This is a fascinating psychological phenomenon:
People can get absolutely furious when something is offered for sale that they don't personally want to buy.
To me this attitude is bizarre, but apparently this is mortally offensive to some people.
People can get absolutely furious when something is offered for sale that they don't personally want to buy.
To me this attitude is bizarre, but apparently this is mortally offensive to some people.
1) The base configuration comes with insufficient resources (low memory, low disk space, till surprisingly recent past slow HDD instead of SSD), and
2) The upgrades are way too expensive compared to any other hardware manufacturer, meaning that
3) The advertised price is a lie! Almost no one should buy the base configuration.
You see a device advertised as 1500$. You think "Sweet! That's the price I am willing to pay!". But then you go through the selection process and end up with a 2000$ minimum on the checkout page. Even though it's not the same, psychologically, it feels like when you try to get an AirBnB for 100$ a night for 3 night and end up seeing a price of 920$ in the checkout page instead of 300$.
Apple is pricing necessities (like 16 GB of RAM) as luxuries, and people don't like that.
You know Apple's base models have a history of being insufficient for your use-case and that upgrades are pricier than you'd like.
You see the cost of the base model and are upset when you find that you will need to spend more than that base cost to get the model you want.
Apple devices and upgrades are costly, without a doubt. But there is clearly a market for whom the price and capabilities of the base model is more than enough.
I know the prices on AirBnB are a lie too, but they still make me unhappy.
I know the unlimited data plans are not unlimited, but I am no happier due to this knowledge when I see their ads.
I know if I buy a perpetual license for a service, it will probably stop functioning in less than 5 years, but I am not more content when it happens because of this knowledge.
People are complaining about the expected tip percentage rising well above 20%. But they feel unhappy about this, instead of mentally adding 30% to the list prices and counting that as the real price and imagining the tip is 0.
At this point, it should be fascinating if we find an instance where human emotions don't work like this, rather than if they do.
I bought here an air with 16GB of RAM and all of the complaints have gone away.
1: Though s/Facebook/Pinterest/, and occasionally a non-word office app open.
At some point I got in the habit of closing tabs and restarting web browsers periodically as their RAM footprint would expand until they were consuming gigabytes.
I'd like to think that an 8GB machine could easily support hundreds of open browser tabs, but this may not actually be true, especially if you don't run an aggressive ad blocker.
But, I think pretty much everyone understands apple tends to have a social signaling aspect tied to it, too. This is why you see plenty of PowerPoint warriors/middle mgmt toting them around too, because "pro" even though their use case for the machine is frequently little more than light office work (ppt/word/excel). So, why not offer it with 8G, they get their social signalling for cheap, and everyone else gets to pay $$$$ for the real configuration.
Yes I agree upgrades are expensive but more choice than before isn’t a bad thing.
Not optimal but to say 16 is a necessity is an overstatement t
Apple is the brand that many of us in the tech crowd have long recommended to our non-technical friends and relatives. You could pay a slightly premium price and expect a machine that is easy to understand, “just works” and most importantly: that you would get a fair few years’ worth of use out of for the extra upfront cost.
Apple is undermining that by shipping 8GB and 256GB in the base configuration. They’re setting up a situation where the expected life of their computers is potentially shortened by unexpectedly-bloated future OS upgrades.
Remember the crappy underspecced Celeron laptops that Walmart used to sell? That unsuspecting non-technical customers would shell out hundreds for, only to become unusable slow in only 1-2 years, meanwhile suffering through it that whole time?
We recommended Apple to our friends and relatives precisely to avoid those kind of cheap and nasty predatory products, but now Apple is moving in that direction too.
As someone (who is technically skilled) who has recommended Apple tech to my whole family (who are non-technical) with massively positive results after migrating from Windows PCs, yes that does anger me.
Similar to the situation where apple was downgrading the iphone cpu after a year to hide their faulty batteries.
I could, of course, handhold every family member buying hardware to make sure they get the right thing. I’d just rather not.
In this case, a couple hundred bucks extra seems to make a world of difference in performance and therefore, more importantly, longevity of the machine.
EDIT: Apparently from reading here, folks in the MacRumors comments are furious. Guess I'm glad I don't read the comments!
You're just going to have to accept that some people don't like your favorite brand's newest product, it's not the end of the world.
Instead of discussing the merits of 8GB vs 16GB commenters are incredulous that Apple would even offer an 8GB laptop in 2023.