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Almost 10 years ago we purchased a MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for approx 2K UK pounds. It's really surprising and disappointing that a decade later
by grumpyprole 4y ago
Almost 10 years ago we purchased a MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for approx 2K UK pounds. It's really surprising and disappointing that a decade later these same specs essentially cost the same!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- potatoman22 4y agoThose two numbers are the same
- ppeetteerr 4y agoIt's a lot faster and of higher quality now. Those numbers do not reflect the speed of the ram, the speed of the memory, the quality of the screen, or the performance of the CPU
- grumpyprole 4y agoYes it's made with iPhone/iPad parts instead of PC parts :)
- mmmmmbop 4y agoIn addition to that, today's 2000 GBP are more comparable to 1600 GBP in 2012 due to inflation.
- trenchgun 4y agoAlso, software bloat means that the old macbook can't do shit with today's software.
- brailsafe 4y agoSure it can
- asdff 4y agoCurrently using a 2012 macbook pro, with a 512gb ssd, and 16gb sticks. It's more than enough power for I'd say 99% of what people use computers for (ms office, adobe suite, some cad, light dev work, etc.) These days its not hard to call upon compute from the heavens priced by the second should you need more horsepower.
- girvo 4y agoMy spinning-rust 24” iMac from 2011 mostly manages to trundle along with Linux Mint on it for my partner to use. LibreOffice and Firefox for web browsing, mostly. Anything more than that and it chokes. Too many tabs, it chokes. Too many software updates, woo boy does she choke. That poor machine!
- gshubert17 4y agoI replaced the HD on my 2009 24" iMac with an SSD some years ago and upped it from 4GB to 8GB. A great performance boost. Old OS but it still works well for me.
- girvo 4y agoI'd love to do the 4GB to 8GB upgrade too, though I've no idea how feasible it even is to find RAM that old in 2022!
- brailsafe 4y agoYa but it's the same amount. Wew my files load marginally faster, but I can only have 5 of them for the same money that I used to be able to have 10. That's like telling someone who can't get a new van with similar features for the same price to instead get a one wheel
- ppeetteerr 4y agoIt really doesn't matter what the underlying hardware is. If it responds to your input quicker, then it's a better product (remember how slow it was to fill that memory in the first place and then save your changes to disk?). That's not to forget the improvements in network speeds, the screen, the speakers, the battery life, the webcam, etc.
- brailsafe 4y agoI actually disagree, but I take your point. A better product needs to make a real difference for the price. Right now, 16gb of ram costs $250 (cad) more than base model. 512gb ssd costs $250 more than base model. The likelihood I'd ever see those gains, compared to the likelihood I'd be able to use more storage, is wildly different. The product as a whole is better, but the individual upgrades you'd be absolutely limited by cost much more than they should. For example, a 1TB ~5GB/s read/write capable NVMe SSD off-the-shelf can be had for under $200. That's just a bit ridiculous. I'm not going to get the same utility between those two examples for the ~$4-500 price difference. If I did have endless money, or my regular work was heavily IO bound, then it wouldn't change anything, except I'd be much more willing to ignore how much it costs.
- bitwize 4y agoAn MBP that's faster than any PC laptop of equivalent form factor, with a longer battery life, should be well worth the scratch. Historically, if you compare pre-M1 Macs to equivalent PCs, they were very price competitive. There are no equivalents to Apple Silicon Macs.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- apozem 4y agoNot to be rude but this is an inaccurate and poor understanding of computers. The entire chip architecture of the Mac changed since 2010. 16 gigs of RAM on an M1-based chip gets you much, much better performance than 16 gigs on an Intel chip from 10 years ago. Even the RAM and SSD stats you cite are apples and oranges - both have gotten dramatically faster in the last decade.
- grumpyprole 4y ago> Not to be rude but this is an inaccurate and poor understanding of computers Not to be rude, but a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. Software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years. What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
- hxegon 4y agoGenerally won't be swapping that often I would think, but besides the point because swap with SSDs (that are as good as the ones in MBs) isn't a big performance hit like it used to be. Swap also doesn't degrade SSD lifetimes like it used to.
- cassianoleal 4y ago> a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. > What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly? If the swapping is fast enough not to be noticeable, then speed is all that matters. In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all! The whole reason why we have all these layers of memory (disk, RAM, L3, L2 and L1 cache, etc) is exactly speed, nothing else. The closer to the CPU, the faster, but also more expensive.
- petercooper 4y agoIn fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all! Just in case anyone was curious, I looked into this recently, assuming 7-8GB/s was pretty darn fast, but dual channel DDR2 RAM was doing such speeds in 2002. So a high end SSD is about as fast as 20 year old memory, if you ignore latency.
- geodel 4y agoWhich other has gotten dramatically cheaper in that time. I see lenovo T-, P- series, dell precision, HP elitebook essentially same price.
- coldtea 4y agoYeah, only - the processor has several times more transistors and cores, - plus several special purposes devices for encoding video, AI tasks, and so on - the video performance is several times faster - the battery lasts 4 times as much, - the RAM is several times faster, - the SSD is 4-5x faster, - the display has twice the resolution and extremelly improved brightness and color rendition... and so on So dissapointing /s
- abraxas 4y agothat's not a lot to show for over a decade when you compare that to the relative progress made over previous decades.
- google234123 4y agoIdk, laptops 2012 look pretty similar to laptops in 2002. Both were slow too.
- grumpyprole 4y agoI never complained about the speed or battery life of the machine, so your mocking tone is unjustified. Apple's system-on-a-chip M1 architecture has essentially got a lot of its speed/efficiency gains at the expense of limiting RAM options. Today even web browsers running typical web pages consume gigabytes of RAM. So yes, 8GB of RAM for such expensive machines is disappointing for me personally. My work issued laptop has 32GB of RAM.
- quacker 4y agoAlmost 10 years ago we purchased a MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for approx 2K UK pounds. With inflation, £2000 in 2012 is equal to about £2516 today. I configured an M2 MacBook Air with these specs for £1750 today, so it actually costs less in real terms. Edit: A 13" MacBook Pro with the same specs is also £1750
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- antipaul 4y agoI see your point. Essentially, you get a fast computer for contemporary, real world use, for the same price as 10 years ago. Though if you ignore the specs, the M2 air (for 1500 so you get the same storage space), is probably equivalent – 8GB unified RAM and fast SSD seems equivalent to 16GB ram from decade ago. Together with the improved software capabilities, I think the overall "experience" is "better" and you get more bang for buck.
- asdff 4y agoHow is 8gb of ram equivocal to 16gb of ram? You can hold fewer things in memory. Certain programs respond to that by crashing to desktop. Frankly the speed of memory is a lot less relevant to most users compared to how much crap you can shovel into memory and not start to see programs crash to desktop.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]