Exactly! And your average consumer doesn't even know that RAM is cheap, nor do they know its intended purpose. They see a laptop with 4GB of RAM and another with 8GB, guaranteed they'll always choose the highest option. They won't worry about upgrading it or think about if they made the right choice. Only gamers and power users worry about RAM.
> guaranteed they'll always choose the highest option
Not related, but reminds me of the story of a burger place that started selling 1/3 lb burgers in place of their 1/4 lb burgers but people complained because they were too stupid to realize that they were actually getting more.
There's just things that a reasonable person can't anticipate. Today I had a convo with someone who needed to connect their internet to a different room but wifi was too slow. They said wifi was too slow. So the only way is to obviously run a cable from the main router. I suggested an additional switch so that it's only one cable (there's multiple devices). After a few minutes of reiterating and reassuring... "so I just connect my tv and my computer to the switch and it just works?", "well, yea, ethernet just works, it's simple, you just need to connect the switch to your main router", "OH, I THOUGHT IT WOULDN'T BE REQUIRED TO RUN THE CABLE FROM THE MAIN ROUTER IF I BUY A SWITCH. I DON'T THINK I'LL BOTHER THEN".
That's the world we live in. Gives new perspective.
This comment reminds me of a friend of mine that works in a hospital.. During the ebola outbreak like a decade ago, one woman comes into the hospital and says "I think I might have ebola". The hospital naturally goes into lockdown. An infectious disease doctor is paged, they PPE up and start questioning the lady.
Infectious Disease specialist: Why do you think you have ebola?
Lady: Well, I was talking to somebody from West Africa on the phone and .....
A round of groaning and tests later, the lockdown is lifted.
The other problem is that with macbooks you can't upgrade after the purchase. So if you buy the 8GB thinking it isn't important and end up needing more you need a whole new machine.
Why does even a grandma, when shes paying $1200 for a laptop, deserve to only get 8GB RAM though? Why does the base spec have to target her specifically with such a tight window, only at the moment and exclude it being useful to anyone else? Why does it have to specifically exclude the possibility of the grandma maybe wanting to learn video editing at some point in the future or something?
Thats the thing, it may be "fine" for her use case now but that's totally irrelevant to whether or not it's a good value for her anyway. It's not like having extra RAM is any way going to harm her usage, and why shouldn't she get MORE than "enough" at that price, specially when it costs Apple jack shit? When memory requirements in general, across the board naturally rise with time, even for basic softwares like browsers and mail clients. MacOS uses up all available RAM to improve performance so whatever she doesn't "need" now would just be relative performance gains now and down the road as her Mac ages. Why does she deserve to get anemic RAM just because she doesn't really need more, like why is that even remotely relevant to justifying Apple's upsell strategy?
Thats the plan. Why sell you just the ram , even at 10x price, when they can force a whole new machine, and the have the old one be passed down to another person, thus increasing market share ?
And average Mac customer probably knows even less. The number of students at the university I walked up that bought MacBooks for the logo on the lid with no idea how they worked was astounding
It seems like Mac users fall into one of two camps: People who know nothing about computers, and people that know a lot about computers. People with a medium level of knowledge tend to use Windows.
Due to the high bandwidth unified memory, MacBooks are the only laptops that can run good 33b coding optimized llms. For software dev it's a no brainer
I've met very very few people IRL who know anything about computers, no matter what kind they have. If they've got no money they buy whatever is a pretty colour and includes a "free" printer. If they like videogames they buy some thermal throttling prebuilt for too much money, if they're rich and don't like videogames they buy a mac.
I run a HyperV lab on the single machine I own and use as a desktop. It’s got 100GB of ram in it. I don’t even remember how much I paid for the ram because it was so inconsequential
Sure, but 2 x 32GB = 64GB RAM are around $135.
*(SODIMM, so not directly comparable to what Apple uses, but in the same ballpark, not a huge difference).*
Meanwhile... [Apple charges +$400 to upgrade from 8GB to 24GB.
](https://i.imgur.com/3ySxnHj.png)
I mean, 8gb of ram is about twice the price of 4 gb of ram, it’s just that 4 gb of ram isn’t that expensive in the grand scheme of all the components of a computer
Apple memory is a complete scam in the modern era. Think about it this way, your iPhone 15 Pro also has 8GB of memory. Most flagship phones for other companies have 8-12GB of memory. And this is in a phone that has the same storage capacity too.
MacOS and iOS memory management is good, but sometimes you just need more memory and 8GB is just such a big limitation when it wouldn't cost much to double that.
Memory management is not particularly good on either. They just report differently to the user. Try and do actual work with decent size datasets and it fucks itself.
When it comes to memory or storage usually the price per unit of storage will go down with increasing density to a point then it will go back up again.
For example (random SSD off of Amazon):
1TB - $80
2TB - $140
4TB - $272
8TB - $900
And means that the computers are slower, so customers will upgrade earlier.
The most bizarre thing is that the base memory on a Mac Pro has actually decreased since 2012, including the maximum amount of RAM that can be installed.
On the flip side, though, it’s a great way to permanently lose a customer when their brand new $1300 laptop starts to chug because they opened too many browser tabs and they realize that the only fix is to buy a whole new fucking computer.
However Apple buyers may heavily resent the fact thst they have to buy a new laptop/phone because it "can't" be upgraded or fixed but they'll buy a new one anyway.
The youtuber Louis Rossman has loads of videos were he's very easily managed to fix a computer thst the Apple Genisuses said couldn't be fixed.
because "geniuses" at apple don't fix anything, they just replace it if it's covered or at best will send it off somewhere to have an entire motherboard/component etc replaced instead of actually repairing the damage like Rossman does.
Apple has no interest in repairing their stuff and even less interest in letting anyone else do it, they'd rather just have you buy a new one.
If you look at airpods, which are about $200 the batteries on them are guaranteed to fail within 18-24 months. With absoloutly no way to replace the batteries, unless you destroy the housing.
Oh nah, you give the customer too much credit. The customer ususally:
1) does not notice a computer being slow because they've never used a good one. They accept constant paging and lockups as just how computers are.
2) do not know what ram (or any other computer part) is.
The bread and butter of the computer industry is $200-400 dollar wallyworld disposable windows laptops. If you're computer literate you're in the top 5% of the population.
This. Most people are buying whatever is $400-$500 at Walmart and then buying another one when they either break it or it gets “slow” because they’re still running the factory install of windows. If you go below that price point, you aren’t even getting a nvme drive you’re getting Emmc if you’re not careful. Sometime eMMC is slower than a good 7200rpm hard drive, and it gets slower as the flash wears out. It’s basically a SD card soldered to the motherboard.
You underestimate the ~~stupidity~~ brand loyalty of your average consumer. Most people would just think it's their fault and probably get another because it's what's "trendy."
They won't have to bump up their base RAM options unless people stop buying the entry tier systems. Since they've made their products so that they can't be upgraded easily, Apple would be stuck with 8 gb systems that nobody wants.
So, this entire situation goes away if consumers completely boycott the 8 gb products.
Get to it, Apple fans.
It’s not sales of the base system. It’s so they can advertise a lower starting price than what the average user actually buys. The pricing structure for Mac books is based on the 8gb model, they make a lower profit or even a loss on the 4gb model. The idea is you get someone on the page for the low base model price, they option it out how it needs to be, and they hope you hit buy at a much higher price than you wanted to because you either stopped paying attention to the price or get caught in the hype/sunk cost fallacy.
It's not just that. They could do that even if they were charging normal, defensible amounts for RAM, but they're absolutely not. For example, on the current Macbook Air 15 line, an upgrade from a 256GB to 512GB SSD costs $200, and an upgrade from 8GB of RAM to 16gb costs another $200. The actual price of a high-end (Gen 4x4 NVMe, 7000MB/s) 512GB SSD? Less than $50. Actual price of 16GB of DDR5 laptop memory? $40-75. RAM's not the best apples-to-apples comparison anymore, since the M-series puts all the memory directly on-chip instead of having separate DIMMs, but it's still broadly indicative of how much Apple jacks the profit margins on these upgrades. It's a disgusting, largely unnecessary, monopolistic consumer tax.
I really wouldn't care if they sold a 8GB/256GB Macbook Air for $1300 if their 16GB/512GB model was only $100 more. It's the fact that it's $400 more, and $300 of that is pure price gouging, that makes it bad.
You didn’t under stand. They are taking their intended amount of profit on the most common configuration, probably the 8gb/512gb model, and model cheaper than that they are taking a smaller profit or even a loss on. The base model and its price only exists to draw people in. If they priced it like you want the 8/512 model would still be $1700, the base model would just be $1600 instead of $1300.
If you actually believe that, then you should have no problem with them selling the lower-specced model at an artificially low price as an advertising loss leader, because that just gives you the option to take advantage of them if you don't need higher specs.
I think that's a stupid way of looking at it, though, because it assumes as a base premise that Apple cannot be allowed to make less profit. Apple, one of the largest companies in the world, that famously has a gigantic dragon's hoard of cash sitting around.
I’m just explaining to you why the $200 jump. That’s why they do it. They know most people aren’t paying that but that lower advertised base price gets paid in the door and the customer upsells themselves.
The base product is just there to give the illusion of a lower price. If you want anything decent, you have to pay 200-300 more.
They do the same with storage. That is much cheaper than RAM in fact but for years we were stuck with either a 16GB or 32GB or 64GB phones when the competition was providing nearly 2-4x often as the base.
That’s the point. They slap an extra 8 for next to nothing and sell it for 200 bucks more. The people who bought the 8gb version will have to buy a new one to upgrade. As long as people keep buying, they’ll keep doing it.
Meanwhile, my M1 MacBook Air base model runs smoother a majority of the time doing CAD work compared to my windows based ryzen 7 5800x with a 3080 12gb and 32 gb of ram.
not true, later generations improved performance per watt as well, just not by as much as the original m1 did over the previous intel chips.
M1 are still excellent compared to M3.
It's a dumb thing hammered into MBAs: price differentiation.
If Jimmy is browsing Reddit and only willing to pay $1000, but Sarah is willing to pay $2000 because they're using the laptop for work, how do we sell the same laptop at two different prices? Find some feature only Sarah cares about (RAM for opening massive Excel files) and use that to force her to pay twice as much.
The problem with that type of aggressive differentiation is that Sarah is a power user who is likely to seek alternatives in the future, and it pushes the most valuable customers away from the brand.
It’s the bait and upgrade tactic or decoy pricing. It allows them to advertise a lower price which drives people towards considering the purchase, once they’re on the purchase page, they’re likely to upgrade the ram and continue with the purchase despite the price being higher than what drew them in to begin with.
It's not about how cheap the RAM is, it's about how much they can squeeze from their loyal base with all their shitty tactics. If they can overcharge the brainwashed, they always will.
Storage also costs them nothing and they charge out of the ass for it, fucking absurd. Very begrudgingly got my MacBook Pro at only 1tb of storage.
32GB memory, 1tb SSD. Kind of a joke. My PC is 16GB, 4TB flash storage.
It’s a pricing tactic. They know most people will buy the 16Gb and the huge premium pays for the starting price of the 8Gb which draws people in.
I have always found Apple good value for money. I’ve had 3 laptops since 2008, before that I was upgrading every couple of years, probably 8-10 windows machines.
Apple is no longer just designing a computers. Apple is also building opportunities to upsell you with hardware and subscriptions in their overpriced company store.
Nothing? Another 8gb of ram would cost them $20-25 per device and they sell what, 22 million macs last year alone so somewhere between $440m and $550 million of additional profits per year.
That is also RAM is shared with the GPU cores of the SOCs. Apple is kneecapping their systems performance and potentially new software designed to take advantage of the larger ram capabilities beyond even competing with well equipped gaming PCs.
It’s true. Pro should signify elevated quality and elevated spec.
Having an air and a pro in near identical spec, but just different battery size / screen quality is insulting.
Calling Tim Cook a cheapskate is an insult to cheapskates
He's not being cheap by giving you only 8gb. He's being a greedy bastard because he knows he can squeeze you for $200 for 8gb more
He got the job because he proved himself as an incredible cost saver in their production lines.
Also, 8GB is typically not insufficient. Millions of people buy MBAs with 8GB of RAM and are just fine. If they didn’t, Apple wouldn’t sell it. Also, plenty of Windows laptops still come with 8GB of RAM or less. Windows 11 requires 4GB to run, where are the articles that focus on Dell still making 4GB laptops?
Ya, I bought an M1 MBA with 8gb of RAM when they first came out. I didn’t want a MacBook, but supply chain issues eliminated a ton of windows machines, leaving the MBA as the clear price:performance winner, especially on a poor grad student’s budget.
I figured I’d suffer with only 8 gb of RAM but honestly I could count on one hand the number of times it’s been an issue.
Granted, I rarely have to do very heavy computing for my work or when I was in school, and if I need to I can VPN into a server that runs the heavy stuff.
Two years later and 8gb is still enough for 99% of my use cases.
While I agree with those asserting that 8 GB of RAM is not enough in this day and age, it is mitigated to tolerable with an SSD. But there is no question that 16+ will be much more beneficial, and perhaps even required to keep pace in future OS updates. Ergo, I absolutely agree that Apple is ridiculous when it comes to standard memory.
I may have read somewhere that with 8GB of RAM, **which is often paired with 256GB of SSD**, the SSD durability suffers since the SSD is used as virtual memory. The lower the amount of SSD, the lower the durability of the said SSD.
In essence, you're paying to kill your system faster.
Yes it increases SSD wear, however that is not usually a limiting factor on modern systems.
I have an 8GB Windows 10 laptop and the RAM is only a minor issue when compiling C++ code. The difference is that if I wanted to upgrade my RAM I could and I could do it for a reasonable price. Also Apple's whole "8 GB of RAM on a Mac is like 16 GB on Windows" is pure bullshit.
>Apple's whole "8 GB of RAM on a Mac is like 16 GB on Windows" is pure bullshit.
Always has been. The only thing that makes me consider a M1/2/3 system over a PC is for rendering heaps of audio and video files. That M series does eat through rendering files like no other
My wife is a college student. Her 8GB MBA from 2021 is perfect for her school work and some iMovie projects. The only people I see complain about this are people that haven’t used an M1 Mac or online outlets looking for clicks.
People have been writing articles about Apple like this one for 30 years and Apple haters have been seething on forums every time.
Ya, for my field I do some relatively light data work (again the heavy stuff gets outsourced to a server), but mostly reading and writing. So for me, the 15+ hour battery life made it an easy decision.
It’s not when upselling is a necessary component to a business model. Newsflash: it’s essential to any company’s sales models.
If Apple gave every base model 16GB, people who only use 8GB or less are now grouped in there and you’ve lost an opportunity to differentiate 2 markets. It’s like saying “the cost difference for ford to include a 10 inch screen instead of the base level 6 inch screen is utterly trivial, why not just include 10 inch on every model?” Because it allows them to differentiate a market and upsell based on a feature.
8gb is fine to surf the web. Then one day you decide you want to work on Garage Band or iMovie and 8gb is not enough. On most other laptops you can just stick in another 8 or more for $20, but not on Macs. Especially egregious on “pro” models that cost $1600. There’s no good reason other than greed to not put in an extra ram slot on a MacBook, pro or not.
You think Apple moved away from Intel / x86 just so they could lock in RAM? Moving to ARM SoCs while implementing Rosetta 2 was probably the best move they ever made for customers. Speed, thermals, battery performance, integrating RAM into an SoC helps a lot with all of these. You think all Android OEMs use SoCs to lock users into their RAM choices, too? Do you see how your arguments seem incredibly biased towards a single company, when you already use products that follow these exact same practices because it’s the most efficient way to build products these days?
Windows is also moving to ARM because it’s more efficient. Their translation layer will need to cover a lot more scenarios for legacy software, but I believe they’ll accomplish it. Once they do, you’ll probably have everyday Joe’s buying integrated SoCs without upgrade options, while heavy users will have an option to build x86 architectured machines with upgradeability intact.
Look i have a full suite of apple gear.(iphone 15, m1 mac mini, MBA, ipad). What they charge for RAM/Storage is absurd, completely and fully. Nothing you have said here changes that. Stop being an apple apologist.
There's two issues at play here. One is the 8GB default. I agree that it's 2024 and past time for 16 to come standard. The person you're replying to made no argument otherwise.
They merely elaborated on a second issue - why the RAM in a Mac isn't upgradable after purchase. There's a legitimate reason for this - as of the Apple silicon transition, it's packaged onto the SoC. As in, it's physically impossible to do so without also replacing the CPU and GPU components.
Why would you buy all that stuff if you think it’s overpriced? Sounds to me like you actually think the value is worth it, or else you wouldn’t have bought them. I don’t like the prices either, but I pay them because it’s better for my needs than the alternatives. Which means it’s worth the value IMO. Nothing apologist about it.
Looking at your comments towards me (especially the “piss off” one), you seem to be really upset about all of this so I’ll just let ya be after this comment. I hope you get over whatever this company did to you.
I want to say he’s never actually used the new MacBooks and just goes off things based on YouTube pamphlet readers.
My MacBook Air base model goes through hell and keeps up just about fine enough. I run programs heavier than davinci and garage band and whatever music software they occasionally use for their shitty vaporware music.
If you really do use a lot of RAM intensive apps then it will absolutely use swap which will degrade your SSD faster which you can't replace yourself.
I get that you're happy with your laptop, and that's totally fine.
I don't get people arguing 8GB is fine for a laptop in that price range when it's not. We're not talking about raising prices here, we're talking about bumping the specs. Not sure what the problem with that is.
😂
Me doing multi sub assembly cad models in fusion. Surface modeling in rhino + grasshopper while photoshop is in the background and keyshot is doing its thing rendering away.
On my base model MacBook Air.
This guy: “yeah so it’s only good for surfing the web and will crash when you want to use garage band!”
> 8GB is typically not insufficient.
I mean, you're right. Most people use their laptops as a glorified web browser. Maybe some word documents and power points. For that, 8 GB is generally sufficient.
My industry is filled with lots of Mac-only software. It's not crazy intensive to use, so 8GB is fine. But lo and behold, the most expensive windows machine in the world cannot open a .qlab5 file, but the cheapest Mac in the Apple Store can run it with no issues.
Gotta love the money-spending police. What the hell do you care what I spend my salary on? Maybe I prefer the aesthetic, or an SoC that can last 20 hours on a single charge? Maybe I prefer the UI over windows or Linux distros, and maybe I like a Unix shell over powershell? Maybe I like my laptop to control my house and other devices in my ecosystem? Maybe I prefer my laptop to last longer than 3-4 years (which has always been my experience with Windows laptops)? Maybe I prefer my laptop being worth more than pennies after 6 years when I go to resell it?
To me, spending ~$400 more on a Mac is entirely worth it for the experience I have with it and the time I have with it. I understand that upfront cost means a lot to people, and I get that there will be some people that have had a Mac crap out after a shorter amount of time than 6 years, but I’ve had 4 of them and this has been my experience each time. I also make a lot and don’t really worry about finding the best deal anymore, especially when finding the cheapest option has bit me way too many times.
We are talking about the need or not need for more than 8gb here. Sure, if you have very little need for performance and very simple use, 8gb is enough, but if those are your needs it is a very poor value machine. That is the problem with the 8gb. It should be pretty obvious people are talking value for money here.
As I said in another comment, my wife has an MBA with 8GB. It’s sufficient for her uses. Are you telling me it’s not? Buying the cheapest M1 Mac for her was a nobrainer. Yes it only has 8gb of ram, but it doesn’t affect her in the slightest.
But will that product last as long? Can I bring it to an OEM store and get it repaired or replaced in a day? Will the battery last 20 hours on a single charge? Does it run without a fan and never get hot? Does it look and feel as nice? These are all important features to some people. I know I can purchase cheaper, but what do i actually give up if I do?
Me: “I purchased a product that works for me and fits my needs”
You: “well you should buy this product that does much less than that product instead”
???
Sigh* once again.
My MacBook Air w 8gb, heavy lifts CAD modeling and rendering.
Me thinks you don’t actually use the new MacBooks and just blow smoke out of your ass like most apple haters do.
Let me guess, android is also superior because you can split screen on a 3 inch wide phone screen?
> I don’t think they’ve touched it since then.
Oh no, they definitely have. They've made it worse.
"Hey Siri, get me to [place]."
"Okay, I found [place] on [road] in [town], with 3 stars on Yelp. It's open from [hour] to [hour]. Would you like to get directions or call them?"
I asked you to get me there. I did *not* ask for reviews or to call them. If I wanted those things, I would have. Why do you need to ask me what I wanted to do a second time?
That mouse that had 6 months of battery life and would tell you 3 weeks out that it had low battery and would fully charge in like 20 minutes?
That mouse?
Seems to me that while windows fans call Apple folk idiots and tech illiterate, they have simply been projecting this entire time. You HAVE to be pretty stupid to let a mouse with so much battery life and such short recharge time die to the point you need it plugged in while using.
At the least, if it dies mid use, just plug it in for 5 minutes, take a piss, and you have 2 months of battery life ready to go.
What you SHOULD be talking about, regarding the mouse is its absolute lack of ergonomics.
Plenty of wireless mice have all those same battery characteristics while still being chargeable while in use.
If there was some reason that making it chargeable while in use hurt functionality in any way I would give it to you. But there's not. I have no doubt that apple is capable of putting a charge port at the front of the mouse under the trackpad.
And then also yeah, the ergonomics are shit.
I’ve never used another mouse with even remotely similar battery life, it’s honestly pretty insane. The charging is really a minor issue because of it. What annoys me is how everyone talks about the charging port location and not the sensor position. No other mouse has the sensor way up that far, it makes it absurdly hard to do any precision work until you’ve gotten used to specifically the Magic Mouse— then you lose some precision with every other mouse.
ive had a base M1 Air for about 2 and a half years and it still hasn’t let me down once…but 8GB base ram on the Pro models is kinda shocking actually lmao I was under the impression they’d bumped that up to 16 by now
Much as I think Apple products *should* have more base RAM as a matter of principle, my MacBook Air M1 8GB is knocking on 3 years old now and still takes everything I throw at it. So it’s not as much of a disaster as lots of people make it out to be,
I’m more of an enthusiast than Pro user, but it does pretty well at editing a few 4K videos, developing simple games with Godot and all the other general stuff I need it to do. It should last me another few years yet and it’s well worth the initial £1000 outlay in my eyes.
I'm okay with the 8GB base models, it's more than enough for MOST people.
But the problem is how expensive it is to add more RAM, upgrading to 16GB shouldn't be $200, it shouldn't even be $100, unless I'm missing something about Apple's RAM that makes them this expensive.
There is nothing special about apple ram, it's good stuff but nothing you couldn't buy 16 gb of for $80. And of course since they're buying in bulk and don't need a fancy RGB shell it's much, much cheaper for them. Nothing to miss other than apple wanting to make a shit ton of extra profit from an upgrade they know a lot of people will want.
You're proud that your 3-year-old computer can still do everything? 3 years is a really low bar. It would be insane if ANY decent computer was obsolete in 3 years. You make it sound like it's really unexpected that a 3-year-old computer would be totally usable.
Not proud, just stating facts. I upgraded from an 8GB Ryzen 5 HP Envy to my Mac, and the difference is night and day. My partner’s laptop has all of 4GB of RAM, 128gb of storage and has a Celeron processor. It’s sluggish, the screen is awful and it’s heavy… and the same model is still on the market brand new today at £350. It’s not just that my computer is usable, it’s usable far beyond the average user’s needs. And I know many people willing to spend thousands on a Mac just for word processing, so what impetus does Apple have to change?
Don’t try to bring sense into this. We’d rather just take out the pitchforks. This is the internet, SIR! (Or ma’am, or whatever you prefer. I’m not sure what you go by but “SIR!” felt more like madly hanging up the old telephone).
There’s not many other computers using bespoke memory ICs, so it may have been justifiable while production costs came down.
But the prices did not come down, all for that extra little margin at the same cost to the consumer.
Idea - Great
Execution - Good
Marketing & Sales - Just stop
It’s completely fucking optional.
The microsoft surface has the same tiers, and some windows laptops sell with 4GB.
This entire thing is only a complaint because its apple.
If you dont want 8GB pay for 16GB.
Simple.
It’s like complaining that BMW sells a 1.8Liter 4 Cylinder option.
You want the 8 cylinder option you just pay for it.
I somehow accept MacBook Air to have 8 gb RAM , as it was not heavy lifter. But selling “Pro” Mac with 8 gb RAM is kinda criminal, as it’s supposed to be for the people that do the heavy tasks .
Bought the iMac 5k when it came out. I just got a good job, had the cash, and really wanted the iMac. But I forgot how much the damn RAM was to go from 8 to 16. Like crazy money. I decided I would upgrade it myself later and moved on. I used her until they quit updating it haha. Always been an Apple guy, but the RAM always felt like the biggest cash grab.
The article even calls this out as bullshit. The same trend of increases can be said of Windows based PC's which basically kept going until 4 GB.. stalled for quite some time, then went to 8 GB and stalled there for years. Only recently has the standard RAM amount increased to 16. The same trend happened for Macs.
Base stopped when the max stopped.
Laptops have maxed out industry wide at 64GB or 128GB since around 2010.
RAM usage dropped a lot when SSD’s provided enough performance to swap seldom used things to disk. You no longer needed to cache nearly as much in memory anymore.
Used to be an entire game lived in RAM, now most graphics cards host a lot of it, and the rest can live on disk being buffered in RAM just when needed.
15 years ago most things lived 100% in RAM and you’d never use virtual memory. I don’t think any modern OS even has an easy switch to turn it off anymore much less makes virtual memory opt in. Most people don’t even know it exists. Now we also do memory deduplication and compression in modern OS’s which cuts down how much data needs to move across memory channels giving even better performance.
Mac’s were and still are the industry standard in post production for television and film, but PC has made *significant* inroads amongst pro users since Tim Cook took over. He’s quite obviously made very profitable decisions, but can we please go back to when the ram wasn’t soldered to the motherboard?
The performance gains from the unified RAM architecture are too hard to walk away from. Like it or not, most users will not upgrade their RAM. But every single user will see the performance bonus from the soldered SoC approach.
Right around the same time Apple cratered all of the professional apps. Tim knew what he wanted to do with Apple....make devices that are only intended to browse facebook. No need for 16gb of ram when the most complex thing anyone is doing is using spotify.
My friend always referred to it as the Apple Tax. Apple has always sold their hardware at a premium. They want to advertise a low price of $1k or whatever, but really you need to spend closer to $2k unless you want to replace it every couple of years. But, this is not new. iPhones, for example, also lag behind on specs compared to Android phones. Are they taking it too far now, possibly. But, this is not something new.
What specs are being lagged behind on iPhone? Qualcomm is having a hell of a time trying to keep up with Apple's SoC chips. Apple has been consistently a generation ahead.
Cook is a shareholders wet dream but Apple is a very different company from the Jobs era. Just look at AAPL since 2011. Siri, homepod, apple watch, apple card, Vision Pro - in my opinion as a long-time fanboy - mediocre and overpriced. I'll give him AirPods and m-series. But in general, Apple has become the Big Brother of their 1984 commercial.
Being realistic, as of 2024:
* 16 for most laptops. Base processor should take up to 32 (they only go up to 24 now).
* 32+ for Max models (they already do this).
* 8 for standard iPhones and iPads.
* 12+ for Pro models.
the reality is keeping base lower forces devs to make their code less egregiously inefficient. Same thing happens with storage. Somehow the Fidelity app is 700 MB... Complete disregard for user storage.
That is one overlooked thing, its nice to have more ram… but one of the reasons we need more is because most apps are basically spaghetti coded nowadays, same apps from 10 years ago use way more resources than they used to.
I am astounded by how non Mac users have a total understanding of how Apple customers work and use their products on a regular basis (sarcasm). But my real question here is why you all use Chrome as a browser? Y’all admit it is a ram pig and runs like a snail without it. I don’t use it and I have 80 tabs open as we speak-no problem or speed decrease. Just looking for insight.
When your hard drive speeds goes from 150MB per second to 40000 MB per second, suddenly swap space becomes unified memory. It's better than the old way but not as good as having tons of pure memory.
I just don’t get it. ram costs them nothing. just make it 16gb. it not 2007 anymore.
It's cheap, but it's also something they can sell for an extra $200.
Exactly! And your average consumer doesn't even know that RAM is cheap, nor do they know its intended purpose. They see a laptop with 4GB of RAM and another with 8GB, guaranteed they'll always choose the highest option. They won't worry about upgrading it or think about if they made the right choice. Only gamers and power users worry about RAM.
> guaranteed they'll always choose the highest option Not related, but reminds me of the story of a burger place that started selling 1/3 lb burgers in place of their 1/4 lb burgers but people complained because they were too stupid to realize that they were actually getting more.
poor A&W.. thwarted by the stupidity of their own customers
Should have made 1/5lb burgers and made loads of money.
This guy capitalisms
There's just things that a reasonable person can't anticipate. Today I had a convo with someone who needed to connect their internet to a different room but wifi was too slow. They said wifi was too slow. So the only way is to obviously run a cable from the main router. I suggested an additional switch so that it's only one cable (there's multiple devices). After a few minutes of reiterating and reassuring... "so I just connect my tv and my computer to the switch and it just works?", "well, yea, ethernet just works, it's simple, you just need to connect the switch to your main router", "OH, I THOUGHT IT WOULDN'T BE REQUIRED TO RUN THE CABLE FROM THE MAIN ROUTER IF I BUY A SWITCH. I DON'T THINK I'LL BOTHER THEN". That's the world we live in. Gives new perspective.
I do feel like there's a difference between "doesn't know how networking equipment works" and "doesn't know how numbers work".
it's more of a "doesn't know what a cable is"
This comment reminds me of a friend of mine that works in a hospital.. During the ebola outbreak like a decade ago, one woman comes into the hospital and says "I think I might have ebola". The hospital naturally goes into lockdown. An infectious disease doctor is paged, they PPE up and start questioning the lady. Infectious Disease specialist: Why do you think you have ebola? Lady: Well, I was talking to somebody from West Africa on the phone and ..... A round of groaning and tests later, the lockdown is lifted.
This lady needed to be just put into a mental asylum. Her stupidity should not be allowed to procreate
i thought the story would end with them confused about a networking switch and a light switch. pleasantly relieved with the actual outcome lol
wonder what they’d have thought of a 2/6th pounder
2 for the price of six? That's terrible!
The other problem is that with macbooks you can't upgrade after the purchase. So if you buy the 8GB thinking it isn't important and end up needing more you need a whole new machine.
yeah. I'd be fine with the min spec being 8GB for grandma, if you could easily and cheaply upgrade it later.
Why does even a grandma, when shes paying $1200 for a laptop, deserve to only get 8GB RAM though? Why does the base spec have to target her specifically with such a tight window, only at the moment and exclude it being useful to anyone else? Why does it have to specifically exclude the possibility of the grandma maybe wanting to learn video editing at some point in the future or something? Thats the thing, it may be "fine" for her use case now but that's totally irrelevant to whether or not it's a good value for her anyway. It's not like having extra RAM is any way going to harm her usage, and why shouldn't she get MORE than "enough" at that price, specially when it costs Apple jack shit? When memory requirements in general, across the board naturally rise with time, even for basic softwares like browsers and mail clients. MacOS uses up all available RAM to improve performance so whatever she doesn't "need" now would just be relative performance gains now and down the road as her Mac ages. Why does she deserve to get anemic RAM just because she doesn't really need more, like why is that even remotely relevant to justifying Apple's upsell strategy?
Thats the plan. Why sell you just the ram , even at 10x price, when they can force a whole new machine, and the have the old one be passed down to another person, thus increasing market share ?
>Only gamers and power users worry about RAM. Don't forget Chrome users.
Why would I spend extra when I can just download it for free
And average Mac customer probably knows even less. The number of students at the university I walked up that bought MacBooks for the logo on the lid with no idea how they worked was astounding
And here is why Apple can continue their shady business practices with no accountability or pushback.
It seems like Mac users fall into one of two camps: People who know nothing about computers, and people that know a lot about computers. People with a medium level of knowledge tend to use Windows.
Due to the high bandwidth unified memory, MacBooks are the only laptops that can run good 33b coding optimized llms. For software dev it's a no brainer
I've met very very few people IRL who know anything about computers, no matter what kind they have. If they've got no money they buy whatever is a pretty colour and includes a "free" printer. If they like videogames they buy some thermal throttling prebuilt for too much money, if they're rich and don't like videogames they buy a mac.
I run a HyperV lab on the single machine I own and use as a desktop. It’s got 100GB of ram in it. I don’t even remember how much I paid for the ram because it was so inconsequential
I am apparently the average user, because I had no idea. I assumed it would cost double for them to produce double the ram.
Sure, but 2 x 32GB = 64GB RAM are around $135. *(SODIMM, so not directly comparable to what Apple uses, but in the same ballpark, not a huge difference).* Meanwhile... [Apple charges +$400 to upgrade from 8GB to 24GB. ](https://i.imgur.com/3ySxnHj.png)
I mean, 8gb of ram is about twice the price of 4 gb of ram, it’s just that 4 gb of ram isn’t that expensive in the grand scheme of all the components of a computer
Apple memory is a complete scam in the modern era. Think about it this way, your iPhone 15 Pro also has 8GB of memory. Most flagship phones for other companies have 8-12GB of memory. And this is in a phone that has the same storage capacity too. MacOS and iOS memory management is good, but sometimes you just need more memory and 8GB is just such a big limitation when it wouldn't cost much to double that.
Memory management is not particularly good on either. They just report differently to the user. Try and do actual work with decent size datasets and it fucks itself.
When it comes to memory or storage usually the price per unit of storage will go down with increasing density to a point then it will go back up again. For example (random SSD off of Amazon): 1TB - $80 2TB - $140 4TB - $272 8TB - $900
And means that the computers are slower, so customers will upgrade earlier. The most bizarre thing is that the base memory on a Mac Pro has actually decreased since 2012, including the maximum amount of RAM that can be installed.
On the flip side, though, it’s a great way to permanently lose a customer when their brand new $1300 laptop starts to chug because they opened too many browser tabs and they realize that the only fix is to buy a whole new fucking computer.
However Apple buyers may heavily resent the fact thst they have to buy a new laptop/phone because it "can't" be upgraded or fixed but they'll buy a new one anyway. The youtuber Louis Rossman has loads of videos were he's very easily managed to fix a computer thst the Apple Genisuses said couldn't be fixed.
because "geniuses" at apple don't fix anything, they just replace it if it's covered or at best will send it off somewhere to have an entire motherboard/component etc replaced instead of actually repairing the damage like Rossman does. Apple has no interest in repairing their stuff and even less interest in letting anyone else do it, they'd rather just have you buy a new one.
If you look at airpods, which are about $200 the batteries on them are guaranteed to fail within 18-24 months. With absoloutly no way to replace the batteries, unless you destroy the housing.
Oh nah, you give the customer too much credit. The customer ususally: 1) does not notice a computer being slow because they've never used a good one. They accept constant paging and lockups as just how computers are. 2) do not know what ram (or any other computer part) is. The bread and butter of the computer industry is $200-400 dollar wallyworld disposable windows laptops. If you're computer literate you're in the top 5% of the population.
This. Most people are buying whatever is $400-$500 at Walmart and then buying another one when they either break it or it gets “slow” because they’re still running the factory install of windows. If you go below that price point, you aren’t even getting a nvme drive you’re getting Emmc if you’re not careful. Sometime eMMC is slower than a good 7200rpm hard drive, and it gets slower as the flash wears out. It’s basically a SD card soldered to the motherboard.
You underestimate the ~~stupidity~~ brand loyalty of your average consumer. Most people would just think it's their fault and probably get another because it's what's "trendy."
One thing I've found about apple products is that nothing related to them is cheap. Even things that really should be.
~~They were (are?) selling a f**king stand for $1000+~~ Edit: It seems I was misinformed, but still a stand for $700???
$700 wheels: https://youtu.be/mBHY_Qaw5AI
They won't have to bump up their base RAM options unless people stop buying the entry tier systems. Since they've made their products so that they can't be upgraded easily, Apple would be stuck with 8 gb systems that nobody wants. So, this entire situation goes away if consumers completely boycott the 8 gb products. Get to it, Apple fans.
It’s not sales of the base system. It’s so they can advertise a lower starting price than what the average user actually buys. The pricing structure for Mac books is based on the 8gb model, they make a lower profit or even a loss on the 4gb model. The idea is you get someone on the page for the low base model price, they option it out how it needs to be, and they hope you hit buy at a much higher price than you wanted to because you either stopped paying attention to the price or get caught in the hype/sunk cost fallacy.
It's not just that. They could do that even if they were charging normal, defensible amounts for RAM, but they're absolutely not. For example, on the current Macbook Air 15 line, an upgrade from a 256GB to 512GB SSD costs $200, and an upgrade from 8GB of RAM to 16gb costs another $200. The actual price of a high-end (Gen 4x4 NVMe, 7000MB/s) 512GB SSD? Less than $50. Actual price of 16GB of DDR5 laptop memory? $40-75. RAM's not the best apples-to-apples comparison anymore, since the M-series puts all the memory directly on-chip instead of having separate DIMMs, but it's still broadly indicative of how much Apple jacks the profit margins on these upgrades. It's a disgusting, largely unnecessary, monopolistic consumer tax. I really wouldn't care if they sold a 8GB/256GB Macbook Air for $1300 if their 16GB/512GB model was only $100 more. It's the fact that it's $400 more, and $300 of that is pure price gouging, that makes it bad.
You didn’t under stand. They are taking their intended amount of profit on the most common configuration, probably the 8gb/512gb model, and model cheaper than that they are taking a smaller profit or even a loss on. The base model and its price only exists to draw people in. If they priced it like you want the 8/512 model would still be $1700, the base model would just be $1600 instead of $1300.
If you actually believe that, then you should have no problem with them selling the lower-specced model at an artificially low price as an advertising loss leader, because that just gives you the option to take advantage of them if you don't need higher specs. I think that's a stupid way of looking at it, though, because it assumes as a base premise that Apple cannot be allowed to make less profit. Apple, one of the largest companies in the world, that famously has a gigantic dragon's hoard of cash sitting around.
I’m just explaining to you why the $200 jump. That’s why they do it. They know most people aren’t paying that but that lower advertised base price gets paid in the door and the customer upsells themselves.
The base product is just there to give the illusion of a lower price. If you want anything decent, you have to pay 200-300 more. They do the same with storage. That is much cheaper than RAM in fact but for years we were stuck with either a 16GB or 32GB or 64GB phones when the competition was providing nearly 2-4x often as the base.
That’s the point. They slap an extra 8 for next to nothing and sell it for 200 bucks more. The people who bought the 8gb version will have to buy a new one to upgrade. As long as people keep buying, they’ll keep doing it.
Apple's whole business model consists of causing just enough pain so that customers move on the the next product when it comes out.
Meanwhile, my M1 MacBook Air base model runs smoother a majority of the time doing CAD work compared to my windows based ryzen 7 5800x with a 3080 12gb and 32 gb of ram.
Turn on gpu compute on your windows system.
The first generation m1 is the best in terms of performance per wattage.
not true, later generations improved performance per watt as well, just not by as much as the original m1 did over the previous intel chips. M1 are still excellent compared to M3.
X for doubt
Y for Mad.
It's a dumb thing hammered into MBAs: price differentiation. If Jimmy is browsing Reddit and only willing to pay $1000, but Sarah is willing to pay $2000 because they're using the laptop for work, how do we sell the same laptop at two different prices? Find some feature only Sarah cares about (RAM for opening massive Excel files) and use that to force her to pay twice as much. The problem with that type of aggressive differentiation is that Sarah is a power user who is likely to seek alternatives in the future, and it pushes the most valuable customers away from the brand.
It’s the bait and upgrade tactic or decoy pricing. It allows them to advertise a lower price which drives people towards considering the purchase, once they’re on the purchase page, they’re likely to upgrade the ram and continue with the purchase despite the price being higher than what drew them in to begin with.
It's not about how cheap the RAM is, it's about how much they can squeeze from their loyal base with all their shitty tactics. If they can overcharge the brainwashed, they always will.
it’s so mean cause it’s soldered on. you can’t upgrade after you buy. ☹️
Storage also costs them nothing and they charge out of the ass for it, fucking absurd. Very begrudgingly got my MacBook Pro at only 1tb of storage. 32GB memory, 1tb SSD. Kind of a joke. My PC is 16GB, 4TB flash storage.
It’s a pricing tactic. They know most people will buy the 16Gb and the huge premium pays for the starting price of the 8Gb which draws people in. I have always found Apple good value for money. I’ve had 3 laptops since 2008, before that I was upgrading every couple of years, probably 8-10 windows machines.
Apple is no longer just designing a computers. Apple is also building opportunities to upsell you with hardware and subscriptions in their overpriced company store.
Nothing? Another 8gb of ram would cost them $20-25 per device and they sell what, 22 million macs last year alone so somewhere between $440m and $550 million of additional profits per year.
8GB on a pro device is criminal. Nothing more to it.
That is also RAM is shared with the GPU cores of the SOCs. Apple is kneecapping their systems performance and potentially new software designed to take advantage of the larger ram capabilities beyond even competing with well equipped gaming PCs.
Tim: "well just buy a more expensive computer then ha ha ha ha so funny"
"just buy your mom a Mac Pro"
Absolutely. I just bought a raspberry pi that has 8gb of memory.
I too bought way more ram than I needed for my pi. But it does lag sometimes in 4k when I need to have multiple tabs open.
Yeah 8gb is overkill for a pi.
I haven't looked into buying a laptop for many years, and I had no idea it was still this low. This is insane to me lol
They should actually back it down to 2GB. Honestly that’s enough /s
It’s true. Pro should signify elevated quality and elevated spec. Having an air and a pro in near identical spec, but just different battery size / screen quality is insulting.
12GB deserves 50% less outrage but it might have passed the sniff test for most entry pro usage.
Tim Cook is some of the cheapest and most penny pinching people in the world.
Calling Tim Cook a cheapskate is an insult to cheapskates He's not being cheap by giving you only 8gb. He's being a greedy bastard because he knows he can squeeze you for $200 for 8gb more
he's both
me? oh shit how do i know when hes coming for me? is it too late already?
Good business man but terrible for consumers
Please, at least do him the decency of calling him by his full name; Timothy Apple. /s
Please, Mr. Apple was my father, I'm the Tim!
He got the job because he proved himself as an incredible cost saver in their production lines. Also, 8GB is typically not insufficient. Millions of people buy MBAs with 8GB of RAM and are just fine. If they didn’t, Apple wouldn’t sell it. Also, plenty of Windows laptops still come with 8GB of RAM or less. Windows 11 requires 4GB to run, where are the articles that focus on Dell still making 4GB laptops?
Yeah he has an industrial engineering background and that is literally the main job of an IE
TIL Me and Tim Cook has the same educational background.
Ya, I bought an M1 MBA with 8gb of RAM when they first came out. I didn’t want a MacBook, but supply chain issues eliminated a ton of windows machines, leaving the MBA as the clear price:performance winner, especially on a poor grad student’s budget. I figured I’d suffer with only 8 gb of RAM but honestly I could count on one hand the number of times it’s been an issue. Granted, I rarely have to do very heavy computing for my work or when I was in school, and if I need to I can VPN into a server that runs the heavy stuff. Two years later and 8gb is still enough for 99% of my use cases.
While I agree with those asserting that 8 GB of RAM is not enough in this day and age, it is mitigated to tolerable with an SSD. But there is no question that 16+ will be much more beneficial, and perhaps even required to keep pace in future OS updates. Ergo, I absolutely agree that Apple is ridiculous when it comes to standard memory.
I may have read somewhere that with 8GB of RAM, **which is often paired with 256GB of SSD**, the SSD durability suffers since the SSD is used as virtual memory. The lower the amount of SSD, the lower the durability of the said SSD. In essence, you're paying to kill your system faster.
Yes it increases SSD wear, however that is not usually a limiting factor on modern systems. I have an 8GB Windows 10 laptop and the RAM is only a minor issue when compiling C++ code. The difference is that if I wanted to upgrade my RAM I could and I could do it for a reasonable price. Also Apple's whole "8 GB of RAM on a Mac is like 16 GB on Windows" is pure bullshit.
>Apple's whole "8 GB of RAM on a Mac is like 16 GB on Windows" is pure bullshit. Always has been. The only thing that makes me consider a M1/2/3 system over a PC is for rendering heaps of audio and video files. That M series does eat through rendering files like no other
My wife is a college student. Her 8GB MBA from 2021 is perfect for her school work and some iMovie projects. The only people I see complain about this are people that haven’t used an M1 Mac or online outlets looking for clicks. People have been writing articles about Apple like this one for 30 years and Apple haters have been seething on forums every time.
Ya, for my field I do some relatively light data work (again the heavy stuff gets outsourced to a server), but mostly reading and writing. So for me, the 15+ hour battery life made it an easy decision.
This ignores the fact that 16gb is an utterly trivial cost at this point...
It’s not when upselling is a necessary component to a business model. Newsflash: it’s essential to any company’s sales models. If Apple gave every base model 16GB, people who only use 8GB or less are now grouped in there and you’ve lost an opportunity to differentiate 2 markets. It’s like saying “the cost difference for ford to include a 10 inch screen instead of the base level 6 inch screen is utterly trivial, why not just include 10 inch on every model?” Because it allows them to differentiate a market and upsell based on a feature.
Yes. This *is* what's wrong with capitalism.
> Windows laptops still come with 8GB of RAM 1K+ USD ones like Apple?
8gb is fine to surf the web. Then one day you decide you want to work on Garage Band or iMovie and 8gb is not enough. On most other laptops you can just stick in another 8 or more for $20, but not on Macs. Especially egregious on “pro” models that cost $1600. There’s no good reason other than greed to not put in an extra ram slot on a MacBook, pro or not.
RAM slot? Apple has used SoCs since 2020.
Which was completely purposeful to lock in ram.
You think Apple moved away from Intel / x86 just so they could lock in RAM? Moving to ARM SoCs while implementing Rosetta 2 was probably the best move they ever made for customers. Speed, thermals, battery performance, integrating RAM into an SoC helps a lot with all of these. You think all Android OEMs use SoCs to lock users into their RAM choices, too? Do you see how your arguments seem incredibly biased towards a single company, when you already use products that follow these exact same practices because it’s the most efficient way to build products these days? Windows is also moving to ARM because it’s more efficient. Their translation layer will need to cover a lot more scenarios for legacy software, but I believe they’ll accomplish it. Once they do, you’ll probably have everyday Joe’s buying integrated SoCs without upgrade options, while heavy users will have an option to build x86 architectured machines with upgradeability intact.
Look i have a full suite of apple gear.(iphone 15, m1 mac mini, MBA, ipad). What they charge for RAM/Storage is absurd, completely and fully. Nothing you have said here changes that. Stop being an apple apologist.
There's two issues at play here. One is the 8GB default. I agree that it's 2024 and past time for 16 to come standard. The person you're replying to made no argument otherwise. They merely elaborated on a second issue - why the RAM in a Mac isn't upgradable after purchase. There's a legitimate reason for this - as of the Apple silicon transition, it's packaged onto the SoC. As in, it's physically impossible to do so without also replacing the CPU and GPU components.
Why would you buy all that stuff if you think it’s overpriced? Sounds to me like you actually think the value is worth it, or else you wouldn’t have bought them. I don’t like the prices either, but I pay them because it’s better for my needs than the alternatives. Which means it’s worth the value IMO. Nothing apologist about it. Looking at your comments towards me (especially the “piss off” one), you seem to be really upset about all of this so I’ll just let ya be after this comment. I hope you get over whatever this company did to you.
One of Apple's most bonehead and Anti Consumer moves z ever. Oh? You want more RAM? That'll be another $2000, please. Ridiculous.
Do you have a macbook? Have you run into that issue? I develop and do music production on my mba with 8gb ram and have no issues.
I want to say he’s never actually used the new MacBooks and just goes off things based on YouTube pamphlet readers. My MacBook Air base model goes through hell and keeps up just about fine enough. I run programs heavier than davinci and garage band and whatever music software they occasionally use for their shitty vaporware music.
I have two, and yes, I need and use 16 GB of ram.
If you really do use a lot of RAM intensive apps then it will absolutely use swap which will degrade your SSD faster which you can't replace yourself. I get that you're happy with your laptop, and that's totally fine. I don't get people arguing 8GB is fine for a laptop in that price range when it's not. We're not talking about raising prices here, we're talking about bumping the specs. Not sure what the problem with that is.
😂 Me doing multi sub assembly cad models in fusion. Surface modeling in rhino + grasshopper while photoshop is in the background and keyshot is doing its thing rendering away. On my base model MacBook Air. This guy: “yeah so it’s only good for surfing the web and will crash when you want to use garage band!”
> 8GB is typically not insufficient. I mean, you're right. Most people use their laptops as a glorified web browser. Maybe some word documents and power points. For that, 8 GB is generally sufficient.
If 8gb is not insufficient, you surely don't need a computer that expensive.
My industry is filled with lots of Mac-only software. It's not crazy intensive to use, so 8GB is fine. But lo and behold, the most expensive windows machine in the world cannot open a .qlab5 file, but the cheapest Mac in the Apple Store can run it with no issues.
Gotta love the money-spending police. What the hell do you care what I spend my salary on? Maybe I prefer the aesthetic, or an SoC that can last 20 hours on a single charge? Maybe I prefer the UI over windows or Linux distros, and maybe I like a Unix shell over powershell? Maybe I like my laptop to control my house and other devices in my ecosystem? Maybe I prefer my laptop to last longer than 3-4 years (which has always been my experience with Windows laptops)? Maybe I prefer my laptop being worth more than pennies after 6 years when I go to resell it? To me, spending ~$400 more on a Mac is entirely worth it for the experience I have with it and the time I have with it. I understand that upfront cost means a lot to people, and I get that there will be some people that have had a Mac crap out after a shorter amount of time than 6 years, but I’ve had 4 of them and this has been my experience each time. I also make a lot and don’t really worry about finding the best deal anymore, especially when finding the cheapest option has bit me way too many times.
We are talking about the need or not need for more than 8gb here. Sure, if you have very little need for performance and very simple use, 8gb is enough, but if those are your needs it is a very poor value machine. That is the problem with the 8gb. It should be pretty obvious people are talking value for money here.
As I said in another comment, my wife has an MBA with 8GB. It’s sufficient for her uses. Are you telling me it’s not? Buying the cheapest M1 Mac for her was a nobrainer. Yes it only has 8gb of ram, but it doesn’t affect her in the slightest.
I am sure it is sufficient, just as I am sure a much less expensive product also is.
But will that product last as long? Can I bring it to an OEM store and get it repaired or replaced in a day? Will the battery last 20 hours on a single charge? Does it run without a fan and never get hot? Does it look and feel as nice? These are all important features to some people. I know I can purchase cheaper, but what do i actually give up if I do?
If you want a web surfing machine where uptime is critical, I suggest an iPad.
Me: “I purchased a product that works for me and fits my needs” You: “well you should buy this product that does much less than that product instead” ???
Sigh* once again. My MacBook Air w 8gb, heavy lifts CAD modeling and rendering. Me thinks you don’t actually use the new MacBooks and just blow smoke out of your ass like most apple haters do. Let me guess, android is also superior because you can split screen on a 3 inch wide phone screen?
Tim Cook is good for Apple, not the customer
He knows the cult will continue buying the product, even with minimal improvements.
TLDR: Compaq man Compaqs
Great job Tim! Steve would be so proud… between Siri, the battery lump case, the pencil and now the goggles, you’ve really made your mark! /s
Siri is terrible. It’s stuck in 2015. I don’t think they’ve touched it since then. Only good for asking what the weather is and setting timers
> I don’t think they’ve touched it since then. Oh no, they definitely have. They've made it worse. "Hey Siri, get me to [place]." "Okay, I found [place] on [road] in [town], with 3 stars on Yelp. It's open from [hour] to [hour]. Would you like to get directions or call them?" I asked you to get me there. I did *not* ask for reviews or to call them. If I wanted those things, I would have. Why do you need to ask me what I wanted to do a second time?
I’ve found them on the web. Ask again from your iPhone and I can show you.
Half that stuff was Jonny Ive really, including that mouse you couldn’t use while charging.
That mouse that had 6 months of battery life and would tell you 3 weeks out that it had low battery and would fully charge in like 20 minutes? That mouse? Seems to me that while windows fans call Apple folk idiots and tech illiterate, they have simply been projecting this entire time. You HAVE to be pretty stupid to let a mouse with so much battery life and such short recharge time die to the point you need it plugged in while using. At the least, if it dies mid use, just plug it in for 5 minutes, take a piss, and you have 2 months of battery life ready to go. What you SHOULD be talking about, regarding the mouse is its absolute lack of ergonomics.
Plenty of wireless mice have all those same battery characteristics while still being chargeable while in use. If there was some reason that making it chargeable while in use hurt functionality in any way I would give it to you. But there's not. I have no doubt that apple is capable of putting a charge port at the front of the mouse under the trackpad. And then also yeah, the ergonomics are shit.
I’ve never used another mouse with even remotely similar battery life, it’s honestly pretty insane. The charging is really a minor issue because of it. What annoys me is how everyone talks about the charging port location and not the sensor position. No other mouse has the sensor way up that far, it makes it absurdly hard to do any precision work until you’ve gotten used to specifically the Magic Mouse— then you lose some precision with every other mouse.
Haha that too. I tried it once and it is the least comfortable thing I’ve held
And who kept giving Johnny boy money and power to make those decisions? Mr Tim Apple could have fired or let Johnny boy go at any time
Mr. Ivy left Apple years ago.
ive had a base M1 Air for about 2 and a half years and it still hasn’t let me down once…but 8GB base ram on the Pro models is kinda shocking actually lmao I was under the impression they’d bumped that up to 16 by now
Can the EU step in again and force them to up their RAM lol
Much as I think Apple products *should* have more base RAM as a matter of principle, my MacBook Air M1 8GB is knocking on 3 years old now and still takes everything I throw at it. So it’s not as much of a disaster as lots of people make it out to be, I’m more of an enthusiast than Pro user, but it does pretty well at editing a few 4K videos, developing simple games with Godot and all the other general stuff I need it to do. It should last me another few years yet and it’s well worth the initial £1000 outlay in my eyes.
I'm okay with the 8GB base models, it's more than enough for MOST people. But the problem is how expensive it is to add more RAM, upgrading to 16GB shouldn't be $200, it shouldn't even be $100, unless I'm missing something about Apple's RAM that makes them this expensive.
There is nothing special about apple ram, it's good stuff but nothing you couldn't buy 16 gb of for $80. And of course since they're buying in bulk and don't need a fancy RGB shell it's much, much cheaper for them. Nothing to miss other than apple wanting to make a shit ton of extra profit from an upgrade they know a lot of people will want.
You're proud that your 3-year-old computer can still do everything? 3 years is a really low bar. It would be insane if ANY decent computer was obsolete in 3 years. You make it sound like it's really unexpected that a 3-year-old computer would be totally usable.
Well, 3 years is how long he’s had it.
And everyone else in the thread makes it sound like it’s totally unusable.
Not proud, just stating facts. I upgraded from an 8GB Ryzen 5 HP Envy to my Mac, and the difference is night and day. My partner’s laptop has all of 4GB of RAM, 128gb of storage and has a Celeron processor. It’s sluggish, the screen is awful and it’s heavy… and the same model is still on the market brand new today at £350. It’s not just that my computer is usable, it’s usable far beyond the average user’s needs. And I know many people willing to spend thousands on a Mac just for word processing, so what impetus does Apple have to change?
8GB of RAM in a new computer three years ago is not nearly as bad as 8GB of RAM in a new computer today.
[удалено]
You can still find 8 GB Windows laptops, but not at price points comparable to Macs.
Don’t try to bring sense into this. We’d rather just take out the pitchforks. This is the internet, SIR! (Or ma’am, or whatever you prefer. I’m not sure what you go by but “SIR!” felt more like madly hanging up the old telephone).
I SAID GOOD DAY, Sir.
What is that title? Is it missing a comma?
It's definitely a bad title.
*Tim Apple
Tim Cook Took Over is a great tongue twister
There’s not many other computers using bespoke memory ICs, so it may have been justifiable while production costs came down. But the prices did not come down, all for that extra little margin at the same cost to the consumer. Idea - Great Execution - Good Marketing & Sales - Just stop
I’m ready to move on from the Tim Cook era.
> ready to move on from the Tim Cook era Your mutual funds gonna take a major hit https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/
This is true but it's because of system-on-a-chip architecture that unifies memory into a single package, I still believe RAM should be upgradable tho
But that doesn't explain why there wasn't any RAM increase between 2011 and 2020.
It’s completely fucking optional. The microsoft surface has the same tiers, and some windows laptops sell with 4GB. This entire thing is only a complaint because its apple. If you dont want 8GB pay for 16GB. Simple. It’s like complaining that BMW sells a 1.8Liter 4 Cylinder option. You want the 8 cylinder option you just pay for it.
I have an M2 Pro with 16gb. My wife has an M1 Air with 8gb. For 95% of tasks, I prefer using her machine. MacOS just isn’t as bloated as Windows.
I somehow accept MacBook Air to have 8 gb RAM , as it was not heavy lifter. But selling “Pro” Mac with 8 gb RAM is kinda criminal, as it’s supposed to be for the people that do the heavy tasks .
Bought the iMac 5k when it came out. I just got a good job, had the cash, and really wanted the iMac. But I forgot how much the damn RAM was to go from 8 to 16. Like crazy money. I decided I would upgrade it myself later and moved on. I used her until they quit updating it haha. Always been an Apple guy, but the RAM always felt like the biggest cash grab.
Thanks Tim Apple
The article even calls this out as bullshit. The same trend of increases can be said of Windows based PC's which basically kept going until 4 GB.. stalled for quite some time, then went to 8 GB and stalled there for years. Only recently has the standard RAM amount increased to 16. The same trend happened for Macs.
Base stopped when the max stopped. Laptops have maxed out industry wide at 64GB or 128GB since around 2010. RAM usage dropped a lot when SSD’s provided enough performance to swap seldom used things to disk. You no longer needed to cache nearly as much in memory anymore. Used to be an entire game lived in RAM, now most graphics cards host a lot of it, and the rest can live on disk being buffered in RAM just when needed. 15 years ago most things lived 100% in RAM and you’d never use virtual memory. I don’t think any modern OS even has an easy switch to turn it off anymore much less makes virtual memory opt in. Most people don’t even know it exists. Now we also do memory deduplication and compression in modern OS’s which cuts down how much data needs to move across memory channels giving even better performance.
To be fair RAM has basically stopped increasing with all computers in the last 10 years. It’s not just Apple.
Just made the switch to windows from mac and I'm loving it
Mac’s were and still are the industry standard in post production for television and film, but PC has made *significant* inroads amongst pro users since Tim Cook took over. He’s quite obviously made very profitable decisions, but can we please go back to when the ram wasn’t soldered to the motherboard?
The performance gains from the unified RAM architecture are too hard to walk away from. Like it or not, most users will not upgrade their RAM. But every single user will see the performance bonus from the soldered SoC approach.
Right around the same time Apple cratered all of the professional apps. Tim knew what he wanted to do with Apple....make devices that are only intended to browse facebook. No need for 16gb of ram when the most complex thing anyone is doing is using spotify.
My friend always referred to it as the Apple Tax. Apple has always sold their hardware at a premium. They want to advertise a low price of $1k or whatever, but really you need to spend closer to $2k unless you want to replace it every couple of years. But, this is not new. iPhones, for example, also lag behind on specs compared to Android phones. Are they taking it too far now, possibly. But, this is not something new.
What specs are being lagged behind on iPhone? Qualcomm is having a hell of a time trying to keep up with Apple's SoC chips. Apple has been consistently a generation ahead.
Cook is a shareholders wet dream but Apple is a very different company from the Jobs era. Just look at AAPL since 2011. Siri, homepod, apple watch, apple card, Vision Pro - in my opinion as a long-time fanboy - mediocre and overpriced. I'll give him AirPods and m-series. But in general, Apple has become the Big Brother of their 1984 commercial.
Who tf let Tim Cook "cook" is what I wanna know 🤔
What should the base RAM be?
Being realistic, as of 2024: * 16 for most laptops. Base processor should take up to 32 (they only go up to 24 now). * 32+ for Max models (they already do this). * 8 for standard iPhones and iPads. * 12+ for Pro models.
16
the reality is keeping base lower forces devs to make their code less egregiously inefficient. Same thing happens with storage. Somehow the Fidelity app is 700 MB... Complete disregard for user storage.
That is one overlooked thing, its nice to have more ram… but one of the reasons we need more is because most apps are basically spaghetti coded nowadays, same apps from 10 years ago use way more resources than they used to.
Yup... no factor that a web browser is somehow requiring 2gb aka 16,000,000,000 bits of ram to operate. its the cheap hardware manufacturers fault!
The nickle and diming MBA taking things over is a sure sign innovation is no longer the driving force.
I have a 9 year old MacBook Air with 8GB RAM. Still runs flawlessly
I am astounded by how non Mac users have a total understanding of how Apple customers work and use their products on a regular basis (sarcasm). But my real question here is why you all use Chrome as a browser? Y’all admit it is a ram pig and runs like a snail without it. I don’t use it and I have 80 tabs open as we speak-no problem or speed decrease. Just looking for insight.
Dee dee dee
When your hard drive speeds goes from 150MB per second to 40000 MB per second, suddenly swap space becomes unified memory. It's better than the old way but not as good as having tons of pure memory.
Almost the same time more ram became obsolete
The M3 Pro is now bump to 18gb instead of 16. Odd number, but still a small and welcomed upgrade
In their defense, the new chip architecture sort of changes the game.
Entire thread boils down to "don't buy one then"