5 ms·
That soldered ram is indeed a killer, and the transition can be quite sudden. We have a 2014 macbook air with 4gb of soldered ram, and my kid was fine using it
by Joeri 3y ago
That soldered ram is indeed a killer, and the transition can be quite sudden. We have a 2014 macbook air with 4gb of soldered ram, and my kid was fine using it for office and browsing, until at one point he suddenly wasn’t. The ram footprint of that software together with macOS updates passed some threshold where it just became too slow, so now he’s using one of my other old laptops, a windows machine with an even slower cpu, but with 8 gb ram, and that one is still ok, for now.
Apple’s talk about sustainability is just talk as long as they bake in poison pills like soldered ram and soldered storage. Those machines are unupgradable and unrepairable.
The thin and light market is almost entirely soldered ram now, so now I just price in the 16 gb upgrade as the base config price when looking at those.
- brailsafe 3y agoHonestly I feel bad for most people who ended up with a 4gb macbook, and Apple should feel some shame for continuing to sell them for so long, not terribly unlike the Vista debacle. 4gb was an awful choice already in 2014, and since 16gb was (I think) the max and still kinda mid, that was the obvious choice; 8GB would have still been fine for an average user. I have no idea if 64gb is the obvious choice now, but the upgrade is so obscenely expensive that I'll be holding onto my intel thing for a while longer. Not as long as I can, but until the cost to value ratio becomes more compelling, or something like a cellular modem comes around.
- shubb 3y agoIt's about price detection. If you offer several versions of a product to discover the maximum reach consumer is willing to pay, then the cheapest versions need to be meaningfully worse to drive those who can pay to the me expensive versions.
- brailsafe 3y agoTrue, but at a certain point you're just selling a shitty product with no longevity and justifying with behavioral manipulation for profit. Same with the 16gb iPad or meager iCloud drive storage tiers. They were fine I guess when they first came out, whatever, but the legitimacy of that tier shouldn't have lasted more than a small number of years
- gymbeaux 3y agoThey finally catered to devs in the last few years but it’s already too late for many of us because macOS is garbage now. The ARM transition makes it worse. I use Linux now.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago> The ARM transition makes it worse. No idea what you mean. The M1 MacBook Air is the best machine Apple has produced for years and finally convinced me to update my old personal laptop. The battery life is insane despite the performance being better than any of the high end Windows laptop I have used for work during the past decade. Plus it was correctly priced at launch which is very rare for Apple which usually extremely overprices everything.
- brailsafe 3y agoYa I'm not sure where people are coming up with this extreme opinion. If they go to linux, maybe they're just trying to follow a path that's been restricted through layers of system protection or something. One of my only gripes with new macbook pros is just that the ram feels insultingly expensive, and to go past 32gb you have to upgrade the CPU (all in it's over $1000 to get there).
- gymbeaux 3y agoYeah it’s top-tier hardware, but the software limits it. My main issue has been with Docker, which has been discussed to death here on HN in various threads.
- brailsafe 3y agoVery much disagree, there's not a chance in hell I'd choose linux over macos and imo—with a few exceptions—it's better than ever, and gradually becoming a more approachable platform to build things for. Although I'm fine with linux for server, when something breaks it can be a massive pain in the ass to track down why, until you've spent years day-in-day-out troubleshooting particular software to the point you know immediately what the issue is. This just doesn't happen at all for me personally on macOS in everyday use.
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y agoUnfortunately soldered RAM consumes less energy and space.
- tmtvl 3y agoAnd it sells more systems when the user needs to upgrade for more RAM.
- cramjabsyn 3y agoAnd gives some users on HN something to complain about
- Scoundreller 3y agoAnd $$$ for hot air workstation operators.
- kaba0 3y agoAnd when you have great resell value than that device might get a second and third user as well.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoAnd they operate trade-in programms spesifically to destroy second hand market
- justsomehnguy 3y agoWaiting for the data to be swapped in consumes more energy.
- sundvor 3y agoYeah I'm so glad I paid top dollar for the 8GB version of the OG X1 Carbon back in 2012 - and got the i7 with the biggest NVME, a 256gb. I also have a newer Nano for work, but prefer the keyboard of the old. If I had picked the 4GB model then, it would have been pretty useless today. Today I wouldn't buy a personal laptop with less than 32GB of memory. The X1 Nano was hard locked at 16GB, and I guess I didn't quite anticipate how much I'd be using Docker. :(
- gymbeaux 3y agoThe nano looks cool but to me there’s no point if I can’t get 32GB of RAM.
- sundvor 3y agoYep, 16GB today is truly the 4GB of 2012. (It's super lightweight though, to the point where it's impossible to know if I've packed the laptop in my bag by weight alone. Hopefully it'll see an upgrade soon.)
- loup-vaillant 3y agoThe real scandal though, is that you need more than 4GB of ram to do some office and browsing. I mean, you update the software and it just becomes worse?
- melagonster 3y agowindows need 4 GB ram, so this is operating system...