I wish Apple wasn’t as stingy with RAM upgrade options considering this can’t be upgraded later. For all the talk on the part of Apple of being more sustainable and green, allowing more competitive memory options would help extend the useful life of these products.
All is about the bottom line, and that's why they're stingy with the ram as well.
Now, every successful company have to have a great bottom-line and that should be a focus as well yes. Not sure how to balance that for a big company like Apple, and I am happy I am not in that position.
That doesn't mean they can't give more, but it's not an 'apples' to apples comparison.
However, they aren’t using good-old SODIMMs - or anything like them. There is no way they’d ever be able to give you laptops with 400GB/s of memory bandwidth in that slim package while making it user-serviceable. I would love to see them try but it’s not an easy request.
I remember when I bought my first alu-Macbook in 2009 and I could remove the battery and add additional memory by just flicking a latch
And the idea seems for it to be more of an LAM with fallback to OpenAI for the LLM.
With current models the latency comes from processing, not from the network — going from a high-power remote server to a low-power local phone is likely to increase latency more than it reduces it
The bigger crime is that the 15" can't be configured with the M3 Pro... particularly given the less-ambitious spec compared to M1/M2 Pro. Things like not supporting a second external display make the 15" MBA a non-starter as an 'ultrabook' even with 24GB configurations.
With the M3 Pro, since you get a 192b memory bus, you'd have options up to 36GB as well as dual external display, which is at least adequate for the class of product.
But you wouldn't have the same performance with discrete memory, so shrug.
what ?!!!!??????!!! there is absolutely nothing sustainable or green about apple, it's products, or its business practices.
> The MacBook Air is made with over 50 percent recycled content overall, a first for the company. This includes 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100% recycled tin in the solder and gold in the plating of multiple printed circuit boards, 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets (which is 99% of the rare earth elements in the device), 100% recycled cobalt in the MagSafe connector’s battery and magnets, 100% recycled copper in the main logic board (also a first), 90% recycled steel in the battery tray, keyboard feature plate, and trackpad beam plate, and 35% or more recycled plastic in other components.
> Additionally, over 25 percent of the electricity used to manufacture the device was sourced from supplier clean energy projects. And 100 percent of the wood fiber used in the packaging is recycled, as is 99 percent of the fiber-based plastic.
They design their laptops in such way that they are not (easily) repairable, and the failure of one component could mean replacement of the entire logic board. And echoing the parent comment, if you think 8G/256GB is good enough at the time of purchase but find it unusable because of a change in the way you use your computer, the only option is to trade-in/sell it instead of just upgrading them. (The vast majority ofWindows laptops on the market has a replaceable SSD.)
(and Apple holding onto a device that is traded in doesn't help when the device could be used by the original owner with an upgrade)
For example, my old MacBook Pro was from mid-2015, I only replaced it with a new M2 Pro early last year - it was my primary machine for almost eight years, with just one battery replacement. The current iPhone I’m writing this on is from late 2020 (12 Pro) and still in fine working condition, I can’t see myself having any reason to upgrade this year.
i always sell my apple products. i usually get at least 50% back on what i paid.
And one of the bonuses of a Mac is that they all come with TB4 so no compromise on performance.
In the case of Apple, the primary (and maybe only?) difference is the number of external displays supported: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mh35952/mac
since macbook airs don't have multi-display capability, you can't call it thunderbolt. you can call it usb4, or usb-c 40gbps, or whatever, but it's not technically thunderbolt - thunderbolt is the brand for the full-capability standard.
this is not something consumers normally bump up against since x86 laptops generally either have multi-display support or don't exist in a product tier where 40gbps is a thing. Stuff like chromebooks falls into the latter, too cheap to have 40gbps, and the entire x86 space is dominated by literally two companies both of which happen to support multi-display. but you'll probably see this show up more in ARM notebooks once other vendors have a shot at releasing processors besides just those 2.
like idk what you expect anyone to say here - usb standards are kind of a shitty free-for-all and always have been. usb gives you the freedom to make a confusing port that doesn't support everything. The simple fact of the matter is the base-tier Mx processors don't support multi-display without a software-driven dongle, that's all you need to know, it's otherwise a full-capability tb3 port, basically usb4 but without the baggage of being unable to connect to certain tb3 devices like usb4 sometimes does.
there is absolutely a justification for laptops like air to not have multi-display support. not everybody needs it, and those processors cross-over between the tablet and laptop spaces. it's a fancy tablet apu, regardless of how good it performs. the sin is not offering a M3 Pro variant on the 15" MBA, and I'd say offering the M3 on the MBPs at all. But it totally makes sense for ultramobility laptops to cut power and cost, and you'll almost definitely see ultrabooks start doing that as the wintel monopoly crumbles over the next year or two. That will be branded as USB4 and won't necessarily support all the capabilities of TB3... or be compatible with all legacy TB3 devices. USB standard sucks, or rather: USB Implementers Forum is responsive to their customers, who aren't you (at least not directly).
Perhaps “less energy” is only one input to cost, which is why the rest of the industry doesn’t have near the level of recycled components.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling
> 42% of crude steel produced is recycled material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_by_material#Iron_and...
The only reason it's not industry standard to use 100% recycled metals is that it's pointless greenwashing. Everyone already uses as much recycled metal as they can get their hands on because it's cheaper.
Definitely an interesting emergent bandwagon phenomenon, i find myself thinking. Years ago i didn’t notice such bandwagon attention seeking sorts of derisive nonsense nearly as much if basically ever.
Like you said, it’s sort of just a reality nowadays.
“there is absolutely nothing sustainable or green about apple, it's products, or its business practices.”
My first fews months of my time on HN can be best described by the famous XKCD strip per link below. Foolhardy attempts as I soon realised.