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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

I think the best reaction would be shame. Just a big round of shame for a trillion dollar company being so greedy to cripple their top equipment. Tech’s stagnated for over a decade and largely because of greed and at the expense of innovation.

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.

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Good luck! People have been trying to shame Apple for their premium pricing since the day they started selling computers, and it has never done a thing to change their strategy nor sales. I think the issue is that a lot of tech people don’t fully understand what Apple is selling, what value is there, and why it appeals to so many consumers, despite whatever reasons we think we have. Nobody needs to prove you wrong, because most consumers do not know and do not care what germanium and plan9 are. Most consumers do not want to mod their phone or plug it into a keyboard & mouse, heck most programmers don’t even want that.

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.

I think the shame is more around calling it a “MacBook PRO” and getting people to pay premium for something that is clearly not to their own high standards and carefully curated image for the “PRO” line of a product.

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.

> ... it has never done a thing to change their strategy nor sales.

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-...

> 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

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.

Hopefully they'll come out with a 32" 6K iMac with Target Display Mode. ;-)

> (...) and we have a unified memory architecture.

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.

> 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.

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.

> (...) for their premium pricing (...)

That's a creative euphemism for price gouging.

Your framing is not accurate. Apple is capitalist, using the free market, and profiteering, sure, but price gouging is “distinguished by being short-term and localized and by being restricted to essentials such as food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and equipment needed to preserve life and property.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging

I think you tried rather desperate to handwave over the fact that Apple price-gouges their laptops. Their entry-level prices for anaemic 8GB laptops to the small fortunes they charge to update (doesn't even count as an upgrade) their RAM beyond 8GB is nothing but price gouging. You can't hide the fact that Apple charges more for 16GB of RAM than what it costs to buy a full blown PC with 16GB of RAM.

It seems like you must have misread or misunderstood what I said. I explicitly acknowledged multiple times that their RAM & storage prices are higher than market rates. You are still misusing the phrase ‘price gouging’ according to Wikipedia’s definition. There are other common phrases for charging higher than market rates, such as profiteering. That’s fine, you call it what you want, but FWIW the result is you are adding negative spin while accusing me of positive spin.

> Tech’s stagnated for over a decade

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.

Sure. Running an OS that is carrying a lot of legacy OS X with introduced bugs and cruft. I love *nix and hope to keep using it for a long time more. But if you plunked 2002 me into modern day, apple’s offerings would be pretty cool but not what I’d expect after 2 decades.

You could buy a desktop with 4 gigs of ram in 2010.

They could get me to shut up for probably 4 years if they cemented a deal to produce the next Nintendo console with Nintendo in a way Nintendo would be fully onboard with delivering. Think steam deck or mac mini level of hardware/cost.

Most of your comments in this thread read like you are completely unaware of the tech and manufacturing leaps we've already passed and are currently trying to pass. You are allowed to complain if you want to, but your complaints are unsubstantiated. Signalling we haven't made significant and or substantial advances since 2002 is a joke - especially if your barometer is buying RAM.

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.

I bought my windows laptop with 8g of ram in 2009. It was nicer but certainly not top of the line. If I recall, I think the minimum you’d find at that time would be 4g, and some configurations offered 16g.

What was the leap though? Pay huge sums for the best TSMC node and put as much as possible on package? Own the whole stack?

I don't know what the leap was, just the effect: a combination of perf and battery life that puts everything else to shame.

Marketing. It was a huge marketing leap for Apple to take credit for TSMC's node upgrades and claim it as some sort of great technological leap.

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.

Yeah, probably had nothing to do with Qualcomm acquiring Nuvia, etc.

M1 was not that big of a leap for trillion dollar company. If you looked in A12 bionic or other processor from Apple before M1, M1 wasn't that different in IPC/core or any metric. Also Apple was 2 generation in semiconductor process ahead due to TSMC contracts.

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.

This discussion is a bit like the dropbox/rsync comment, M1 was a huge leap for the users, I am yet to see anyone upgrading to M1 and not amazed around me. It was a technological huge leap or not is not the important part here in my opinion.

Dropbox/rsync thread is so hyped here and most people haven't read it[1]. Firstly most comments were positive. Also the top comment poster who was negative first became positive later after explaination. Top commenter said "You are correct that this presents a very good, easy-to-install piece of functionality for Windows users". Second commenter said "This is genius. It's is problem everyone is having, and everyone knew it".

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.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

It's entirely subjective and I'm going to disagree. I ran an A12Z Developer Transition Kit and then immediately upgraded to an M1 Mini and the raw performance was staggeringly faster.

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).

There was a time in the late 90s and early aughts when by the time you've unboxed your new computer it's already out of date.

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.

My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks

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

https://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos?si=kbkY4H6nepvB7I0o

I don't even need to click the link. Weird Al' is speaking the truth here!

> The company is the problem here

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.

Yeah, everyone points out that "if its free, you are the product" then Google and Microsoft do all kinds of shitty stuff due to their products being cheap/free, then people scream about Apple's hardware markups.

Apple does plenty of data collection too though I believe they keep most the data internal. "If it's free, you are the product" sure, but that doesn't imply that if it's not free, you are not the product.

You mean do the right thing by shareholders. Apple spends on the order of a 100 billion a year lining shareholder pockets through buybacks and dividends. That is three times what they spend on r&d.

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.

if the market (competition) is not forcing them, why would they spend all that on R&D?

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.

Tim Cook has a choice, Apple actually started doing that right after Steve Jobs passed away. Steve categorically refused to do that kind of stuff precisely because of those problems. Tim Cook also has a vested interest in lining his own pockets, he has targets that are about revenue and profits, not user experience and customer satisfaction. So, he maximise his own benefit and this is what we get.

People who pretend Apple wasn't different under Job are magnificent gaslighters and should not be taken seriously about anything really...

And yet they become obsolete in a couple of years of time unlike the likes of other products like say for example, ThinkPads.

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...

> And yet they become obsolete in a couple of years of time unlike the likes of other products like say for example, ThinkPads.

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

> I think the best reaction would be shame. Just a big round of shame for a trillion dollar company being so greedy to cripple their top equipment.

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.

It seems in 2004 the web was much more indignant on Apple memory prices. Let's pick up the pace people!

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=a...

Innovation for the sake of innovation doesn't make a whole lot of sense. A CPU on germanium? Why? The semiconductor industry thought about it decided silicon was a better material platform 50 years ago.

“The semiconductor industry thought about it decided silicon was a better material platform 50 years ago.” Because we’re stuck at a handful of cores and around 3ghz clock on silicon.

We are? I must not know how to count because those are not the numbers I have. What year is it where you are?

The decision was kind of arbitrary though, and now economy of scale makes it very hard to switch. For instance, GaAs is better semiconductor than silicone in many aspects, and probably somewhat better overall for chips, but switching to it would cost billions

I’m in the market for a new Macbook. Should I get the M2 instead of the M3? The base M2 had 16GB RAM

Honestly hold off until next year if you can or when they announce the M4. Otherwise probably get whatever you can afford to upgrade the RAM.

Or just wait until the year after for the M5.

Point being the jump from intel to M1 was much bigger than the jump from M1 to M3.

We don't know what they're upgrading from, they could have an M1 already. If they do have an Intel machine, then yes, they should ideally buy an M1 rather than spending more for M2 or M3 which don't really seem to be that large of a jump but for a proportionally higher cost.

I hear that the M6 is likely to be the most powerful chip they’ve ever produced.

I replaced an M1 Pro with an M2 Air and have had nothing but improvements in my daily computing. Juggling Xcode, terminal tools, web browsers, Slack, Discord, music/podcasts, video streaming, video CALLS, all the background sync, email, VS Code, occasionally photoshop for flavor. It just doesn't slow down, at all, at any point.

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.

Same here. Turned in my 14" MBP M1 for a M2 15" MB-Air (1TB NVMe, 24G RAM). Lightweight, fast, excellent 15" screen. Hands down the best laptop I have ever had (and I have a stack of MBP boxes in my closet from the past 10yrs).

> I’m in the market for a new Macbook. Should I get the M2 instead of the M3?

Yes, especially if you were considering a low-end M3 model. Also consider a MacBook Air, which are great.

The MBP has a very nice screen including HDR, if you care about that. M2 vs M3 - no idea. I have a M1 and it's great.

What is your current computer? I still have my M1 Pro and it does everything I need it to right now.

Currently have a desktop as my primary device with an AMD Ryzen 5600x. Never felt that I was pushing that system. Had a Macbook Air 2019 that was starting to feel sluggish.

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

I've seen reviews of the M2 and M3 chips, they're not too much better than the M1 it seems, even MKBHD on YouTube concluded the same and stuck with his M1, so that's what I'd recommend as well. If you're looking for deals, /r/appleswap has some good ones.

Just one more subjective datapoint from someone who previously upgraded every 1-2 generations on Intel or AMD mobile platforms and really likes to have the shiny new stuff ("It's TWENTY % faster!"): I have absolutely no need nor desire to upgrade my M1 Pro (using it for web development). If the difference in performance could be felt at all, it definitely wouldn't be worth the price, and other upgrades are basically non-existent. I wholeheartedly recommend finding a well-kept M1 Pro or at least a discounted M2 Pro.

The base M3 MBP isn't a true MBP. It's to replace the 13" MBP w/ touchbar, which was always a lower-end black sheep of the MBP family. Now that they've removed the touchbar, they've consolidated it into the regular MBP lineup, but it remains crippled.

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.

Yeah the base model MacBook Pro being gimped goes back even further than the recently discontinued Touch Bar pro.

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.

Yes. A discounted M2 with 16 (or 32) GB is a much better value than a new M3.

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