4 ms·

Laptops, at least, are increasingly all-soldered RAM from many brands. SSDs are mostly still m.2, I think, so at least those are upgradable. Mac Pros were upgra

Laptops, at least, are increasingly all-soldered RAM from many brands. SSDs are mostly still m.2, I think, so at least those are upgradable. Mac Pros were upgradeable until this most recent iteration switching to their ARM chips. The other companies also use lower-spec components than you could buy for less yourself, same as Apple. If anything, the rest of the industry has been moving in Apple’s direction with these kinds of limitations. They’re not more evil than their competition, they’re just ahead of the curve. I agree Apple takes it further with the gouging than others. We should absolutely complain about it and criticize them for gouging! My criticism of the “Apple Tax” complaint is that 1. Nobody ever complains nearly as vociferously about other manufacturers doing similar stuff, and 2. The particular way people complain about Apple’s behavior is always phrased to kind of imply it’s unique and not just a more egregious form of a common behavior.

toyg 3y ago
> They’re not more evil than their competition, they’re just ahead of the curve. "They don't want us to live in Hell, they just pave shiny roads that can only lead us there".
godelski 3y ago
> the rest of the industry has been moving in Apple’s direction with these kinds of limitations That's the "evil". Your next sentence doesn't justify the former. Apple is the one pushing the bounds. Others see Apple can get away with it, so they follow. There's good reason to believe that if Apple didn't push this then we wouldn't be in this state (right to repair is another piece of evidence related to Apple too).
- wfleming 3y ago
  My critique is not “this behavior is acceptable”, and I certainly didn’t describe it as justified. My critique is “the industry is full of bad actors but everyone mostly yells about one particular bad actor”, which I think is unproductive.
  - xbmcuser 3y ago
    People complain about the largest and biggest company as they usually define how the industry follows. I think more worrying is your and other people fanboying/ defending with whataboutism instead of just accepting Apple is doing bad shit and so are others but this thread is about an apple product so of course we will complain about Apple here. Do you know of any other company or brand whose new product is talked about so much on hacker news that it self shows Apples clout.
  - godelski 3y ago
    I understand that, and for the most part I actually agree. I think in those situations it is less important to point fingers at specific actors but at the structure and system. Because you're right that it isn't about individuals in those cases, but systematic problems. But there's 2 things I need to say: 1) In a system of bad actors, it is still useful to point fingers and discuss the largest (or small subset) that are doing this. Because 2) Certain actors are driving forces, which others follow. This is Apple. They even brag about having this position. They even have the credentials to do so! They earned that right. They took away the headphone jack. They got us all on ear buds. They got us all on smart phones in the first place. They made podcasts a thing. The aren't the cause of everything, but they are one of the drivers, and definitely the most powerful one. It would be naive to be under the impression that Apple doesn't have significant influence on the entire market. They've done things that resulted in significant backlash, had lots of consumer complaints, and have no become the status quo (e.g. headphone jack). They were the only major company to solder RAM for decades, and people complained about it for just as long. They have weight, they know it, and they know how to use it. That weight allows them to make markets that don't even exist. Because of this, I will point fingers. My complaint with your comment is that you characterize Apple as just another player being pulled along by forces outside their control. But let's be real, Apple was the first $1T company (late 2018), the first $2T company (late 2020), AND the first $3T company (Jan 2022). No one else even comes close. Microsoft is #2 market cap, but has a 12% gap, then Google with a 43% gap. There are only 4 trillion dollar companies (Amazon being the next) and realistically only one builds laptops (MSFT isn't as hardware focused). Apple sets the tone. Yes, the system sucks and is problematic, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the one dictating that system.
- klodolph 3y ago
  I don’t think soldering is an “evil”. Sockets suck in a hundred different ways, and we only tolerate them for the stuff we need to upgrade or replace. The demand for upgrading / replacing CPUs and memory has been dropping, steadily. I think that socketable CPUs have always been a dodgy proposition, even at the best of times—when I want to replace the CPU, it’s probably got a new socket, or I’m upgrading from DDR3 to DDR4 or something like that. Upgrading RAM is nice but having tons of memory bandwidth is much, much nicer.
  - photonbeam 3y ago
    Sockets mean that you dont have to guess inventory levels so carefully, Apple presumably has to build boards that will be low demand, like 92gb ram with 4tb nvme, separately from 8tb and 1tb
    - simondotau 3y ago
      I find it genuinely astonishing that the contemporary reason for soldering memory onto the motherboard hasn't been raised already. Yes, the reason Apple moved to soldered memory for their MacBook Air line is likely some combination of physical packaging and fleet reliability. But with the latest CPUs, those reasons are now secondary. The primary reason is now performance. Don't believe me? Look at how RAM is arranged on a GPU or in a game console. The RAM chips are located as close to the CPU/GPU as physically possible, limited only by thermal constraints. You will never see DIMM slots on an NVIDIA card because the compromises would be untenable. Longer traces means lower performance, while sockets will make the cards thicker and with poorer thermals. The reasons why NVIDIA cards are the way they are correlates with why Apple's latest comptuers are the way they are. What Apple did with packaging RAM so close to the M1/M2 chip is a big part of the Apple Silicon performance story.
      - buildbot 3y ago
        Yep, exactly this. Huge, massive power savings by not pumping electrons up literally thousands of long wires to memory, thousands of times per second.

toyg 3y ago

> They’re not more evil than their competition, they’re just ahead of the curve. "They don't want us to live in Hell, they just pave shiny roads that can only lead us there".

godelski 3y ago

> the rest of the industry has been moving in Apple’s direction with these kinds of limitations That's the "evil". Your next sentence doesn't justify the former. Apple is the one pushing the bounds. Others see Apple can get away with it, so they follow. There's good reason to believe that if Apple didn't push this then we wouldn't be in this state (right to repair is another piece of evidence related to Apple too).

wfleming 3y ago
My critique is not “this behavior is acceptable”, and I certainly didn’t describe it as justified. My critique is “the industry is full of bad actors but everyone mostly yells about one particular bad actor”, which I think is unproductive.
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  People complain about the largest and biggest company as they usually define how the industry follows. I think more worrying is your and other people fanboying/ defending with whataboutism instead of just accepting Apple is doing bad shit and so are others but this thread is about an apple product so of course we will complain about Apple here. Do you know of any other company or brand whose new product is talked about so much on hacker news that it self shows Apples clout.
- godelski 3y ago
  I understand that, and for the most part I actually agree. I think in those situations it is less important to point fingers at specific actors but at the structure and system. Because you're right that it isn't about individuals in those cases, but systematic problems. But there's 2 things I need to say: 1) In a system of bad actors, it is still useful to point fingers and discuss the largest (or small subset) that are doing this. Because 2) Certain actors are driving forces, which others follow. This is Apple. They even brag about having this position. They even have the credentials to do so! They earned that right. They took away the headphone jack. They got us all on ear buds. They got us all on smart phones in the first place. They made podcasts a thing. The aren't the cause of everything, but they are one of the drivers, and definitely the most powerful one. It would be naive to be under the impression that Apple doesn't have significant influence on the entire market. They've done things that resulted in significant backlash, had lots of consumer complaints, and have no become the status quo (e.g. headphone jack). They were the only major company to solder RAM for decades, and people complained about it for just as long. They have weight, they know it, and they know how to use it. That weight allows them to make markets that don't even exist. Because of this, I will point fingers. My complaint with your comment is that you characterize Apple as just another player being pulled along by forces outside their control. But let's be real, Apple was the first $1T company (late 2018), the first $2T company (late 2020), AND the first $3T company (Jan 2022). No one else even comes close. Microsoft is #2 market cap, but has a 12% gap, then Google with a 43% gap. There are only 4 trillion dollar companies (Amazon being the next) and realistically only one builds laptops (MSFT isn't as hardware focused). Apple sets the tone. Yes, the system sucks and is problematic, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the one dictating that system.
klodolph 3y ago
I don’t think soldering is an “evil”. Sockets suck in a hundred different ways, and we only tolerate them for the stuff we need to upgrade or replace. The demand for upgrading / replacing CPUs and memory has been dropping, steadily. I think that socketable CPUs have always been a dodgy proposition, even at the best of times—when I want to replace the CPU, it’s probably got a new socket, or I’m upgrading from DDR3 to DDR4 or something like that. Upgrading RAM is nice but having tons of memory bandwidth is much, much nicer.
- photonbeam 3y ago
  Sockets mean that you dont have to guess inventory levels so carefully, Apple presumably has to build boards that will be low demand, like 92gb ram with 4tb nvme, separately from 8tb and 1tb
  - simondotau 3y ago
    I find it genuinely astonishing that the contemporary reason for soldering memory onto the motherboard hasn't been raised already. Yes, the reason Apple moved to soldered memory for their MacBook Air line is likely some combination of physical packaging and fleet reliability. But with the latest CPUs, those reasons are now secondary. The primary reason is now performance. Don't believe me? Look at how RAM is arranged on a GPU or in a game console. The RAM chips are located as close to the CPU/GPU as physically possible, limited only by thermal constraints. You will never see DIMM slots on an NVIDIA card because the compromises would be untenable. Longer traces means lower performance, while sockets will make the cards thicker and with poorer thermals. The reasons why NVIDIA cards are the way they are correlates with why Apple's latest comptuers are the way they are. What Apple did with packaging RAM so close to the M1/M2 chip is a big part of the Apple Silicon performance story.
    - buildbot 3y ago
      Yep, exactly this. Huge, massive power savings by not pumping electrons up literally thousands of long wires to memory, thousands of times per second.