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People get so mad about this. Who cares if they offer an 8GB model? If that’s not enough for you, don’t buy it. They claim on their site in the section “How muc

People get so mad about this. Who cares if they offer an 8GB model? If that’s not enough for you, don’t buy it. They claim on their site in the section “How much memory is right for you?” >>> 8GB: Great for browsing online, streaming movies, messaging with friends and family, editing photos and personal video, casual gaming, and running everyday productivity apps. That’s not wrong. Someone only doing that stuff can get by just fine with 8GB of RAM. The only thing wrong about that is that the people who fall into that category aren’t pro, so shouldn’t they be getting some other Macbook that isn’t pro? The thing we should be mad about are the prices. They’re charging $200 or more for each step-up in RAM. I understand that their RAM is integrated and special, but an 8GB stick of SD RAM for a PC is like $30. $100 might be understandable, but $200 is obscene. The storage is even worse. Even the M3 MAX defaults to 1TB of storage. To upgrade to 4TB is $1000. A Samsung 990 Pro M2 SSD with 4TB of storage is under $300. I understand the apple storage is different, and that justifies some markup, but over a 300% markup is absurd.

wredue 3y ago
8GB is not enough for electronification and for the even further enshittification on the web today. I would tend to agree that needing 16gb just to browse the web is insane, but it’s where these apps are at right now and we should expect it to only get much much worse at an escalating rate.
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  Plus not just the web itself, but all the web based products like slack
- mulmen 3y ago
  If enshitification expands to fill available RAM is Apple doing us a favor by offering less? Can a MacBook Pro+ with 4GB of RAM save the Internet? Is a 2GB Pro++ the machine of my dreams?
  - binary132 3y ago
    I’m picking up what you’re putting down.
  - wredue 3y ago
    I don’t think even Apple influence can possibly stave off software becoming worse faster than hardware is getting better.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      They killed Flash!
thejohnconway 3y ago
I agree, 8GB is enough for a large number of people. But it shouldn't be in the pro line, and the upgrade pricing is insane.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  The problem is that "Pro" in the name of an Apple product no longer actually means Pro, even though that was true on the Mac line for longer than in the rest of their line. AirPods Pro aren't meant for people doing professional audio production. iPhone Pro isn't for people who are professional... phone...ers???
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It’s just giving in to the “prosumer” styling, which is an excellent financial decision on Apple’s part. And allowing an 8gb option lets them snag more of those. Of course, the sneaky people wait for the refurbished units.
    - thejohnconway 3y ago
      Well, sure, but it's obviously brand dilution too. Pros now know Pro doesn't mean much, and so it's premium is wearing off. It's short-termism.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Actual professionals are going to be looking at the specs and what they need to do their profession, so if was named the MacBook Wussie Edition for Idiots and it was what they needed, they'd still buy it.
  - thejohnconway 3y ago
    Apple's naming of things is just getting worse and worse. What does "Air" mean? Lighter? Sometimes...? Cheaper? Sometimes...? Standard (Mac) or special (iPad)? "Max" and "Ultra", so max isn't the max? I think the serious people at Apple have given up on naming, and whatever happens at normal corporations is happening. Part of it in genuine confusion in the product lines though. They need another Jobsian reset.
yowzadave 3y ago
I just hope Apple did their research, and that 8GB is indeed enough for the typical user; nothing will turn a new buyer off like buying an expensive new machine and then immediately finding out it’s running out of memory. Apple is supposed to be a premium brand, and they charge premium prices; cheaping out on memory is not a great way to maintain that image.
- seec 3y ago
  They did not and they don't care. A similar problem existed in the base iMac intel a few years ago. My cousin has issues with it precisely because of that. He finds ludicrous that a computer that was sold for over 1.7K euros had 8GB of RAM and an absurdly slow "Fusion Drive". The actual SSD in those is stupidly small, something like 24GB I think, all in the name of profits. He solved the disk issue by booting on an external thunderbolt SSD. Funnily enough booting on an external SSD has a lot of caveats with Apple Silicon, but I guess we should be happy they allow it at all. Next step is making sure you have to pay a special price to access more than X amount of external storage to make sure you are forced to buy the Apple upcharge. For some reason, current Apple fans seem to believe their entry level models were/are good. But they are an unbelievably bad deal and always were. When you have to make an effort of a 100 but going to the next much better step only requires 20 more, stopping your effort at the first step is a bad idea, you should only do it if you have no other choice. You went most of the way and then stopped instead of maximizing your payoff. Apple stuff was always like that, the interesting hardware started in the mid-range, and you would buy with the assumption that you would upgrade the RAM/SSD later on to avoid the Apple tax. If you want a cheap and weak computer, Apple hardware makes no sense; you can find comparably useful computers for half the price, they are just not as nice but that's it. It is just like their SE line, where they sell you a phone with technology/design/build of a least 5 years ago. If you just want to buy a cheaper (500 euros) brand new phone there are many much better options, they won't win at chip benchmarking, but they will win at everything else (because they are not challenged with 2GB of RAM and have 8GB instead). They sell this to milk the customers who have no option because switching would be too complicated. This way they can say that it's ok if they sell a phone at a decent price. But in reality, the competition for that is either a secondhand phone or 200 euros phones and then you realized the update argument is pure nonsense; you could buy at least 2 comparable phones for the same amount of time your basic iPhone gets used. Funnily enough even if you use it for 5 years, you will need to change the extremely small battery that will undoubtedly be bad at half point even with very low usage. Apple entry level hardware sells for a premium price but does not offer a premium experience because of the limitations they put into them to be able to upsell, to make more profit... And if you go for the mid-high-level hardware with the necessary options for a confortable experience, it is not a premium price anymore but luxury pricing. I think what happens is that people mostly have belief, and when they buy their expensive but entry level hardware, they believe it is working good for the price, because they don't know what they are missing on. They don't understand how much they are getting fooled for the price. And I am fairly sure Apple knows that (considering the behavior of Apple salespeople I have encountered in Apple stores) and its even part of their strategy. If a customer comes back complaining about a slow computer, they try to upsell him and make it "his mistake". They are going to say he chose "wrong", and he should have spent more money. In other words, they are psychologically abusing people, thanks to their brand image of great performance hardware. In practice the hardware is voluntarily weakened at the entry level to upsell the bigger version where they make more profit. As an old school mac user (started with System 9) I'm pretty sad to say it but people need to stop buying Apple crap. It is not worth it, at all. macOS is nice, but Windows is fine really, and there are tons of Linux option that are largely sufficient for a personal computer.
ethagknight 3y ago
It's a little naïve to think that if Apple gave us a "better deal on memory", it wouldn't also change their whole pricing scheme, as if they would just pass that savings on to the consumer. Their whole game is hitting their margin, this is how they choose to do it, and a more "fair" memory and storage pricing scheme would merely result and higher prices across-the-board. The power users are subsidizing the low end users, look elsewhere for great deals on memory.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  They could still keep asking $200 for the next tier. They used to regularly bump the lowest RAM spec and keep the price the same. DRAM and SSD prices have fallen but Apple keeps the same specs and the same upgrade prices so they're making more money off 8GB/256 GB configs then they were previously. It's getting to point where it's pretty insulting to sell a $1300 computer with a 256 GB SSD that has a street value of not even $30 and ask $400 to bump it to a 1TB when you can easily find name brand high quality fast 4TB SSDs for less than $400.
raverbashing 3y ago
Yeah I see your point. Storage is less of a concern because you can always use NAS or an external drive. Not so much with RAM And it is really shortchanging. Don't give me that crap that 8GB "is like 16GB", because quite obviously isn't. And I can see it in a MacBook with upgraded memory that even if I close most apps and try the most basic use it doesn't fit on 8GB Sounds like another case of the Apple Reality Distortion Field
nordsieck 3y ago
> People get so mad about this. Who cares if they offer an 8GB model? If that’s not enough for you, don’t buy it. > ... > The thing we should be mad about are the prices. They’re charging $200 or more for each step-up in RAM. I understand that their RAM is integrated and special, but an 8GB stick of SD RAM for a PC is like $30. $100 might be understandable, but $200 is obscene. This is the crux of the issue. The way Apple prices, the only good values they offer are the base models for each product/processor combination[1]. Apple could fix this by offering better base models or by offering reasonable upgrade pricing. They've really gouged customers on ram for as long as I can remember - even when they had user serviceable ram slots, so that's unlikely to happen IMO. I think that's why people are pushing so hard on better base models - that feels more achievable. I'm not nearly as concerned by the storage costs; mostly because it's much easier to add storage to the system as a user pretty easily. Although I will admit that external storage on a laptop is a little clunky. --- 1. I don't follow their offerings closely, but from what I recall, the vanilla processor comes with 8 GB, the Pro with 16 GB, the Max with 32 GB and the Ultra with 64 GB of ram.
- eptcyka 3y ago
  You cannot upgrade the boot drive at all. It's not even that it's hard, even if you put on higher capacity NAND on the motherboard, you'd still need an apple private key to make it work. This is unacceptable, the pricing for storage stings ever so slightly more because of this. 256gb is fine for my line of work for Linux and Windows, if you don't need too many VMs. It's a non-starter if you want to use multiple XCode versions.
The_Colonel 3y ago
> People get so mad about this. Who cares if they offer an 8GB model? People are not mad about Apple offering an 8GB model, but about making such absurd statements.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
> The thing we should be mad about are the prices. They’re charging $200 or more for each step-up in RAM.' To play Devil's advocate (and shill for Apple for a moment), probably from a marketing standpoint the 8GB model doesn't quite hit the profit margin they would like. Not that I'm claiming it's a loss-leader, but it might be on the low-end of what Apple expects when they mark up a device. But they'll take it because they want to have a model "mainstream" enough for the user with somewhat-modest disposable income. It is with the upgrades that marketing leans in and ramps up the profit margin. They recognize the "power user" that is maxing out the hardware options and deduce they can stick them for it. And this in fact affords them the softer margins on the entry model.
gizmo 3y ago
Our Macs/PCs allow us to do our -- incredibly well compensated -- jobs. I can't believe that modern computers cost less than a car. I pay maybe $3000 for a computer and $30,000 for a car. When I compare how much value I get from both it's totally the wrong way around. I should be spending $30,000 on a Mac and drive a $3000 clunker. It's amazing how inexpensive computer hardware has become and I really don't get how people feel so entitled to lower prices when you can pick up a slightly older computer that runs linux for next to nothing.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  If you spend $16k on each you can get a fairly decent used car and a small cluster, haha.
- nightski 3y ago
  That's not how economics work. Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world. They have been well compensated for the work they have done. Yet they could do better. Competition should force that, but they undertake anti-competitive measures just like every other massive boring conglomerate out there.
  - MR4D 3y ago
    Apple is the 4th largest computer maker by market share [0]. Lenovo is more than 2 1/2 times their size. Your argument is akin to "Porsche should lower their prices. They could do better. Competition should force that." Apple has a particular niche in the market similar to Porsche. Steve Jobs even tells the story of that (sorry, don't have a link handy for that story at the moment). Apple is a premium company. They have premium prices. I can complain about their prices all day long just like for Porsche, but I'm still going to buy their products if I think they're worth it. I just make sure to keep them for a long time - iphones for 4 years, and computers for 6 - which makes it worth it to me to spend on larger ram and storage. Side note: Take a look at Louis Vuitton handbags [1]. They're way overpriced. But there are tons of them out there if you look for them. Most of the bags on that page are more expensive than most Apple computers. That tells me that Apple knows what they are doing, and the rest of the PC market does not. [0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/269703/global-market-share-held-by-pc-vendors-since-the-1st-quarter-2009/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/269703/global-market-sha... [1] - https://us.louisvuitton.com/eng-us/women/handbags/all-handbags/_/N-tfr7qdp https://us.louisvuitton.com/eng-us/women/handbags/all-handba...
gentleman11 3y ago
Check out your disk writes per day after using an 8gb m-series MacBook due to swapping. It will make your head explode. I personally had a tb per day, and that was mostly just web browsing with a lot of tabs, not even doing work stuff. The soldered on ssds only have a certain write capacity before they’re pooched, meaning your whole machine is toast after that. I got rid of mine after seeing that
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Apparently the 870 EVO is good for 2400TBW (I picked that because it was the first thing that I stumbled across while googling, not sure what brand Apple uses, but I guess they must be aware that they are planning to swap a lot, so I bet they went for the higher end). So assuming Apple’s disk isn’t much worse than an 870 Evo, that’s around 7 years. Probably increased a bit if your weekend workload is lighter.
  - coder543 3y ago
    No... TBW scales with the size of the disk. The 870 EVO is not uniformly rated for 2400TBW. Different technologies will have different TBW per GB of storage, but for a line of SSDs with the same technology, it almost always scales linearly by the amount of storage. The 250GB model of the 870 EVO is warrantied for 150TBW. Many of the laptops Apple sells with 8GB of RAM only come with a 256GB SSD. Surely nobody is buying an Apple laptop with 8GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD. Is 5 months a good enough lifespan for a computer? I am personally skeptical that most people would be seeing 1TBW per day, but I firmly believe that 8GB is unjustifiably low. Apple offers 24GB as an option, so they could (and should) offer 12GB as the base spec if they're unwilling to make 16GB the base spec. "Warrantied TBW for 870 EVO: 150 TBW for 250 GB model, 300 TBW for 500 GB model, 600 TBW for 1 TB model, 1,200 TBW for 2 TB model and 2,400 TBW for 4 TB model"[0] [0]: https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/internal-ssd/870evo/ https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/intern...
    - goosedragons 3y ago
      Apple weirdly limits SSD size to config. You can't buy a 4TB 8GB M3 MBP. It caps out at 2TB. If you want 4TB you need a M3 Pro or Max and 8TB is also only available with a Max for example.
bee_rider 3y ago
Are they just ripping people off on memory, or is their whole “unified memory” thing more expensive than popping in a dimm? I actually don’t understand their memory system at all, the typical trade off is high latency, high bandwidth for graphics memory, and low latency, relatively low bandwidth for CPU. They get those high bandwidth numbers, so it must be more like GDDR. But nobody seems to be complaining about memory latency on these chips? Maybe they need some cheaper RAM, to get swapped into; a RAM disk formatted to swap, haha.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  From what I understand, they're using "regular ram", but it's on package, so they can have a much wider bus between the ram and the processor. Also, the traces are much shorter, so they get a small latency benefit.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Oh interesting, I assumed started at GDDR and done something tricky to get the latency down, but your explanation makes a lot more sense.
- Havoc 3y ago
  > it must be more like GDDR Its LPDDR5 so not slow but nowhere near gddr either. Best as I can tell its just more parallel than usual setups - potentially made feasible by arm. If you look at altra etc they also seem to support loads of ram

wredue 3y ago

8GB is not enough for electronification and for the even further enshittification on the web today. I would tend to agree that needing 16gb just to browse the web is insane, but it’s where these apps are at right now and we should expect it to only get much much worse at an escalating rate.

shortrounddev2 3y ago
Plus not just the web itself, but all the web based products like slack
mulmen 3y ago
If enshitification expands to fill available RAM is Apple doing us a favor by offering less? Can a MacBook Pro+ with 4GB of RAM save the Internet? Is a 2GB Pro++ the machine of my dreams?
- binary132 3y ago
  I’m picking up what you’re putting down.
- wredue 3y ago
  I don’t think even Apple influence can possibly stave off software becoming worse faster than hardware is getting better.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    They killed Flash!

thejohnconway 3y ago

I agree, 8GB is enough for a large number of people. But it shouldn't be in the pro line, and the upgrade pricing is insane.

kalleboo 3y ago
The problem is that "Pro" in the name of an Apple product no longer actually means Pro, even though that was true on the Mac line for longer than in the rest of their line. AirPods Pro aren't meant for people doing professional audio production. iPhone Pro isn't for people who are professional... phone...ers???
- bombcar 3y ago
  It’s just giving in to the “prosumer” styling, which is an excellent financial decision on Apple’s part. And allowing an 8gb option lets them snag more of those. Of course, the sneaky people wait for the refurbished units.
  - thejohnconway 3y ago
    Well, sure, but it's obviously brand dilution too. Pros now know Pro doesn't mean much, and so it's premium is wearing off. It's short-termism.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Actual professionals are going to be looking at the specs and what they need to do their profession, so if was named the MacBook Wussie Edition for Idiots and it was what they needed, they'd still buy it.
- thejohnconway 3y ago
  Apple's naming of things is just getting worse and worse. What does "Air" mean? Lighter? Sometimes...? Cheaper? Sometimes...? Standard (Mac) or special (iPad)? "Max" and "Ultra", so max isn't the max? I think the serious people at Apple have given up on naming, and whatever happens at normal corporations is happening. Part of it in genuine confusion in the product lines though. They need another Jobsian reset.

yowzadave 3y ago

I just hope Apple did their research, and that 8GB is indeed enough for the typical user; nothing will turn a new buyer off like buying an expensive new machine and then immediately finding out it’s running out of memory. Apple is supposed to be a premium brand, and they charge premium prices; cheaping out on memory is not a great way to maintain that image.

seec 3y ago
They did not and they don't care. A similar problem existed in the base iMac intel a few years ago. My cousin has issues with it precisely because of that. He finds ludicrous that a computer that was sold for over 1.7K euros had 8GB of RAM and an absurdly slow "Fusion Drive". The actual SSD in those is stupidly small, something like 24GB I think, all in the name of profits. He solved the disk issue by booting on an external thunderbolt SSD. Funnily enough booting on an external SSD has a lot of caveats with Apple Silicon, but I guess we should be happy they allow it at all. Next step is making sure you have to pay a special price to access more than X amount of external storage to make sure you are forced to buy the Apple upcharge. For some reason, current Apple fans seem to believe their entry level models were/are good. But they are an unbelievably bad deal and always were. When you have to make an effort of a 100 but going to the next much better step only requires 20 more, stopping your effort at the first step is a bad idea, you should only do it if you have no other choice. You went most of the way and then stopped instead of maximizing your payoff. Apple stuff was always like that, the interesting hardware started in the mid-range, and you would buy with the assumption that you would upgrade the RAM/SSD later on to avoid the Apple tax. If you want a cheap and weak computer, Apple hardware makes no sense; you can find comparably useful computers for half the price, they are just not as nice but that's it. It is just like their SE line, where they sell you a phone with technology/design/build of a least 5 years ago. If you just want to buy a cheaper (500 euros) brand new phone there are many much better options, they won't win at chip benchmarking, but they will win at everything else (because they are not challenged with 2GB of RAM and have 8GB instead). They sell this to milk the customers who have no option because switching would be too complicated. This way they can say that it's ok if they sell a phone at a decent price. But in reality, the competition for that is either a secondhand phone or 200 euros phones and then you realized the update argument is pure nonsense; you could buy at least 2 comparable phones for the same amount of time your basic iPhone gets used. Funnily enough even if you use it for 5 years, you will need to change the extremely small battery that will undoubtedly be bad at half point even with very low usage. Apple entry level hardware sells for a premium price but does not offer a premium experience because of the limitations they put into them to be able to upsell, to make more profit... And if you go for the mid-high-level hardware with the necessary options for a confortable experience, it is not a premium price anymore but luxury pricing. I think what happens is that people mostly have belief, and when they buy their expensive but entry level hardware, they believe it is working good for the price, because they don't know what they are missing on. They don't understand how much they are getting fooled for the price. And I am fairly sure Apple knows that (considering the behavior of Apple salespeople I have encountered in Apple stores) and its even part of their strategy. If a customer comes back complaining about a slow computer, they try to upsell him and make it "his mistake". They are going to say he chose "wrong", and he should have spent more money. In other words, they are psychologically abusing people, thanks to their brand image of great performance hardware. In practice the hardware is voluntarily weakened at the entry level to upsell the bigger version where they make more profit. As an old school mac user (started with System 9) I'm pretty sad to say it but people need to stop buying Apple crap. It is not worth it, at all. macOS is nice, but Windows is fine really, and there are tons of Linux option that are largely sufficient for a personal computer.

ethagknight 3y ago

It's a little naïve to think that if Apple gave us a "better deal on memory", it wouldn't also change their whole pricing scheme, as if they would just pass that savings on to the consumer. Their whole game is hitting their margin, this is how they choose to do it, and a more "fair" memory and storage pricing scheme would merely result and higher prices across-the-board. The power users are subsidizing the low end users, look elsewhere for great deals on memory.

goosedragons 3y ago
They could still keep asking $200 for the next tier. They used to regularly bump the lowest RAM spec and keep the price the same. DRAM and SSD prices have fallen but Apple keeps the same specs and the same upgrade prices so they're making more money off 8GB/256 GB configs then they were previously. It's getting to point where it's pretty insulting to sell a $1300 computer with a 256 GB SSD that has a street value of not even $30 and ask $400 to bump it to a 1TB when you can easily find name brand high quality fast 4TB SSDs for less than $400.

raverbashing 3y ago

Yeah I see your point. Storage is less of a concern because you can always use NAS or an external drive. Not so much with RAM And it is really shortchanging. Don't give me that crap that 8GB "is like 16GB", because quite obviously isn't. And I can see it in a MacBook with upgraded memory that even if I close most apps and try the most basic use it doesn't fit on 8GB Sounds like another case of the Apple Reality Distortion Field

nordsieck 3y ago

> People get so mad about this. Who cares if they offer an 8GB model? If that’s not enough for you, don’t buy it. > ... > The thing we should be mad about are the prices. They’re charging $200 or more for each step-up in RAM. I understand that their RAM is integrated and special, but an 8GB stick of SD RAM for a PC is like $30. $100 might be understandable, but $200 is obscene. This is the crux of the issue. The way Apple prices, the only good values they offer are the base models for each product/processor combination[1]. Apple could fix this by offering better base models or by offering reasonable upgrade pricing. They've really gouged customers on ram for as long as I can remember - even when they had user serviceable ram slots, so that's unlikely to happen IMO. I think that's why people are pushing so hard on better base models - that feels more achievable. I'm not nearly as concerned by the storage costs; mostly because it's much easier to add storage to the system as a user pretty easily. Although I will admit that external storage on a laptop is a little clunky. --- 1. I don't follow their offerings closely, but from what I recall, the vanilla processor comes with 8 GB, the Pro with 16 GB, the Max with 32 GB and the Ultra with 64 GB of ram.

eptcyka 3y ago
You cannot upgrade the boot drive at all. It's not even that it's hard, even if you put on higher capacity NAND on the motherboard, you'd still need an apple private key to make it work. This is unacceptable, the pricing for storage stings ever so slightly more because of this. 256gb is fine for my line of work for Linux and Windows, if you don't need too many VMs. It's a non-starter if you want to use multiple XCode versions.

The_Colonel 3y ago

> People get so mad about this. Who cares if they offer an 8GB model? People are not mad about Apple offering an 8GB model, but about making such absurd statements.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

> The thing we should be mad about are the prices. They’re charging $200 or more for each step-up in RAM.' To play Devil's advocate (and shill for Apple for a moment), probably from a marketing standpoint the 8GB model doesn't quite hit the profit margin they would like. Not that I'm claiming it's a loss-leader, but it might be on the low-end of what Apple expects when they mark up a device. But they'll take it because they want to have a model "mainstream" enough for the user with somewhat-modest disposable income. It is with the upgrades that marketing leans in and ramps up the profit margin. They recognize the "power user" that is maxing out the hardware options and deduce they can stick them for it. And this in fact affords them the softer margins on the entry model.

gizmo 3y ago

Our Macs/PCs allow us to do our -- incredibly well compensated -- jobs. I can't believe that modern computers cost less than a car. I pay maybe $3000 for a computer and $30,000 for a car. When I compare how much value I get from both it's totally the wrong way around. I should be spending $30,000 on a Mac and drive a $3000 clunker. It's amazing how inexpensive computer hardware has become and I really don't get how people feel so entitled to lower prices when you can pick up a slightly older computer that runs linux for next to nothing.

bee_rider 3y ago
If you spend $16k on each you can get a fairly decent used car and a small cluster, haha.
nightski 3y ago
That's not how economics work. Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world. They have been well compensated for the work they have done. Yet they could do better. Competition should force that, but they undertake anti-competitive measures just like every other massive boring conglomerate out there.
- MR4D 3y ago
  Apple is the 4th largest computer maker by market share [0]. Lenovo is more than 2 1/2 times their size. Your argument is akin to "Porsche should lower their prices. They could do better. Competition should force that." Apple has a particular niche in the market similar to Porsche. Steve Jobs even tells the story of that (sorry, don't have a link handy for that story at the moment). Apple is a premium company. They have premium prices. I can complain about their prices all day long just like for Porsche, but I'm still going to buy their products if I think they're worth it. I just make sure to keep them for a long time - iphones for 4 years, and computers for 6 - which makes it worth it to me to spend on larger ram and storage. Side note: Take a look at Louis Vuitton handbags [1]. They're way overpriced. But there are tons of them out there if you look for them. Most of the bags on that page are more expensive than most Apple computers. That tells me that Apple knows what they are doing, and the rest of the PC market does not. [0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/269703/global-market-share-held-by-pc-vendors-since-the-1st-quarter-2009/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/269703/global-market-sha... [1] - https://us.louisvuitton.com/eng-us/women/handbags/all-handbags/_/N-tfr7qdp https://us.louisvuitton.com/eng-us/women/handbags/all-handba...

gentleman11 3y ago

Check out your disk writes per day after using an 8gb m-series MacBook due to swapping. It will make your head explode. I personally had a tb per day, and that was mostly just web browsing with a lot of tabs, not even doing work stuff. The soldered on ssds only have a certain write capacity before they’re pooched, meaning your whole machine is toast after that. I got rid of mine after seeing that

bee_rider 3y ago
Apparently the 870 EVO is good for 2400TBW (I picked that because it was the first thing that I stumbled across while googling, not sure what brand Apple uses, but I guess they must be aware that they are planning to swap a lot, so I bet they went for the higher end). So assuming Apple’s disk isn’t much worse than an 870 Evo, that’s around 7 years. Probably increased a bit if your weekend workload is lighter.
- coder543 3y ago
  No... TBW scales with the size of the disk. The 870 EVO is not uniformly rated for 2400TBW. Different technologies will have different TBW per GB of storage, but for a line of SSDs with the same technology, it almost always scales linearly by the amount of storage. The 250GB model of the 870 EVO is warrantied for 150TBW. Many of the laptops Apple sells with 8GB of RAM only come with a 256GB SSD. Surely nobody is buying an Apple laptop with 8GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD. Is 5 months a good enough lifespan for a computer? I am personally skeptical that most people would be seeing 1TBW per day, but I firmly believe that 8GB is unjustifiably low. Apple offers 24GB as an option, so they could (and should) offer 12GB as the base spec if they're unwilling to make 16GB the base spec. "Warrantied TBW for 870 EVO: 150 TBW for 250 GB model, 300 TBW for 500 GB model, 600 TBW for 1 TB model, 1,200 TBW for 2 TB model and 2,400 TBW for 4 TB model"[0] [0]: https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/internal-ssd/870evo/ https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/intern...
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    Apple weirdly limits SSD size to config. You can't buy a 4TB 8GB M3 MBP. It caps out at 2TB. If you want 4TB you need a M3 Pro or Max and 8TB is also only available with a Max for example.

bee_rider 3y ago

Are they just ripping people off on memory, or is their whole “unified memory” thing more expensive than popping in a dimm? I actually don’t understand their memory system at all, the typical trade off is high latency, high bandwidth for graphics memory, and low latency, relatively low bandwidth for CPU. They get those high bandwidth numbers, so it must be more like GDDR. But nobody seems to be complaining about memory latency on these chips? Maybe they need some cheaper RAM, to get swapped into; a RAM disk formatted to swap, haha.

nordsieck 3y ago
From what I understand, they're using "regular ram", but it's on package, so they can have a much wider bus between the ram and the processor. Also, the traces are much shorter, so they get a small latency benefit.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Oh interesting, I assumed started at GDDR and done something tricky to get the latency down, but your explanation makes a lot more sense.
Havoc 3y ago
> it must be more like GDDR Its LPDDR5 so not slow but nowhere near gddr either. Best as I can tell its just more parallel than usual setups - potentially made feasible by arm. If you look at altra etc they also seem to support loads of ram