cheaper. And even Apple has Macbook Air which is much cheaper while still more than enough to do most types of office tasks or internet browsing. So someobody wants not only a Macbook, but also a new Macbook and top model for that matter.
It is like saying you want to buy top of the line Mercedes and complain the options are expensive. Yes, they are expensive, but nobody forces you to buy top of the line Mercedes. If you can't afford, don't complain about it.
And as for non-replaceable RAM, that's the same thing as with battery or SSD or whatever else-- no one makes a fuss about it because no one wants to lug around large heavy laptops. Non-replaceable components is what made these super small and light and blazing fast if you pay for specced up versions.
He has not much problem with Apple charging $1799 for a MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM. His problem is that Apple sells another model with 8GB for $1599. A $200 difference for a 8GB difference, what a ripoff!
Does that mean he'd be happier if Apple sold the base model for $1699 instead of $1599, making the 8GB memory upgrade cost a more reasonable $100?
"As I write this, with just a handful of browser tabs open, Slack, and a distraction-free writing app (iA Writer—it’s great), I’m consuming just about 11GB on my M2 MacBook Air."
How the hell did we end up here? This level of waste is mind-boggling. Honestly, this makes me want to run MenuetOS as my daily driver.
It's useless to argue against and pure waste of time. Don't but their products and don't argue. They are just another greedy, dominating corporate. Nothing more, nothing less. It's how they project in people's mind is good they are. All other stuff of innovation, fantastic product etc etc is just pure marketing gimmick. Nothing works beyond a few years and one still needs to upgrade. Take a ThinkPad and throw it in dust and it still functions even after 12 - 13 yrs with the latest upgraded OS support.
Can anyone show a single apple product that exists? Oh no! They don't have any product that had so much life or upgrade ability since apple sucks cash from time to time from their beloved fanbois!
And yet folks compare it against other products missing the core discussion here about the mind altering behaviour and how apple drives the consumer base while commanding a premium for the silliest of the silly feature or upgrade. That's the command they've over the ecosystem and once one gets caught, there's no turning back.
It's like Hotel California. You can check in anytime, but you can never leave and you pay with your soul.
Turns out we now require at least 32GB to build the project, but I just upgraded all the way to 64 because it was so cheap.
btw, if you are wondering, Unity will just hang forever during the build process of you don't have enough ram.
I mean, for many Intel CPUs, they're literally exactly the same products off the manufacturing line that are just binned differently, despite significant price differences in the market.
Kid is using a framework with 16GB as well. Why? It’s 2023 and cost an extra $40.
This isn't that hard, people.
> the true starting cost of a M3 MacBook Pro is $1,699 because to buy one with only 8GB of RAM is crazy.
Does a MBP with 16 GB of RAM cost $2000 or $1700?
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quo...
Apple does a lot of analytics maybe they see that there's really a group of people who just use the default apps with some light browsing. But I think it's rather unlikely.
What would happen if Macs with twice the memory were more common? There’s always an Electron or whatever ready to eat that extra RAM.
Apple is probably doing the low end PC users a favour here, by proxy.
(Not that Apple cares in the slightest, it’s a side effect.)
What you’re proposing is for Apple to raise the price of the baseline model by $40 so that everyone gets 16GB. But most regular people don’t need 16GB. They don’t have a million tabs and applications open all at once. They use their computers for very basic things and Apple makes them very happy by providing a luxurious product for that.
You can see the same pricing strategy play out in countless other premium products, and not just in consumer goods. Check out the prices on Fluke multimeters or Tektronix oscilloscopes sometime (and compare with UniT and Rigol, respectively).
First, I don't know a lot of regular people who DON'T have 20-30 tabs open minimum. And the #1 consumer of RAM for "regular people" is browser tabs. Just a "normal" page with tons of ads is eating a tremendous amout of RAM, and most people would like to keep dozens open. Not to mention running a half dozen Electron apps at once like Slack, Teams, etc. It's been a decade plus of ever-growing OS and software bloat and Apple's base model 8GB hasn't changed in all this time. So, if 8GB was just enough then, it can't possibly be enough for those same consumers now.
Yesterday an older machine with 4GB of actual memory and 12GB of paged memory on a fast drive running Windows 10 (I know, not an Apple story) died mid use and auto rebooted.
The cause?
Google Chrome, 14 tabs, 8 inactive, an app running extracting subtitles from a queue of MKV files, a terminal window and ... <drumroll> .. windows update triggered to sanity check for new updates in the background.
The (windows) update checks are getting pretty damn heavy these days, you can hear the drives thrashing in the background as every critical file is version and CRC checked and who knows what else these days.
The failure and rebooting was likely linked to my hard limit on paged memory - just this dedicated 12 GB partition and no more .. but the workload was light by any past standard and it's the first instance of the updater kicking in and exhausting resources.
Its... Maybe $20?[1][2]
Its so cheap that it probably costs Apple more to manufacture the extra Macbook/CPU SKU, test it, support it and so on than to just sell 16GB as the baseline.
Its literally, purely just to upsell the 16GB version. There is effectively no savings for the consumer even if 8GB is "enough."
1: https://www.dramexchange.com/
2: https://www.mouser.com/c/semiconductors/memory-ics/dram/?typ...
It’s market segmentation. Memory isn’t the only difference between those models.
It’s market segmentation. Memory isn’t generally going to be the only configured difference.
So maybe $30?
It’s clear to be that the 8GB isn’t intended to sell in volume. It’s just there so they can advertise a lower “Starting at “ price. It’s literally just for marketing.
> It’s clear to be that the 8GB isn’t intended to sell in volume.
If they didn't intend to sell it in volume, it wouldn't be the base model.
The SoC design of Apple silicon makes an 8GB M3 MBP faster than a 16GB Intel machine.