Having an 8GB version makes it more accessible. Apple could just stop selling it and the complaint about there being a $200 upgrade would no longer be valid.
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.
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.