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Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

My problem with Apple devices are that:

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.

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Thank you for proving the parent's point. The base model is insufficient for your use case.

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.

You're welcome. I don't disagree.

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.

Insufficient? An 8gb ram MacBook crushes word, YouTube and browsing Facebook. That’s most people, I think your “almost no-one” is “most people”.

Someone who only cares about Word, YouTube and browsing Facebook also doesn't need a $1,600 laptop with an 8-core CPU and a chunky GPU, they could get by with something much less powerful and probably wouldn't even notice the difference - and if anything, having only 8 GB of RAM is more likely to cause performance problems than not having a fast CPU or GPU (the modern web and modern apps are pretty memory hungry especially if you open a lot of tabs).

Which is an ipad use case, I think people aren't so offended by the air, which could be viewed as "ipad with keyboard" but by the macbook pro with 8G, because presumably a person using it for "pro" work would be doing some heavy lifting to justify the "pro" bit.

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.

I don’t get this, it’s not like apple made the pro model worse with the M3, they made it more accessible than before, where the entry price was 2k. Now there’s a model in between for those that want a bit more than an Air, but can’t/wont pay 2k for a more loaded Pro, at $400 less. Sometimes one just needs a few more ports, and a nicer screen.

Yes I agree upgrades are expensive but more choice than before isn’t a bad thing.

I don't know; my wife is limited to primarily these things[1], and she was always asking me why her computer was so slow; she refused to close most of the open apps or browser tabs for various reasons.

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.

> she refused to close most of the open apps or browser tabs for various reasons

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.

I’ve been using an 8gb M1 Air for 3 years now. It’s fine for personal use, and there have been stretches where I needed to use it as a dev machine in a pinch.

Not optimal but to say 16 is a necessity is an overstatement t

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