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> Software developers thinking that 16GB is a small amount of RAM is why all of our software is fat barges of bloat now no, that's not the reason. Anyway, it'

> Software developers thinking that 16GB is a small amount of RAM is why all of our software is fat barges of bloat now no, that's not the reason. Anyway, it's 2021,16gb max for a new laptop in 2021 is factually low. Laptops had 16GB max more than 10 years ago. I think it's fair to criticize the specs of one of the most expensive pieces of hardware on the market if they are somewhat underwelming and when even new game consoles have the same amount of RAM, at a fraction of the price, with only one thing to do. edit: not comparing the performances or the energy efficiency here, but a Dell with a ryzen 5700 and 16gb of RAM (upgradable) costs € 829, an M1 with the same amount of RAM and less storage space costs € 1.659 on Apple website I think Apple could have done better in this regards

MR4D 5y ago
My car has the same horsepower (or luggage space, or windshield size, or more seats, etc.) as a Porsche. For some reason nobody here brings that up. Considering that AAPL is the most valuable company on the planet, they might just have a good understanding of their market. AAPL is serving their market well, and then make enough money each year to buy the entire Dell company. You may prefer Dell, and many people obviously do, but I don’t think AAPL needs to stuff 64Gb of Ram into everything.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > My car has the same horsepower (or luggage space, or windshield size, or more seats, etc.) as a Porsche. We agree. Porsche and Apple base offers are overpriced, for what they actually offer. A 959 pearl white it's one thing, but a Macan? in this particular case the M1 is not comparable to a Porsche, but more to a luxury hotel that has a very tiny bathroom or a limit of one cup of coffee at breakfast. When you consciously spend the kind of money a Mac costs, you really expect the best the money can buy. > You may prefer Dell, and many people obviously do You got it backwards though. 16gb of maximum RAM for a laptop in 2021 doesn't even match the Dell offering... Imagine if the afore mentioned Porsche had a limiter that let you use only 50% of the accelerating power, unless you buy the more expensive "pro" model. That is basically the same car, only with the limiter removed. Anyway, nobody said anything on the ability Apple to make money, probably it says more on the people who buy macs than on Apple itself The article simply says that the best laptop in the market can't have 16gb of maximum available RAM. Which is true.
  - tomByrer 5y ago
    > The article simply says that the best laptop in the market can't have 16gb of maximum available RAM. Which is true. False, Air is NOT the 'best'; that is the Pro, urm Pro-Max or whatever marketing verbiage Apple is spitting out now. Air is the low-end model, so makes sense to make it 16Gb max (though that config is /hard/ to find retail). Reports say that M1-native code uses less memory, & memory usage is fast & efficient. So safe to say 16Gb with M1 ~= 20Gb Intel. So a 16Gb M1 Air is great /value/ machine, but not 'best'. 1st gen M1 Pro with max 16Gb, that was poor decision making IMHO.
ksec 5y ago
MacBook Air at $999 is Apple's entry level Mac. If you want more than 16GB, you need to go M1 Pro or higher. M1 is their first generation Mac SoC. Still using LPDDR4, if you want 32GB, you will have to wait for M2 MacBook Air which should have LPDDR5 and allows 32GB. Assuming Apple allow such configuration. Or they may decide to save cost and stick with LPDDR4. M1 Pro and Max has wider memory bus and controller with LPDDR5. You can built a Laptop with 128GB if you wanted to, just at the expense of Battery Life. If we dont have a borderline fair comparison with products, why dont we compare to a Chromebook? I think most if not all people should agree the build quality of MacBook Air M1 is better than 99% of Dell's laptop. I dont want to sound like an Apple apologist but that is just an objective truth. If the argument is about pricing, then Apple isn't a brand sell product on low margin. Consoles are sold at small or even negative margin. They aren't even in the same business model. That is a marketing and pricing strategy question. And almost no one realise, partly because 99.999% of people inclusive but not limited to HN aren't working in CE or supply chain. The price for DRAM hasn't moved in the past 10 years. And LPDDR memory are actually more expensive per GB.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > MacBook Air at $999 is Apple's entry level Mac that's for the 8gb model and it's € 1.429,00 on the Italian Apple store > I think most if not all people should agree the build quality of MacBook Air M1 is better than 99% of Dell's laptop it doesn't actually matter, honestly. If people need more RAM and don't want to spend a fortune on the pro Apple models, they have to look elsewhere. An ASUS ROG with 32gb of RAM and a discrete NVidia GPU costs more or less the same of an M1 Air with 16gb (maximum, I wanna stress the concept, that's all you are going to get out of it, forever)
audunw 5y ago
The thing is that Apple is kind of moving towards making RAM the level 4/5 cache. It’s becoming more and more important to tie RAM closely to CPU to reduce power consumption and lower latency. That’s naturally going to make RAM size grow more slowly than it did before and make it non-upgradable. I think the solution is to increase the amount of caching RAM on NVM storage, so the NVM acts more like RAM used to. So I really don’t think what Apple is doing with regards to RAM is a problem. But they should have a user replaceable NVM slot. Perhaps tiered with a soldered on NVM chip so you can cache some of the data on a low power, low latency NVM.

MR4D 5y ago

My car has the same horsepower (or luggage space, or windshield size, or more seats, etc.) as a Porsche. For some reason nobody here brings that up. Considering that AAPL is the most valuable company on the planet, they might just have a good understanding of their market. AAPL is serving their market well, and then make enough money each year to buy the entire Dell company. You may prefer Dell, and many people obviously do, but I don’t think AAPL needs to stuff 64Gb of Ram into everything.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> My car has the same horsepower (or luggage space, or windshield size, or more seats, etc.) as a Porsche. We agree. Porsche and Apple base offers are overpriced, for what they actually offer. A 959 pearl white it's one thing, but a Macan? in this particular case the M1 is not comparable to a Porsche, but more to a luxury hotel that has a very tiny bathroom or a limit of one cup of coffee at breakfast. When you consciously spend the kind of money a Mac costs, you really expect the best the money can buy. > You may prefer Dell, and many people obviously do You got it backwards though. 16gb of maximum RAM for a laptop in 2021 doesn't even match the Dell offering... Imagine if the afore mentioned Porsche had a limiter that let you use only 50% of the accelerating power, unless you buy the more expensive "pro" model. That is basically the same car, only with the limiter removed. Anyway, nobody said anything on the ability Apple to make money, probably it says more on the people who buy macs than on Apple itself The article simply says that the best laptop in the market can't have 16gb of maximum available RAM. Which is true.
- tomByrer 5y ago
  > The article simply says that the best laptop in the market can't have 16gb of maximum available RAM. Which is true. False, Air is NOT the 'best'; that is the Pro, urm Pro-Max or whatever marketing verbiage Apple is spitting out now. Air is the low-end model, so makes sense to make it 16Gb max (though that config is /hard/ to find retail). Reports say that M1-native code uses less memory, & memory usage is fast & efficient. So safe to say 16Gb with M1 ~= 20Gb Intel. So a 16Gb M1 Air is great /value/ machine, but not 'best'. 1st gen M1 Pro with max 16Gb, that was poor decision making IMHO.

ksec 5y ago

MacBook Air at $999 is Apple's entry level Mac. If you want more than 16GB, you need to go M1 Pro or higher. M1 is their first generation Mac SoC. Still using LPDDR4, if you want 32GB, you will have to wait for M2 MacBook Air which should have LPDDR5 and allows 32GB. Assuming Apple allow such configuration. Or they may decide to save cost and stick with LPDDR4. M1 Pro and Max has wider memory bus and controller with LPDDR5. You can built a Laptop with 128GB if you wanted to, just at the expense of Battery Life. If we dont have a borderline fair comparison with products, why dont we compare to a Chromebook? I think most if not all people should agree the build quality of MacBook Air M1 is better than 99% of Dell's laptop. I dont want to sound like an Apple apologist but that is just an objective truth. If the argument is about pricing, then Apple isn't a brand sell product on low margin. Consoles are sold at small or even negative margin. They aren't even in the same business model. That is a marketing and pricing strategy question. And almost no one realise, partly because 99.999% of people inclusive but not limited to HN aren't working in CE or supply chain. The price for DRAM hasn't moved in the past 10 years. And LPDDR memory are actually more expensive per GB.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> MacBook Air at $999 is Apple's entry level Mac that's for the 8gb model and it's € 1.429,00 on the Italian Apple store > I think most if not all people should agree the build quality of MacBook Air M1 is better than 99% of Dell's laptop it doesn't actually matter, honestly. If people need more RAM and don't want to spend a fortune on the pro Apple models, they have to look elsewhere. An ASUS ROG with 32gb of RAM and a discrete NVidia GPU costs more or less the same of an M1 Air with 16gb (maximum, I wanna stress the concept, that's all you are going to get out of it, forever)

audunw 5y ago

The thing is that Apple is kind of moving towards making RAM the level 4/5 cache. It’s becoming more and more important to tie RAM closely to CPU to reduce power consumption and lower latency. That’s naturally going to make RAM size grow more slowly than it did before and make it non-upgradable. I think the solution is to increase the amount of caching RAM on NVM storage, so the NVM acts more like RAM used to. So I really don’t think what Apple is doing with regards to RAM is a problem. But they should have a user replaceable NVM slot. Perhaps tiered with a soldered on NVM chip so you can cache some of the data on a low power, low latency NVM.