Update: I am thinking the 24GB for M5 is a typo. I see on Apple's site the 14 inch MBP can be configured optionally with 32GB of RAM.
If anyone has any real clues that they can share pseudonymously, that would be great. Not sure which department drove that change.
There may be a technical explanation for it, but incentives are incentives.
> E.g they found that most people buying 64GB ram do also buy the upgraded processor.
It seems like the way they've divided them, there's at least one more SKU than there would otherwise be, because of that base M4 Max with only 36gb of ram (can't get it with 24,48,64,96), so if you want the extra few cores, you now have to go to the max Max to get any more ram.
It took me a while to commit to the purchase, because I felt like an idiot implicitly telling them I'm okay with that bs pricing ladder, but at least I didn't over extend and go for the Max. They already charge comically too much for ram and storage.
Apple is designing and manufacturing a chip/chipset/system with 32GB with integrated memory. During QA, parts that have one non-conformant 8GB internal module out of the four are reused in a cheaper (but still functional) 24GB product line rather than thrown away.
Market segmentation also has its hand in how the final products are priced and sold, but my strong guess is that, if Apple could produce 32GB systems with perfect yield, they would, and the 24GB system would not exist.
Ah, the memory is integrated in the same package (the "chip" that gets soldered onto the motherboard) as the integrated CPU/GPU, and I had understood that correctly. However, I had incorrectly surmised that it was built into the same silicon die.
Thanks for the correction!
Lesson: TIL about the difference between System-In-a-Package (SIP) and System-On-a-Chip, and how I had misunderstood the Apple Silicon M series processors to be SoCs when they're SiPs.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/apple-introduces-m2-u...
Pulled shenanigans wrt TPM requirements for Windows 10 and 11. Actively trying to make sure people login to a Microsoft Account and making it hard to use Local Accounts.
> Mac developers are all too used of having to constantly keep up with whatever crap Apple has changed and moved around this time.
Mmm...
Win16 API
Win32 API (including variants like GoodLuckSystemCallExExEx2W(...))
MFC
ATL
.NET WinForms
.NET Avalon/WPF
Silverlight
MAUI
...The thing with all the mentioned APIs is that, excluding 16 bit stuff (that got yeeted in Win7 x64, but if you did need it you could run W7 x32), you can still run software using them without too much of a hassle and you most probably can compile it if you need to fix a bug.
Good luck trying to get a Mac game from the 90s running on any Mac natively without an emulator/VM in contrast.
.NET technologies... Yeah, MS dropped the ball there.
I'm sure it's possible to do that, but the backwards compatibility on Windows is definitely not as good as you say.
That said, I'm also currently, as a fun personal project, converting a game originally intended to work on 68k Macs and which still has parts explicitly labelled as for resource forks, and I've lived through (and done work on) 68k, PPC, Intel, and M-series hardware, plus all the software changes, so I agree with you about Apple.
No piece of Mac software anyone has bought in the late PPC Mac era can even run (!) at all natively on a modern Mac, and even early Intel Mac software will not run on the last Intel generation ever since macOS dropped 32-bit support in userspace entirely. You need to pay the developers for a new version, that's obsolescence by definition and particularly I'm still pissed about the 32 bit removal as that also killed off WINE running 32 bit apps which, you can probably guess, include many games that never got a 64-bit Windows binary because they were developed long before Windows x64 became mainstream (or into existence).
I do love Apple for high quality hardware, but I'll stick the finger to them till the day I die for killing off WINE during the Intel era for no good reason at all.
> You need to pay the developers for a new version, that's obsolescence by definition
Sure, but you don't have to pay Apple.
The entire point of the idea of planned obsolescence is companies intentionally making their products last less time than they should, so you have to pay that company more money.
This is a company making it so you might have to pay other companies more money, because backwards compatibility isn't a priority for them. You can be annoyed by that, sure, but it is not the same thing, and is not obviously corrupt like planned obsolescence is.
I'm just asking the question.. ;-)
Our family iPad Pro is older than my 8-year old son, and still gets security patches. My wife’s phone is an XS Max, launched in 2018; iOS 26 is the first release that doesn’t support it - it will continue to receive security patches for the foreseeable future. My son’s school laptop is my old 8gb 2020 M1 Air, which continues to have stellar performance and battery life and could run Tahoe if I was crazy enough to want to upgrade it. My work machine is a 2021 M1 Pro that runs just as great as the day I bought it (thanks, Al Dente!). My 3 Apple TV 4Ks are I-have-no-idea-how-old but they are still being updated and just get out of the way like a TV box should.
I have no particular love for Apple (or any other company), but they’ve always treated me well as a customer. I can’t really think of another tech co that seems to make people as irrationally angry. Is it their marketing? I hate their marketing too. But their products and support are great.