The 256gb and 512gb models have 8gb of ram. The 1tb and 2tb models have 16gb. Not a fan of tying ram to storage.
Such a waste of nice components.
I can't run podman, slack, teams, and llama3-8B in llama.cpp at the same time. Oddly enough, this is rarely a problem.
This just seems like lameness on Apple’s part.
Your estimates are not even close. You can't honestly think that LPDDR5 at leading edge speeds is only $3 per 64 Gb (aka 8GB), right?
Your estimate is off my an order of magnitude. The memory Apple is using is closer to $40 for that increment, not $3.
And yes, they include a markup, because nobody is integrating hardware parts and selling them at cost. But if you think the fastest LPDDR5 around only costs $3 for 8GB, that's completely out of touch with reality.
You can get 8GB of good quality DDR5 DIMMs for 40$, there is no way in hell that Apple is paying anywhere near that.
Going from 8 to 16GBs is probably somewhere between 3-8$ purely in material costs for Apple, not taking into account any other costs associated
You mention DIMMs and component prices instead. This is unhelpful.
See https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/memory/774... for LPDDR5 prices. You can get a price of $48/chip at a volume of 2000 chips. Assuming that Apple got a deal of $30-40-ish at a few orders of magnitude larger order is quite fair. Though it certainly would be nicer if Apple priced 8GB increments not much above $80-120.
As for prices, the prices you cited are not at all comparable. Apple is absolutely certainly buying directly from manufacturers without a middleman since we're talking about millions of units delivered each quarter. Based on those quantities, unit prices are guaranteed to be substantially lower than what DigiKey offers.
Based on what little public information I was able to find, spot market prices for LPDDR4 RAM seem to be somewhere in the 3 to 5$ range for 16GB modules. Let's be generous and put LPDDR5 at tripe the price with 15$ a 16GB module. Given the upgrade price for going from 8 to 16GB is 230 EUR Apple is surely making a huge profit on those upgrades alone by selling an essentially unusable base configuration for a supposed "Pro" product.
A DIMM is 8 or 16 chips (9/18 is ECC), while the LPDDR is a single chip for the same storage. The wild density difference in chip capacity (512MB or 1GB vs 8GB) makes a huge difference, and how a stick can be sold at retail for cheaper than the bare LPDDR chip in volume.
but up until these these things I felt I could run whatever I wanted, including Baldur’s Gate 3.
As devs and power users we'll always have an edge case for higher RAM usage, but the average consumer is going to be perfectly fine with 8GB of RAM.
All of these comments about how 8GB of RAM is going to make it "unusable" or a "waste of components" are absurd.
I was using my 4gb ram pinebook pro in public transport yesterday, and decided to turn of all cores except for a single Cortex-A53, to safe some battery. I had no problems for my usecase of a text editor + shell to compile for doing some SIMD programming.
It's not quite in the same ballpark as showing apartment or airfare listings without mandatory fees but it is at the ticket booth outside of the stadium.
> It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs to a more manageable numbers.
Or you just click the little chevron in Tree Style Tabs or equivalent and 100 tabs are just hidden in the UI.
It's fairly easy to hit a few GB of RAM used up just with those.
I'm still getting at least 16 GB on my next one though.
like, the $359 acer shitbox probably doesn't do all the exact same thing as the MBA either, but that's actually ok and really only demonstrates the MBA is an unaffordable luxury product, basically the same as a gold-plated diamond-encrusted flip-phone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292839
Not your circus, not your clowns, but this is sort of the duality of apple: "it's all marketing and glitz, a luxury product, there's no reason to buy it, and the fact that they have a better product only PROVES it" vs "of course no PC manufacturer could possibly be expected to offer a top-notch 120hz mini-LED screen, a good keyboard, great trackpad, good speakers, and good SOC performance in a thin-n-light..."
There are different categories of "power users"
And as for the parent comment’s point, being into cars doesn’t mean you’re as good as a professional race car driver.
The Macbook line will get iPadOS support long before they allow MacOS on this line. Full steam ahead towards the walled garden.
M1 chips, great screens, precise pencil input and keyboard support, but we still aren't permitted a serious OS on it, to protect the monopolistic store.
App Stores have beeen around long enough to prove that they're little more than laboratories in which to carry out accelerated enshittification experimentation. Everything so dumbed down and feature-light, yet demanding subscriptions or pushing endless scammy ads. And games that are a shameless introduction to gambling addiction, targeted at kids.
Most of the 'apps' that people actually use shouldn't need to be native apps anyway, they should be websites. And now we get the further enshittification of trying to force people out of the browser and into apps, not for a better experience, but for a worse one, where more data can be harvested and ads can't so easily be blocked...
I feel bad about all this because I advised my mother to buy an iPad Pro as it was sold as a laptop replacement but it never materialized anywhere near expectations and ended being an expensive mistake that can only offer compromised workflows with limitations that do not even come close to a MacBook she was used to (even in Apple own apps, even something like the Page app, yes).
I think the iPad would be a fine device, if only they didn't try to upsell it and stopped pretending it is a "Pro" thing. If the whole lineup would get OLED displays, more RAM across the board and decent base storage for media at a more honest price it would be an easy recommendation.
As it is, the entry level is lackluster because of the display (if you only buy for content consumption it is better to go with an Android OLED options) and the high-end variant are just stupid expensive for what they will actually allow you to do.
But too many Apple customers have drunk the Kool-Aid so they don't have to care much about the reality and we just get expensive bullshit.
The multitasking will still be poor but perhaps Apple can do something about that when in docked mode.
That said, development likely remains a non-starter given the lack of unix tooling.
Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine.
And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.
It’s rather an issue of selling deliberately underpowered hardware for no good reason other than to sell actually up-to-date versions for a difference in price that has no relation to the actual availability or price of the components. The sheer disconnect from any kind of reality offends me as a person whose job and alleged primary competency is to recognize reality then bend it to one’s will.
8 GB were the standard back then.
Edit: I confirmed that I was indeed wrong, but the payoff isn't great anyway because that just means that yes in fact they've kept the exact same ram floor for 10 years. Insane.
For me personally 16 or 32 GB are perfectly fine, 8 GB was too little (even without VMs) and I've never needed 64 or more. So it's curious to see you are pretty much exactly the opposite.
Did you miss this part prefixing that sentence?
> I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course
>"I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM"
The used M1 MacBook Air I just bought is by far the fastest computer I have ever used.
I put a spare 120 GB SSD, a cheap no-name brand that was just lying around for some testing purposes. Found the similar off-the-shelf DDR3 2 GB RAM stick. I thought the RAM was faulty, turned out it’s in a working condition, so I put it there.
I need the computer for basic so-called office work (a browser, some messengers, email client and a couple of other utilities). I thought I’d buy at least two 4GB RAM sticks after I test it, so you know, 8 GB is just the bare imaginable minimum! I have my 16 GBs everywhere since, idk, maybe 2012 or something.
And you know what?! It works very well with 4 GB of RAM and default Fedora (it’s 40 now, but I started with 38, iirc). It has the default Gnome (also, 46 now, started with 44, iirc). And it works very well!
It doesn’t allow me to open a gazillion of browser tabs, but my workflow is designed to avoid it, so I have like 5 to 10 open simultaneously.
Before throwing Fedora at the PC, I thought I would just install a minimal Arch Linux with swaywm and be good. But I decided I don’t want to bother, and I’ll just buy 8 GB later on, and be done with it.
And here I am, having full-blown Gnome and just 4 GB of RAM. I don’t restrict myself too much, the only time I notice it’s not my main PC is when I want to do some heavy web-browsing (e.g. shopping on some different heavy websites with many tabs opened). Then it slows down significantly, till I close the unnecessary tabs or apps. All the software is updated and current, so it’s not like it’s some ancient PC from 00’s.
Also, I have my iPad Pro 12,9 1st Gen with just 4 GB of RAM too, and I never feel it’s slow for me.
I understand that some tasks would require a lot of RAM, and it’s not for everyone. Having a lot of RAM everywhere, I’m quite used to not thinking of it at all for a significant part of my career (for over a decade now), so I may have something opened for weeks that I don’t have any need for.
So, it’s 2024, and I’m surprised to say that 4 GB of RAM is plenty when you’re focused on some tasks and don’t multitask heavily. Which never productive for me at least. I even noticed that I enjoy my low-memory PC even more, as it reminds me with its slowdowns that I’m entering the multitasking state.
I use swaywm on my Arch Linux laptop, and most of the time it’s less than 3–4 Gb (I have 16 Gb).
Thus making your three other machines 400% perfectly fine?
This argument is self defeating in the context of the M4 announcement. "Average consumers" who don't need 16 GB of RAM don't need an M4 either. But people who do need an M4 chip probably also need 16 GB of RAM.
I think actually more people need 16 GB of RAM rather than a top M4 chip. Having only 8 GB can be a serious limitation in some memory heavy circumstances, while having (say) an M2 SoC rather than an M4 SoC probably doesn't break any workflow at all, it just makes it somewhat slower.
At least, chrome wouldn’t run that many tabs on iPad for sure if it used the same engine as desktop chrome
3 GB ram chips probably exist, but are definitely not common.
No device should be measuring storage in the gigabytes in 2024. Let alone starting at $1000 offering only 256GB. What ridiculousness.
I have years of photos and videos on there. Apparently the 256 GB model was the right choice for me?
I have the 256 GB model as well, full resolution of 5+ years of photos (around 20k), around 200 GB used, 180 on iCloud via Family Sharing.
All the changes under the Cook leadership are appalling and reveal what is definitely one of the worse character you can get as a leader. At this point even Bill Gates looks like a good guy in comparison.
A 1 TB consumer-oriented SSD is about $50 today. At Apple’s manufacturing scale, do you have any doubt that the cost to them is nearly negligible?
iPad Pros should come with 1-16 TiB of SSD, and 16-128 GiB of RAM.
On the Macbooks (running MacOS), RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes. It makes sense for Apple to account for with higher RAM spec for the 1TB/2TB configurations.
I'm pretty sure that's what all modern operating systems are doing.
Apple uses it for segmentation and nothing else.
Modern being - since the 80s.
Apple doesn't do this, and use their tight integration to perform a similar function using system memory. So there is some technical justification, I think. They are 100% price gougers though.
Gave me a chuckle ;)
It's also still typically just worse than an actual dram cache.
The justifications I see are to reduce the number of models needed to stock and to keep the purchasing decision simple for customers. These are very good reasons.
But no 16GB without more SSD? lol?
The iPhone SE exists because there is a market for this form factor. If you look at the specs, you would notice it uses hardware previously used by more expensive models.
> iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max
Again, different customers for different form-factors. These phones differ more than just SoC in them.
You understand that having N different colors of iPads is different from having N different SoCs for the same model of an iPad.
Some calculation like:
total storage size / page size per LBA (512B or 4KiB usually) * mapping data structure size
Are LBA's a thing on SSD's nowadays? I thought it was the legacy of the spinning rust.
SSD's operate on memory pages of the flash memory, and the page management is a complicated affair that is also entirely opaque to the host operating system due to the behind the scenes page remapping. Since flash memory is less durable (in the long term), the SSD's come overprovisioned and the true SSD capacity is always more (up to a double if my memory serves me well). The SSD controller also runs an embedded RTOS that monitors failures in flash chips and proactively evacuates and remaps ailing flash memory pages onto the healthy ones. Owing to this behaviour, the memory pages that the SSD controller reports back to the operating system have another, entirely hidden, layer of indirection.
As you mentioned, over-provisioning and other NAND flash memory health management techniques like garbage collection and wear leveling are needed for usable modern SSDs. Modern SSD controllers are complex beasts having 3-7 microprocessor cores (probably double digit core counts now with PCIe 5.0), encryption engines, power & thermal management, error correction, multiple hardware PHYs, etc.
Example product sheet: https://www.marvell.com/content/dam/marvell/en/public-collat...
I think it is strictly for that purpose.
And that decision somehow turns into making budget conscious people's UX shittier? How is that a reason not to make 16gb RAM, which is almost a bare minimum in 2024, available to everyone?
That said, Apple's policy toward SKUs is pretty consistent: you pay more money and you get more machine, and vice versa. The MacBooks are the only product which has separately configurable memory / storage / chip, and even there some combinations aren't manufactured.
My guess is they want you to use their cloud storage and pay monthly for it.
I'm not storing my Docker containers and `node_modules` in the cloud.
Pro isn't just images and videos.
I said this in a sibling comment already, but I think it's just price anchoring so that people find the $1500 they're actually going to pay a bit easier to swallow.
Unless you are a solo editor.
What is your concern?
I would expect most actual users of the Pro model, now that 13 inch is available at the lower tier, would be working with photos and video. Even shooting ProRes off a pro iPhone is going to eat into 256 pretty fast.
Seems like that model exists mainly so they can charge $1500 for the one people are actually likely to get, and still say "starts at $1299".
Then again, it's Apple, and they can get away with it, so they do. My main point here is that the 256GB model is bad value compared to the equivalent Air model, because if you have any work where the extra beef is going to matter, it's going to eat right through that amount of storage pretty quick.
That type of buyer is a very significant % of sales for iPad pros. Despite the marketing, there are really not that many people (as a % of sales) that will be pushing these iPad's anywhere even remotely close to their computational/storage/spec limits.
not again
What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?
I do think there is a price discrimination story here, but there are some details to be filled in.
Also, I have seen lots of people on HN complain about the price itself, even if it's not what you yourself object to.
This is what they did when I was buying iPad Air - it starts with actually problematically low 64GB of Storage... and the 256GB model is the next one with massive price jump.
It's the same kind of "anchoring" (marketing term) that car dealers use to lure you into deciding for their car based on the cheapest 29.999$ model which with "useful" equipment will end you costing like 45.000$
Not to mention that occasionally is nice to have a set of downloaded media available for vacation/travel and 64GB isn't enough to download week worth of content from Netflix.
This is why this is so annoying - you're right, I don't need 512GB or 256GB. But I'd still like to have more than "You're out of space!!" amount.
Games. You can put maybe three or four significant games on an iPad Air before it maxes out. (MTG Arena is almost 20GB all on it's own, Genshin Impact is like 40+ GB)
This is actually most of the storage space -- videos downloaded for consumption in places with no or bad internet.
[1]: https://liliputing.com/you-can-use-a-floppy-disk-drive-with-...
I mean, what would happen if you yanked out the drive while an app was running on it?
I could fit more if I didn’t insist on downloading everything 1080p I guess.
In my sphere, everyone with an iPad uses it for the Apple Pencil and/or video editing. Raw files for drawings get surprisingly big, once you get up into the many tens of layers, considering an artist can draw a few a day.
It's anecdotal, but 8/10 people that I know over the age of 40 would have no idea what RAM or CPU configurations even theoretically do for them. This is probably the case for most iPad purchasers, and Apple knows this - so why would they provide expensive/confusing configurability options just for the handful of tech-y people who may care? There are still high/med/low performant variations that those people can choose from, any the number of people for whom that would sour them away from a sale is vanishingly small, and they would be likely to not even be looking at Apple in the first place
The RAM and system-on-chip are tied together as part of the system-on-package. The SoP is what enables M chips to hit their incredible memory bandwidth numbers.
This is not an easy thing to allow configuration. They can’t just plug a different memory chip as a final assembly step before shipping.
They only have two SoPs as part of this launch: 9-core CPU with 8gb, and 10-core CPU with 16gb. The RAM is unified for cpu/gpu (and I would assume neural engine too).
Each new SoP is going to reduce economies of scale and increase supply chain complexity. The 256/512gb models are tied to the first package, the 1/2tb models are tied to the second. Again, these are all part of the PCB, so production decisions have to be made way ahead of consumer orders.
Maybe it’s not perfect for each individual’s needs, but it seems reasonable to assume that those with greater storage needs also would benefit from more compute and RAM. That is, you need more storage to handle more video production so you are probably more likely to use more advanced features which make better use of increased compute and RAM.
More costs everywhere in the chain; limiting SKUs is a big efficiency from manufacturing to distribution to retail to support, and it is an easy way (for the same reason) to improve the customer experience, because it makes it a lot easier to not be out of or have delays for a customer’s preferred model, as well as making the UI (online) or physical presentation (brick and mortar) for options much cleaner.
Of course, it can feel worse if you you are a power user with detailed knowledge of your particular needs in multiple dimensions and you feel like you are paying extra for features you don't want, but the efficiencies may make that feeling an illusion — with more freedom, you would being paying for the additional costs that created, so a higher cost for the same options and possibly just as much or more for the particular combination option you would prefer with multidimensional freedom as for the one with extra features without it. Though that counterfactual is impossible to test.
1. Having more SKUs is expensive, for everything from planning to inventory management to making sure you have enough shelf space at Best Buy (which you have to negotiate for). Chances are good that stores like Best Buy and Costco would only want 2 SKUs anyway, so the additional configs would be a special-order item for a small number of consumers.
2. After a certain point, adding more options actually decreases your sales. This is confusing to people who think they'd be more likely to buy if they could get exactly what they wanted, but what you're not seeing is the legions of casual consumers who are thinking about maybe getting an iPad, but would get overwhelmed by the number of options. They might spend days or weeks asking friends which model to get, debating about whether to spend extra on this upgrade or that, and eventually not buying it or getting an alternative. If you simplify the lineup to the "cheap one" and the "high end one" then people abandon most of that overhead and just decide what they want to pay.
The biggest thing tech people miss is that they're not the core consumers of these devices. The majority go to casual consumers who don't care about specifying every little thing. They just want to get the one that fits their budget and move on. Tech people are secondary.
WTF? Why so little? That's insane to me, that's the amount of RAM you get with a mid-range android phone.
What needs that amount on a phone? 8GB on a desktop is...well it's not great, but it's usable, and usable for a damn sight more multi-tasking than you would ever do on a smartphone. Is it just because you need to look better on the spec sheet, like the silly camera megapixel wars of the 2010s?
I freaking hate my iPhone Mini for that, load a YouTube video, a few tabs and a note and boom you are in for a reload every 3-context switch. It's disgusting for a phone that launched at a price too close to 1Keur for my liking. And no, I'm not going to drop over 1keur on a stupid smartphone just to be able to load more than 5 tabs and a note without constant reloading when I'm just trying to do research in a shop to inform a purchasing decision.
I bought it solely for the form factor in the first place, but I really regret considering all the shortcomings that came with the price.
But if Apple think they are smartass, I'll have the last laugh by not buying their hardware again. My next smartphone is definitely going to have over 8Gb of RAM, just not from Apple.
I use my iPad Pro constantly for heavy stuff and I don’t know how much ram is in it; it has never been something I needed to think about. The OS doesn’t even expose it.
There's absolutely nothing a mobile device does that should require that much memory. That shitty OEMs bloat the hell out of their ROMs and slap on more memory to match isn't a good thing or something to emulate in my opinion.
That combined with replaceable batteries would go a long way to reduce the amount of ewaste.
In contrast, Apple's internal storage to my knowledge always is very durable NVMe, attached logically and physically directly to the CPU, which makes their shenanigans with low RAM size possible in the first place - they swap like hell but as a user you barely notice it because it's so blazing fast.
I'd just love to buy a device with a moderate amount of unupgreadable SSD and an SD slot so that I can put a more memory in it later so the device can last longer.
[1] https://winfuture.de/news,141439.html
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/09/macbook-air-m3-storage-speeds...