20 ms·

Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

269 points by jay_kyburz 3y ago

jay_kyburz 3y ago
I had 16GB on my windows PC and was having trouble building our Unity project. Turns out we now require at least 32GB to build the project, but I just upgraded all the way to 64 because it was so cheap. btw, if you are wondering, Unity will just hang forever during the build process of you don't have enough ram.
- hulitu 3y ago
  You can always add more swap. /s
eisa01 3y ago
This will excerbate the problem with electronic waste by shortening the useful life Apple should be more serious about their environmental commitments
- bushbaba 3y ago
  Eh, if you give more Ram developers will just take advantage of it. Realistically perf headroom just gets eaten up on shitty code and abstraction layers. Ever notice how word is always the same slow-ish speeds. Never really faster.
  - Osiris 3y ago
    You’re arguing that we should all be using 10-20 year old computers and that computers should never get faster because it makes us write less efficient code? That’s an asinine argument.
    - _Algernon_ 3y ago
      >That’s an asinine argument. Good that that isn't the actual argument made by GP, but just a pretty strawman you managed to think up.
      - matsemann 3y ago
        I'm also unable to read the argument in any other way. If you have a better explanation please provide it.
        _Algernon_ 3y ago
        The jump from developers will use more RAM on abstraction layers to computers shouldnt get faster was never made by the original comment, and implying it was made is the worst possible reading of the argument made which is against HN guidelines.
        Osiris 3y ago
        That’s not how I read it “IF you give them more RAM… they’ll just use it”. Thus, more RAM is effectively the same as less RAM. Conclusion: no need for more RAM.
      - Osiris 3y ago
        I guess I misinterpreted his argument. How would you word the point he was making, so I can understand it better?
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Not only that, it doesn't even work if only Apple does it. Developers will still write the bloated code because it runs on cheap PCs with 16+GB of RAM, and it runs on the pricier Macs that also have 16+GB of RAM, so the only thing it runs poorly on is the more affordable Macs which are a small enough market segment for developers to disregard.
- aurareturn 3y ago
  The average Mac is in use for far longer than your average upgradeable windows laptop from Walmart/Costco. One strong evidence for this is that macOS market share is actually 20% on desktop/laptops despite Macs selling only about ~8-10% of total PCs worldwide. [0] So yes, on average, Macs are significantly better for the environment. Having less RAM does not mean people replace their Macs more often than Windows computers. If people truly cared about the environment, they'd buy Macs over Windows computers. With that said, could Apple extend the lifespan of Macs even more by making the base RAM higher? Yes. Not going to argue against that. But Macs are already much better than Windows computers in this regard. [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide [0] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS51020623 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS51020623
  - ge96 3y ago
    The display man, so good. Using a 2015 i7 mbp still.
  - matsemann 3y ago
    Given that this comparison is with quite expensive Macs vs lots of cheap Windows laptops I'm not sure your conclusion makes sense. For the "if people truly cared about the environment" they would probably get the same use out of a similar expensive PC. It's also a bit tone deaf to gatekeep environmentalism behind a $1000++ purchase, especially one that many can't afford.
    - aurareturn 3y ago
      >For the "if people truly cared about the environment" they would probably get the same use out of a similar expensive PC. I really don't think so. I used to buy $800 - $900 Windows laptops. They often lasted 2 years before some hinge is broken or the display suddenly gets corrupted or it comes unbearably slow. I had a 2013 base Macbook Air that lasted until 2019. None of my Windows laptops ever lasted that long. The data seems to back up my anecdote experience. Do you get more RAM on a Windows laptop for the same price as a Mac? Yes, usually. But everything else around the Windows laptop is poor.
charcircuit 3y ago
Having an 8GB version makes it more accessible. Apple could just stop selling it and the complaint about there being a $200 upgrade would no longer be valid.
- usea 3y ago
  That's not the only other alternative.
- hulitu 3y ago
  I think thay the complain here is more that it comes with 8GB of RAM and less that the upgrade costs 200$. Apple fans are people for whom the money are usually not a problem.
- xp84 3y ago
  They should stop selling 8GB configs, but they shouldn't hike the price by $200 to do it. They'd make the same margin dollars (though not percentage) if they hiked the base prices by $40 and bumped them all to 16GB. But obviously this is Apple we're talking about, and they've been playing these cynical margin games with their customers for 30+ years.
  - chongli 3y ago
    It’s called premium pricing. Apple charges more because people expect them to, given that Apple markets their products as premium products. What you’re proposing is for Apple to raise the price of the baseline model by $40 so that everyone gets 16GB. But most regular people don’t need 16GB. They don’t have a million tabs and applications open all at once. They use their computers for very basic things and Apple makes them very happy by providing a luxurious product for that. You can see the same pricing strategy play out in countless other premium products, and not just in consumer goods. Check out the prices on Fluke multimeters or Tektronix oscilloscopes sometime (and compare with UniT and Rigol, respectively).
    - xp84 3y ago
      > most regular people don’t need 16GB. They don’t have a million tabs and applications open all at once First, I don't know a lot of regular people who DON'T have 20-30 tabs open minimum. And the #1 consumer of RAM for "regular people" is browser tabs. Just a "normal" page with tons of ads is eating a tremendous amout of RAM, and most people would like to keep dozens open. Not to mention running a half dozen Electron apps at once like Slack, Teams, etc. It's been a decade plus of ever-growing OS and software bloat and Apple's base model 8GB hasn't changed in all this time. So, if 8GB was just enough then, it can't possibly be enough for those same consumers now.
innagadadavida 3y ago
Another version of what Bill Gates said: '640K software is all the memory anybody would ever need on a computer.'.
- vel0city 3y ago
  He probably never said that. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quo...
  - pieter_mj 3y ago
    Maybe not, but it's still a valid analogy to what Apple is doing now.
aurareturn 3y ago
8GB is still good enough for office workers and students. Heck, I used an M1 8GB Air for 1 year as a dev. Although I wish I had more RAM, it still served me well. For $899 (on sale sometimes), the 8GB M2 Air is absolutely a steal. The screen quality, thinness, battery life, build quality, SoC, quietness, coolness, metal enclosure, touchpad, and speakers are simply unmatched by anything in the PC world at that price - sometimes any price. Those things cost Apple money. Other PC makers cheap out on them. In order for Apple to earn higher margins, they make the RAM and storage upgrades very expensive. So the base versions actually offer great values. It's the upgraded RAM/storage that decreases the value but still good value overall considering what you're getting. I understand why 8GB is still the base. Everything except the RAM is outstanding and unmatched. Apple makes the money on RAM and storage upgrades. Perhaps Apple will start at 12GB for M4 generation. Perhaps the arrival of local LLMs will skyrocket RAM upgrade demand such that Apple can start the base at 16GB and still have plenty of people who want to upgrade to 32GB. The problem for Apple will always be if they can increase the base without hurting upgrade profit. On a slightly related note: $/GB for RAM hit a wall starting in 2011. https://assets.ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage.svg https://assets.ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/historical...
- shmde 3y ago
  Apple geeks eating up and justifying anything and everything that apple throws at them is hilarious to see. It takes 50-60$ for a 8GB stick and people justifying that 200$ markup because Apple needs to make profit too. Is it Stockholm syndrome I dont know.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - aurareturn 3y ago
    It probably costs Apple way less than $50-$60 for 8GB. The margins must be very high. I understand the business aspect of this for Apple. I'm not mad at them. I'll pay $200 to upgrade the RAM so that I can keep using macOS and have a well-built laptop that makes no noise. Apple knows this. It's just good business in my opinion. But I guess to you, I'm an Apple geek who has Stockholm syndrome.
Osiris 3y ago
When I started my current job they gave me an M1 Mac with 8GB because it’s what they had on hand. I could barely run my IDE and a web browser. At least 1GB was for video memory, and it was swapping constantly. I couldn’t run docker containers because of how much input lag I would get. 8GB is barely usable and shouldn’t even be an option for a Pro machine. I used it for a week before switching to a personal desktop with 64GB.
- changoplatanero 3y ago
  I work at apple and i use a m1 mac with 8gb for all my work
  - Osiris 3y ago
    How? What apps are you using? As soon as I plug in an external monitor it turns into molasses. If I try to do a screen share for a video call, it lags. My memory pressure graph was always maxed out. If I ran the test suite for one repo the system became unresponsive. Docker would eat 4GB with only two containers (just redis and postgresql for local dev) I had to manually tune docker to use a little as possible. It was a nightmare.
    - aurareturn 3y ago
      You're clearly a dev who requires at least 16GB. For many office workers, 8GB is fine.
      - Osiris 3y ago
        I supposed if you only used your $1800 MacBook Pro to use the web browser, then yeah, 8GB would be fine.
        aurareturn 3y ago
        I wouldn't buy the $1600 M3 14" MBP if that's what you're referring to. I can get an M2 Pro with 32GB for $1800 used easily. That's what I'd spend my money on if I had to get a laptop with $1800.
7e 3y ago
Upgrading to 16GB costs as much as dinner for two at a moderately nice restaurant.
- Osiris 3y ago
  Where do you live? I pay half that to take my family of 5 out.
  - 7e 3y ago
    Legal Sea Foods: one soup, one main, one drink. Tax, tip, then parking. $100 per person.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Hopefully you don't live at Legal Sea Foods, which is a popular New England restaurant, so maybe you're in Boston where it's that expensive?
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    You’ll certainly get close to that in SF with a couple drinks at $20 a pop.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - keep_reading 3y ago
    Any major US city? Dinner for two with my wife is ~$200, yeah...? (I'm not even in California or NYC)
- deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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3np 3y ago
Counter to title, as a non-mac-user I probably benefit from entry-level Macs having 8GB vs 16GB RAM - it increases pressure on devs to actually try to reign in their ballooning web/Electron apps when resource waste becomes noticable on modern hardware. Accounting for second-order effects over longer timeframes it could be a net benefit for desktop users. 8GB should be plenty. That it isn't is a software problem.
- Osiris 3y ago
  It’s a weird argument. It’s more weird because Apple isn’t the only computer manufacturer. I’ve never sat in a software development meeting in which the amount of RAM on customer machines was discussed, let alone used as an argument in favor of spending significant time doing software optimizations. I would be very surprised if Apple selling laptops with 8GB of RAM had any effect whatsoever on software development priorities.
  - 3np 3y ago
    More likely to manifest as "PM complains that our app runs like dogshit on their new computer, just like those user reports we have been ignoring until now"
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Unfortunately if you use typescript (tsc) it absolutely gobbles memory up
  - 3np 3y ago
    So your use-case may require more and the entry-level model may not be an appropriate choice for you. I can also come up with dozens of not-too-uncommon scenarios where 16GB won't suffice, either (4k video editing + commonly mandated corpware, for one).
- pornel 3y ago
  I don’t think it will work: • Devs and their managers don’t use the 8GB version. • Electron is used because it’s cheap to develop for. You can hate its RAM-eating guts all you want, but for cross-platform UIs there’s no competition. Nobody wants to pay for maintenance of 5 separate front ends in 3 languages.
jmspring 3y ago
I've got a couple of different Macbooks...My first M1 was a 16gig M1 Air. I usually splurge for more storage (and memory), 16gig was the most that was available at that time. The machine still works well for development, running VMs, etc. It's no longer my main machine, but it works great for when I have to travel.
hurryer 3y ago
Luxury status items are not priced on BOM. That's the whole point, showing that you don't care paying way beyond actual costs. It would be a strategic signaling mistake for Apple to sell RAM upgrades at actual cost, it would decrease their luxury brand value. If you don't mind signaling poor and want to pay just actual costs buy a PC.
- al_borland 3y ago
  This would only make sense if there was some way for people to show off their extra RAM. A MacBook Pro with 8GB or RAM, or 24GB for $400 more, look exactly the same, and no one cares how much RAM someone else has. It's not a flex.
  - stevage 3y ago
    Whoa, I didn't know there was such a thing as a 15" MacBook Air with 24 GB. That may very well be my next computer. My old MBP died, and the cost of a new MBP is extortionate. Thank you!
- arcticbull 3y ago
  Premium pricing absolutely factors in. They charge $200 instead of say $199.99 because it’s meant to feel expensive, not like a good deal.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
Whenever I pointed this out "very wide memory bus very close to the M3 chip" I got voted down here. But the Mx performace you get is partially because of the wide memory bus of the unified memory. The downside is the cost and the you-can't-upgrade-card you have been dealt. Please don't point out again it's "just" DDR5 and not in a system-in-a-package and just like any other laptop. "We shouldn’t accept this" Well you raved about the CPU performance and how Apple is genius, you can't eat the cake and have it (the cake is a lie!) (LDDR5 8gb is ~$25)
- skrebbel 3y ago
  If I may take a guess, maybe you get downvoted not because of the content of your arguments but because of their coherence. For instance, who is this “you” you’re raving against? How is CPU performance related to the cost if 8gb RAM? Consider re-reading your comment before you hit post and the downvotes might well disappear.
  - KingOfCoders 3y ago
    I would disagree. Usually my comments have some upvotes or none. But my Apple comments get consistent downvotes. "How is CPU performance related to the cost if 8gb RAM?" "But the Mx performace you get is partially because of the wide memory bus of the unified memory. The downside is the cost" I did write this in the comment I think and the others - but I agree not as clearly in this one as in others. (My Apple/M[x]/Memory comments often drop karma below zero and than get upvoted - as a reaction? I do think this is more of a community topic, I don't think my other comments are clear and my Apple/M[x]/Memory comments get downvotes because they are unclear/confusing. If I write "Steve Wozniak is just a human" it seems in the center of the distortion field)
    - skrebbel 3y ago
      > "How is CPU performance related to the cost if 8gb RAM?" > "But the Mx performace you get is partially because of the wide memory bus of the unified memory. The downside is the cost" FWIW I still have no idea what you mean here.
tedunangst 3y ago
Anyone with a literally useless 8GB macbook, you can send it my way and I'll, uh, dispose of it for you.
deleted 3y ago
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PeterStuer 3y ago
Don't remember building with anything less than 32GB in the last 6 years if not longer. The cost savings of going with just 16GB were just too tiny. 8GB? I can't even remember the time I would have considered that adequate.
- krisleipus 3y ago
  I have personal M1 Pro with 16GB, and work M1 Pro with 32GB. I code on both, run Docker, etc. Can't notice any difference in performance.
matsemann 3y ago
My cheap student laptop in 2012 had 32 GB ram. My laptop at work ~6 years ago 64 GB. That we still have to care about memory is insane to me.
- jatins 3y ago
  How does it feel to be rich? :)
  - matsemann 3y ago
    What's your point?
    - jatins 3y ago
      Not much of a point, just friendly banter. I understand it's a bit off topic for HN so hope you didn't mind Edit: though if I must make a point it was just that it's relatively uncommon to have fully speced out machines as a student
rpmisms 3y ago
I have two M1 Airs with 8gb apiece, run standard webdev loads with docker and over 100 tabs on each, and have zero issues ever. The memory management is absurd, and since I'm not working with large datasets, I'm happy. 32gb is my minimum on any other machine.
- KevinMS 3y ago
  same here: both firefox and chrome open, VScode, terminal, multiple dev apps, node processes, PDF reader, Bunch of terminal processes, etc. Memory pressure is green. Its almost like they dont believe us. Sure 8GB sounds stingy, but I'd only need to upgrade if I started using VMs that gobbled up memory for themselves.
  - ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
    I wouldn't even buy a phone with just 8 GB of ram, atleast for an android
bdcravens 3y ago
The comparison with Windows laptops isn't apt (yes, I know I avoided the obvious pun there) The SoC design of Apple silicon makes an 8GB M3 MBP faster than a 16GB Intel machine.
snickerbockers 3y ago
>That does not mean that 8GB is “enough,” though. Even relatively casual users who load up on browser tabs and inefficient Electron apps (household names like Slack, Teams, Discord, etc.) can find performance compromised by running out of RAM. As much as i love to rip on Apple's overpriced garbage, i think this speaks more to what an embarrassing clusterfuck the web has become. I remember doing all the listed tasks on computers that didn't even have 8GB HDDs.
JodieBenitez 3y ago
I don't understand... I routinely run my M1 Air with 4 instances of jetbrains IDEs, have dual screen, Safari with tens of tabs, additional apps like Rocket chat and more... and the machine never go past 8gb ram. What's going on with others ?
- fragmede 3y ago
  Tens? try hundreds of tabs, across three browsers. also Docker.
  - JodieBenitez 3y ago
    Why should I use hundreds of tabs ? I don't think I could even use this, I'd be lost. Also Why should I use Docker ? From the article: > Yes, you need more than 8GB No, I don't.
- devjab 3y ago
  I run my minimum spec m1 air with docker, vsc and all the same things I run on my work lenovo t14 or something with 32gb ram and my m1 runs better. So I'm not sure why 8gb wouldn't be enough for most things on a macbook, and I do wonder what the hell windows is doing. That being said. I don't see why Apple wouldn't put 16gb in the M3 pros. I mean, I don't really get why you'd buy the smallest pro instead of just getting the air, but it does seem cheap of Apple to only put 8GB of ram into it.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > What's going on with others ? What's going on is that almost none of the people posting here have used an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB of RAM, and don't realize that it's a very different experience than trying to use a PC with 8GB of RAM.
happytiger 3y ago
You can justify this all you want, but the truth is, for the price point, Apple is failing its customers with its minimum memory offering. It’s not about what works: it’s about the perception customers have of the company, and this looks cheap. Apple is a premium offering and questions like these are a product management failure that can damage the brand. If you find yourself defending your product for looking inferior as a premium positioned product you have already made terrible mistakes. Apple should raise ram minimums simply to eliminate the perception of value questions. God knows (as does every investor) that they have the margin to do it.
massenpunkt 3y ago
This was one of the reasons that made me switch from iPhones to Android phones.
j7ake 3y ago
Apple computers are reliable for 5 plus years. The additional few hundred dollars to upgrade the memory or storage is peanuts once amortised over the life of a computer.
fafhnir 3y ago
Don't buy it with 8 Gigs. Where's the Problem? If it's to expensive, buy another one! Is there a "humen right" or something that says: NO ONE SCHOUL HAVE LESS THAN 16 GIGS! A Pro(!) Machine which costs 4.000 Bucks with M3 Max, 36 Gigs and 1TB of SSD and ist used for 3 years or so costs 112 Bucks a month. For an absolute powerhouse which is doing Desktop-class Worstation-Performance on the go! And for a machine i am working on 8 hours a day and earn my money! And as a Pro who has to buy a 112$/month machine you should have paid this thing in one or two hours work per month. As a hobyist - well, it's a hobby! Buy whatever you can afford.
- deleted 3y ago
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Havoc 3y ago
Apple has a memory opportunity. They've got enough customers that will just blindly pay whatever they ask. They know it and they're charging accordingly
mo_42 3y ago
I think this is just about pricing. A Macbook with 8GB RAM is a shitty product. But you get to advertise that Macbooks start at 1599. Apple does a lot of analytics maybe they see that there's really a group of people who just use the default apps with some light browsing. But I think it's rather unlikely.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  But why can't it start at $1600 with 16GB? For hundreds less you can get something like a Surface Laptop 5 or Asus Zenbook with similar builds and hi-res screens with 16GB RAM.
librasteve 3y ago
I agree that 8GB is too small. My theory is that the Apple M processor guys have entered a dark pact with the marketing guys that runs like this: - we are going to need a speed bump after the initial switch to the M series to keep the momentum - we can get 8GB on the same SOC as the CPU much cheaper than 16GB (this was different with the Intel non SOC multi package architecture) And so RAM for a mac is now analogous to camera lenses on an iPhone … it going to be the main driver of upgrades when the step change to M / SOC saturates It also explains why the late Intel modules were limited to 8GB
dvfjsdhgfv 3y ago
This public shaming is very useful. It's all about the money: as long as they are able to charge ridiculous amounts for RAM upgrades, they will do it.
timeon 3y ago
I was hoping they would use better argument then just: 'We need to run Electron apps'. Especially in context of 'pro'.
frizlab 3y ago
> As I write this, with just a handful of browser tabs open, Slack, and a distraction-free writing app (iA Writer—it’s great), I’m consuming just about 11GB on my M2 MacBook Air. Yeah it does not matter how memory you have, the system is supposed to use as much as it can from it. So this does not mean anything. I’m not saying 8GiB is enough, just that this particular sentence makes no sense.
thetis 3y ago
For what it's worth: here's a youtube video of an M2 macbook air running stable diffusion https://youtu.be/Zbrd8bSK0zc https://youtu.be/Zbrd8bSK0zc
- CharlesW 3y ago
  Importantly, an 8GB Macbook.
tjpnz 3y ago
Weren't Apple taking another shot at gaming with some AAA games recently being demoed on Apple silicon? 8GB is barely enough these days with many titles requiring at least 12 to run games at minimum settings, newer releases like Starfield require 16. That's for PC with discrete graphics too.
ho_schi 3y ago
8GB RAM would be enough. If not companies searched and found a successor for Flash. Is is Electron! It wastes memory, it is slow, it doesn’t integrate to Linux, Windows and MacOS and it allows to deploy bloated JavaScript locally. But it is cheap for them! Basically the target of companies is avoiding to employ programmers for native applications. These people cost money. And optimization cost money. So they opt to waste our resources. The new ThinkPad/MacBook with soldered RAM does cost us a lot but not them. And if you just use Googles Chrome - which made all this possible with V8 - you still have a problem. Every website believes it is okay to load JS from literally everywhere and show any kind of animated media. Plus no ad-blocker. And us, opening hundreds of tabs with Epiphany, Firefox, Safari or Chrome ;)
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  It's not the point, but it doesn't hurt that, at least on macOS the 'real native' APIs are... terrible! SwiftUI only just got rounded borders this year https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71744888/swiftui-view-with-rounded-corners-and-border https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71744888/swiftui-view-wi.... People here complain about CSS, but that's been a platform feature since like 2003. On Windows the UI toolkit story is just as much of a pain, with microsoft reinventing the toolkit every other year, and it still lacks basic layout features solved in CSS.
  - jolt42 3y ago
    Unless it lacks the ability to give a MacOSX Look & Feel, I don't see a problem.
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      Unfortunately, that's kind of the case. SwiftUI on Mac looks like ass https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1557357661171204098 https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1557357661171204098 https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/SystemSettings.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/SystemSettings.html
  - ho_schi 3y ago
tibbon 3y ago
8GB feels like the base model car. It technically gets you there, but you should probably opt for at least the most minimal of upgrades.
tromp 3y ago
From another point of view this author's arguments may look a little odd. He has not much problem with Apple charging $1799 for a MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM. His problem is that Apple sells another model with 8GB for $1599. A $200 difference for a 8GB difference, what a ripoff! Does that mean he'd be happier if Apple sold the base model for $1699 instead of $1599, making the 8GB memory upgrade cost a more reasonable $100?
- diffeomorphism 3y ago
  No, the point is that the 8GB model is just for pretending that the base price is not 1799. The price difference is just apple telling you this (if 8GB were viable, they could not charge that much to unsabotage the machine).
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
How is giving people more options a bad thing? If somebody does want a larger screen and two monitor setup but will only ever be using it for light web, the 8GB machine is probably perfect for them. And thinking "you shouldn't be paying extra" is just bias. Just select the configuration you need, look how much it costs and figure if this is what you want to pay. You are not paying anything extra. They clearly tell you how much you are going to pay for the configuration you want.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  The actual complaint implicit in all this is that the upgrade pricing has always been, and still is, pretty expensive.
  - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
    But that complain doesn't make sense IMO. There are other laptops you can buy for cheaper. And even Apple has Macbook Air which is much cheaper while still more than enough to do most types of office tasks or internet browsing. So someobody wants not only a Macbook, but also a new Macbook and top model for that matter. It is like saying you want to buy top of the line Mercedes and complain the options are expensive. Yes, they are expensive, but nobody forces you to buy top of the line Mercedes. If you can't afford, don't complain about it.
- dcow 3y ago
  The point is not that more options is bad, it’s that Apple is marking ram up more than what the author considers a reasonable amount. In the past you could buy a 3rd party sodimm module and pop it in for much cheaper but now you can’t since everything is an SoC now.
- bakugo 3y ago
  When the "option" is paying $200 for an extra 8GB of RAM or 512GB of storage that would cost 1/10th of that if you bought it as a separate part, yes, it's a bad thing.
- throwaway290 3y ago
taeric 3y ago
I'll add to the chorus of folks that is somewhat baffled that 8GB is not enough. That is a ton of memory.
- eptcyka 3y ago
  It is not a ton if you're using the laptop for professional software development or for professional whatever software work that would call for professional hardware - I am specifically excluding professional work that can be done on a MacBook Air from 2017.
- tornato7 3y ago
  I do heavy dev work on my M1 Air with 8GB, meaning multiple IDEs, dozens of Chrome tabs, iPhone simulators, and plenty of electron apps all open at once. Never had an issue with it. MacOS is very good at paging to it's super-fast SSD.
- savanaly 3y ago
  Add on to that the observation that memory for your average consumer computer is something of an arms race between the manufacturer of the consumer's computer and the developers of the software they'll use. Manufacturers want to have a computer with enough memory that it never feels like a constraint to the user (and blog posts like this one enjoin them to do that). At the same time, developers of software want to consume as much memory as possible-- up to the point where they've used it all and any extra becomes noticeable as perf problems to the user. So Apple keeping their default memory offering low could be seen in a certain noble light...like honoring a nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  Not when you compare against other devices and consider that bloat is a thing and programs and websites use more RAM now than they did to accomplish essentially the same thing. If Apple was asking $600 that might be OK, but at $1600? How many laptops at that price point have 8GB RAM? Heck a $400 Steam Deck has 16GB.
- doublepg23 3y ago
  The iPhone 15 Pro that launched some months ago has 8G 8G is paltry on a desktop computer that should last years.
ilamont 3y ago
If 8GB will be a bottleneck for many today, imagine the performance of that non-upgradeable laptop in a few years’ time. Apple used to sell an iMac with non-upgradable RAM: we found this iMac has the memory soldered to the motherboard removing any possibility of adding additional memory. Users will be permanently locked in to the 8GB of memory, as there is no Apple factory upgrade option. https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/25084-teardown-of-lower-cost-2014-imac-reveals-memory-not-user-upgradable https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/25084-teardown-of-lower-cost... Lots of returns and refurbs on that model.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > Lots of returns and refurbs on that model. You imagine, or you have data?
ianai 3y ago
I think the best reaction would be shame. Just a big round of shame for a trillion dollar company being so greedy to cripple their top equipment. Tech’s stagnated for over a decade and largely because of greed and at the expense of innovation. Prove me wrong? Do something genuinely new, like a mass produced cpu on germanium. Make a modern OS that’s a successor to unix-and plan9. Edit-Or at least a moddable iphone that can plug into a monitor/keyboard/mouse. Edit2-shame the company though, not the people who walk around carrying iphones or other apple devices. The company is the problem here.
- runjake 3y ago
  > Tech’s stagnated for over a decade I don’t know where to begin with this, but on topic, the M1 came out in 2020 and was a big tech leap in how PCs are done. Sure, all the individual technologies within existed elsewhere first. But Apple executed and delivered great products.
  - ianai 3y ago
    Sure. Running an OS that is carrying a lot of legacy OS X with introduced bugs and cruft. I love *nix and hope to keep using it for a long time more. But if you plunked 2002 me into modern day, apple’s offerings would be pretty cool but not what I’d expect after 2 decades. You could buy a desktop with 4 gigs of ram in 2010.
    - ianai 3y ago
      They could get me to shut up for probably 4 years if they cemented a deal to produce the next Nintendo console with Nintendo in a way Nintendo would be fully onboard with delivering. Think steam deck or mac mini level of hardware/cost.
    - jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
      Most of your comments in this thread read like you are completely unaware of the tech and manufacturing leaps we've already passed and are currently trying to pass. You are allowed to complain if you want to, but your complaints are unsubstantiated. Signalling we haven't made significant and or substantial advances since 2002 is a joke - especially if your barometer is buying RAM. There's always research ongoing to improve tech and a lot of it is on the market already, but just because researchers figured something out doesn't mean it's feasible on a large manufacturing scale or that thermodynamics will even allow it to work well. Comparing devices in 2002 to 2023 and not noticing the drastic improvements just shows a lack of understanding and or signs of living in complete denial to just complain.
wafriedemann 3y ago
The problem I have with 16GB as a upgrade is that the base model is widely available and often on sale. 16GB does exist as preconfigured option, but it is a lot harder to come by. It's mainly sold as BTO, which means you have to pay full price. That makes that extra 8GB of RAM ridiculously expensive. I mean it's already ridiculously expensive, but the fact that base models sell with huge discounts increases it even further. I will NEVER EVER pay for this upgrade out of sheer principle. I'd rather switch to another system.
- selfhoster69 3y ago
  Yep, I faced this same issue when I bought an M2 Air early March. The 16GB BTO upgrade was roughly 40% more expensive compared to the discounted base 8GB model.
- rs999gti 3y ago
  Macs are luxury goods, price is the price. If you have an issue with it then you are not the market. No one goes to a Lambo dealer and complains about the cost of an oil change. Price is the price for luxury goods.
  - NewJazz 3y ago
    Apple has an 8% global market share for PCs. In Q42022, they shipped 7 million units. Lamborghini shipped less than 10k units in 2022, total. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/11/apples-mac-market-share-jumped-even-though-pc-sales-fell-for-the-sixth-consecutive-quarter.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/11/apples-mac-market-share-jump... https://www.lamborghini.com/en-en/news/lamborghinis-record-breaking-2022 https://www.lamborghini.com/en-en/news/lamborghinis-record-b... https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/19/apple-shipped-seven-million-macs-despite-market-drop-in-2022 https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/19/apple-shipped-sev...
    - a123b456c 3y ago
      Comparing Apple to Lamborghini is laughable. Apple is Audi at best. More like Volkswagen or Honda to me.
underbluewaters 3y ago
Having these amounts of RAM on the base models hurt walk-in retail customers as well. Recently I had a computer die and luckily my boss found some extra funds in our budget that needed to be spent ASAP. I had an opportune moment to get a machine that day, but only if I could walk into the Apple Store and get it off the shelf. I settled for less RAM than I would have liked because a "custom order" would have taken weeks to arrive. I have no problem with low-memory being an option, but why stock only meager amounts of RAM on the models sold in the store?
- CharlesW 3y ago
  I bought my 16GB MacBook Air from a store. And FWIW, vendors like B&H and others regularly stock high-spec Macs that you can get overnight.
actionfromafar 3y ago
Hot take: What would happen if Macs with twice the memory were more common? There’s always an Electron or whatever ready to eat that extra RAM. Apple is probably doing the low end PC users a favour here, by proxy. (Not that Apple cares in the slightest, it’s a side effect.)
satvikpendem 3y ago
As long as people keep buying, companies will keep selling. That is how it is, according to the laws of supply and demand. If you want Apple to stop selling 8 GB machines for that much, convince a large enough contingent of consumers to stop buying. Indeed, Mac sales have been down the past few years.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Absurd behavior from a company who spent a fortune on an ad for their environmental initiatives to essentially ship e-waste to force your hand to the higher price. Yes it's e-waste, it can't be upgraded, it can't be amended later those machines are under performing for life for essentially saving a few dollars just to give the false idea the machine is cheaper than they actually want to sell it at.
indigomm 3y ago
The reason they do this is to have a low headline price, yet push you into upgrading more than just the RAM. Customers see the low 'starting from' price, but then get pushed into upgrading for more RAM. At which point they see that they can change for a more powerful machine with the same RAM for only a bit more. You come in for an M3, but walk out with the M3 Pro.
rs999gti 3y ago
The problem is Macs are not for poor people. They are the Bentleys and Mercedes of the laptop world. All prices for everything in the brand are overinflated, because you are paying for the brand and prestige. You want Honda prices for upgrades on your Mercedes. An equivalent Windows laptop can do mostly everything the Mac can do except have an Apple on the lid.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  > An equivalent Windows laptop can do mostly everything the Mac can do except have an Apple on the lid. Or develop / test / use Mac software. Or even check how Safari works for your SAAS (without resorting to BrowserStack or similar).
  - rs999gti 3y ago
    > Or develop / test / use Mac software. Or even check how Safari works for your SAAS (without resorting to BrowserStack or similar). You're making my point still. Because you are developing software and testing in the Mac environment, over there everything is more expensive.
fastaguy88 3y ago
What a brouhaha. Apparently the people buying MacBook Pro's are so non-professional that they are duped into buying a machine with too little RAM? I think they get a 30 day return free, so if they find out they were duped, why not just upgrade. And while the upgrade cost may be extortionate compared to NewEgg, a 16Gb machine is just $200 more, still considerably cheaper than the same model was in the Intel days. I suspect that people who have decided to pay extra for the Pro model may actually have some idea how much RAM they need.
etempleton 3y ago
I think Apple should have more memory in their base pro models, but it can not be understated to those who have not used an 8GB Macbook Air how that does not impact day-to-day computer usage compared to a similar spec. Windows machine. I had used an M1 Air with 16Gb for work in the past and was impressed by it but was skeptical of the 8 Gb version. That is until I bought one because it was on sale. If you are doing video editing or using similarly memory intensive applications you will see issues, but you can in a sense say 8GB is ~equivalent to 16 GB on Windows for average use cases.
daft_pink 3y ago
The issue I have with the base model Mac's being under-memoried is that the base models are the high volume models that have sales and are easier to get at vendors other than the Apple Store. iPhone's have been under memoried at significant periods during their life, but most stores carried an upgraded model. I find the non base model Mac's often aren't available at launch, have longer lead times and force you to go to the Apple Store where you won't get any discount of any kind and often find a longer lead time even there.
dockd 3y ago
Making money by selling RAM is baked in to Apple's DNA. Apple charged a premium for the original Mac to go from the entry level 128 Kbytes to 512 Kbytes of RAM. Here we are almost 40 years later and that business model is still in place.
LoganDark 3y ago
What are you going to do about it? Nothing. You can do nothing about it. People are going to keep buying it, and "voting with your feet" does nothing. You don't matter to Apple. There is nothing that is going to be done, and this is going to continue.
dangus 3y ago
Look, Apple knows what that have. They have a product people want. RAM and storage are their bread and butter margin-padding products and that has been the PC OEM’s game for decades. There’s no shame in getting your bag. Apple isn’t the only company that makes laptops with soldered memory, although soldered SSDs are less common. Some of the most popular models from brands like Dell and Lenovo have soldered memory, like the XPS 13 and X1. Joe Consumer will never take a screwdriver to their laptop anyway, and your company certainly won’t pay for IT people $100 an hour to make upgrades and replace batteries. They’ll just “lease” computers and refresh on a ~3 year cycle because their apes for employees are going to spill coffee and crumbs on the damn thing anyway. Just call these Apple systems what they are and pretend they cost $200 more than the base price in the first place and get over it. Either the costs makes sense to you or it doesn’t and go buy something else like 80% of the PC market already does. Nobody seems to mind that brands like Razer and Alienware make overpriced gear because they aren’t as popular as Apple. Yes, we get it, the base M3 14” “Pro” has “Pro” in the name and it’s not “Pro.” Who fucking cares? There are thousands of products that use the word “Pro” without being “Pro.” And yes the M3 14” MacBook Pro costs $400 less than the M3 Pro equipped model. The $1999 model gained 2GB of memory compared to the previous generation.
stalfosknight 3y ago
If you want more than 8GB then configure your order to have more RAM. If you think you shouldn't have to custom order your laptop to be what you want, then take your money elsewhere in this free market. This isn't that hard, people.
dsign 3y ago
While I agree with the general feeling of the article, I would like to bring some attention to the fact that Apple’s competition is on the business of monetizing their user base in a worse manner. Windows is so shock-full of dark patterns these days (I’m speaking of the start menu, the upgrade wheel, the survtech in the browser and the OS), that I will be between the sword and a dark place when I need to upgrade my hardware next time. The Windows 11 upgrade is free, which speaks to Microsoft’s commitment to make me their product. Who knows, maybe I will end up paying five grands for a Mac Studio. In terms of hardware, that same amount of money would buy me a beefy workstation that I could arm myself, but Linux won’t run more than half of the software I use these days.
NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
Since when does the price of a product relate to the cost of the BOM? I mean, for many Intel CPUs, they're literally exactly the same products off the manufacturing line that are just binned differently, despite significant price differences in the market.
nyanpasu64 3y ago
> The cheapest MacBook Pro you can configure with more than 8GB is $1,800! > the true starting cost of a M3 MacBook Pro is $1,699 because to buy one with only 8GB of RAM is crazy. Does a MBP with 16 GB of RAM cost $2000 or $1700?
stevage 3y ago
Boy, I wouldn't even consider buying a new computer with less than 32GB. This is basically a marketing trick to to make you think a MacBook Pro is cheaper than it is. For the specs I would need it's now over $5k AUD. Sigh.
clouddrover 3y ago
> In Apple’s case, you have no choice. You can’t upgrade later. You can’t pay anyone else’s price. You have to pay Apple’s exorbitant $200-for-8GB upgrade cost. Of course you have a choice. If the price isn't right then don't buy it. > This is pure corporate greed from the world’s biggest and richest technology company, and as Apple customers, we shouldn’t stand for it. A company is only useful to you if its interests align with yours and if it is producing something worth the money. If a company is not worth your time or money then put your time and money toward something else.
Koshkin 3y ago
Just think for a moment of a machine with 24KB of RAM which ran the first version of UNIX.
indianmouse 3y ago
Ugh! Apple and it's fanbois! It's useless to argue against and pure waste of time. Don't but their products and don't argue. They are just another greedy, dominating corporate. Nothing more, nothing less. It's how they project in people's mind is good they are. All other stuff of innovation, fantastic product etc etc is just pure marketing gimmick. Nothing works beyond a few years and one still needs to upgrade. Take a ThinkPad and throw it in dust and it still functions even after 12 - 13 yrs with the latest upgraded OS support. Can anyone show a single apple product that exists? Oh no! They don't have any product that had so much life or upgrade ability since apple sucks cash from time to time from their beloved fanbois! And yet folks compare it against other products missing the core discussion here about the mind altering behaviour and how apple drives the consumer base while commanding a premium for the silliest of the silly feature or upgrade. That's the command they've over the ecosystem and once one gets caught, there's no turning back. It's like Hotel California. You can check in anytime, but you can never leave and you pay with your soul.
b800h 3y ago
From the article: "As I write this, with just a handful of browser tabs open, Slack, and a distraction-free writing app (iA Writer—it’s great), I’m consuming just about 11GB on my M2 MacBook Air." How the hell did we end up here? This level of waste is mind-boggling. Honestly, this makes me want to run MenuetOS as my daily driver.
mixmastamyk 3y ago
I made sure to get 16GB on our ten year old MBP and it is still going strong. I don’t recommend anyone get less on a machine that can’t be upgraded. Kid is using a framework with 16GB as well. Why? It’s 2023 and cost an extra $40.
lucasyvas 3y ago
> Are the new M3 Macs great computers? Sure. I don't want to be overly negative on what is intended by this concluding line, but it's part of the problem. It should re-state the point that has been driven home - the entry level MacBook Pro is a bad product for its audience. Just leave it at that - it doesn't say the whole line suffers the same fate, but it's OK to say it's a bad offering without making excuses for them. It does mention the issue again after, but don't say they're unilaterally great on the whole if they're not - it gives them justification to dismiss the issue if they are still "great". The entry level MacBook Pro is not a device you could recommend to the majority of professionals. We all know it. You should either get the Air, or a MacBook Pro with 16GB+.
- pas 3y ago
  it's perfect for sitting in meetings and vscode remote work, and/or very professionally SSHing here and there ...

269 points by jay_kyburz 3y ago

I had 16GB on my windows PC and was having trouble building our Unity project. Turns out we now require at least 32GB to build the project, but I just upgraded all the way to 64 because it was so cheap. btw, if you are wondering, Unity will just hang forever during the build process of you don't have enough ram.

hulitu 3y ago
You can always add more swap. /s

eisa01 3y ago

This will excerbate the problem with electronic waste by shortening the useful life Apple should be more serious about their environmental commitments

bushbaba 3y ago
Eh, if you give more Ram developers will just take advantage of it. Realistically perf headroom just gets eaten up on shitty code and abstraction layers. Ever notice how word is always the same slow-ish speeds. Never really faster.
- Osiris 3y ago
  You’re arguing that we should all be using 10-20 year old computers and that computers should never get faster because it makes us write less efficient code? That’s an asinine argument.
  - _Algernon_ 3y ago
    >That’s an asinine argument. Good that that isn't the actual argument made by GP, but just a pretty strawman you managed to think up.
    - matsemann 3y ago
      I'm also unable to read the argument in any other way. If you have a better explanation please provide it.
      - _Algernon_ 3y ago
        The jump from developers will use more RAM on abstraction layers to computers shouldnt get faster was never made by the original comment, and implying it was made is the worst possible reading of the argument made which is against HN guidelines.
        Osiris 3y ago
        That’s not how I read it “IF you give them more RAM… they’ll just use it”. Thus, more RAM is effectively the same as less RAM. Conclusion: no need for more RAM.
    - Osiris 3y ago
      I guess I misinterpreted his argument. How would you word the point he was making, so I can understand it better?
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Not only that, it doesn't even work if only Apple does it. Developers will still write the bloated code because it runs on cheap PCs with 16+GB of RAM, and it runs on the pricier Macs that also have 16+GB of RAM, so the only thing it runs poorly on is the more affordable Macs which are a small enough market segment for developers to disregard.
aurareturn 3y ago
The average Mac is in use for far longer than your average upgradeable windows laptop from Walmart/Costco. One strong evidence for this is that macOS market share is actually 20% on desktop/laptops despite Macs selling only about ~8-10% of total PCs worldwide. [0] So yes, on average, Macs are significantly better for the environment. Having less RAM does not mean people replace their Macs more often than Windows computers. If people truly cared about the environment, they'd buy Macs over Windows computers. With that said, could Apple extend the lifespan of Macs even more by making the base RAM higher? Yes. Not going to argue against that. But Macs are already much better than Windows computers in this regard. [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide [0] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS51020623 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS51020623
- ge96 3y ago
  The display man, so good. Using a 2015 i7 mbp still.
- matsemann 3y ago
  Given that this comparison is with quite expensive Macs vs lots of cheap Windows laptops I'm not sure your conclusion makes sense. For the "if people truly cared about the environment" they would probably get the same use out of a similar expensive PC. It's also a bit tone deaf to gatekeep environmentalism behind a $1000++ purchase, especially one that many can't afford.
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    >For the "if people truly cared about the environment" they would probably get the same use out of a similar expensive PC. I really don't think so. I used to buy $800 - $900 Windows laptops. They often lasted 2 years before some hinge is broken or the display suddenly gets corrupted or it comes unbearably slow. I had a 2013 base Macbook Air that lasted until 2019. None of my Windows laptops ever lasted that long. The data seems to back up my anecdote experience. Do you get more RAM on a Windows laptop for the same price as a Mac? Yes, usually. But everything else around the Windows laptop is poor.

charcircuit 3y ago

Having an 8GB version makes it more accessible. Apple could just stop selling it and the complaint about there being a $200 upgrade would no longer be valid.

usea 3y ago
That's not the only other alternative.
hulitu 3y ago
I think thay the complain here is more that it comes with 8GB of RAM and less that the upgrade costs 200$. Apple fans are people for whom the money are usually not a problem.
xp84 3y ago
They should stop selling 8GB configs, but they shouldn't hike the price by $200 to do it. They'd make the same margin dollars (though not percentage) if they hiked the base prices by $40 and bumped them all to 16GB. But obviously this is Apple we're talking about, and they've been playing these cynical margin games with their customers for 30+ years.
- chongli 3y ago
  It’s called premium pricing. Apple charges more because people expect them to, given that Apple markets their products as premium products. What you’re proposing is for Apple to raise the price of the baseline model by $40 so that everyone gets 16GB. But most regular people don’t need 16GB. They don’t have a million tabs and applications open all at once. They use their computers for very basic things and Apple makes them very happy by providing a luxurious product for that. You can see the same pricing strategy play out in countless other premium products, and not just in consumer goods. Check out the prices on Fluke multimeters or Tektronix oscilloscopes sometime (and compare with UniT and Rigol, respectively).
  - xp84 3y ago
    > most regular people don’t need 16GB. They don’t have a million tabs and applications open all at once First, I don't know a lot of regular people who DON'T have 20-30 tabs open minimum. And the #1 consumer of RAM for "regular people" is browser tabs. Just a "normal" page with tons of ads is eating a tremendous amout of RAM, and most people would like to keep dozens open. Not to mention running a half dozen Electron apps at once like Slack, Teams, etc. It's been a decade plus of ever-growing OS and software bloat and Apple's base model 8GB hasn't changed in all this time. So, if 8GB was just enough then, it can't possibly be enough for those same consumers now.

innagadadavida 3y ago

Another version of what Bill Gates said: '640K software is all the memory anybody would ever need on a computer.'.

vel0city 3y ago
He probably never said that. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quo...
- pieter_mj 3y ago
  Maybe not, but it's still a valid analogy to what Apple is doing now.

aurareturn 3y ago

8GB is still good enough for office workers and students. Heck, I used an M1 8GB Air for 1 year as a dev. Although I wish I had more RAM, it still served me well. For $899 (on sale sometimes), the 8GB M2 Air is absolutely a steal. The screen quality, thinness, battery life, build quality, SoC, quietness, coolness, metal enclosure, touchpad, and speakers are simply unmatched by anything in the PC world at that price - sometimes any price. Those things cost Apple money. Other PC makers cheap out on them. In order for Apple to earn higher margins, they make the RAM and storage upgrades very expensive. So the base versions actually offer great values. It's the upgraded RAM/storage that decreases the value but still good value overall considering what you're getting. I understand why 8GB is still the base. Everything except the RAM is outstanding and unmatched. Apple makes the money on RAM and storage upgrades. Perhaps Apple will start at 12GB for M4 generation. Perhaps the arrival of local LLMs will skyrocket RAM upgrade demand such that Apple can start the base at 16GB and still have plenty of people who want to upgrade to 32GB. The problem for Apple will always be if they can increase the base without hurting upgrade profit. On a slightly related note: $/GB for RAM hit a wall starting in 2011. https://assets.ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage.svg https://assets.ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/historical...

shmde 3y ago
Apple geeks eating up and justifying anything and everything that apple throws at them is hilarious to see. It takes 50-60$ for a 8GB stick and people justifying that 200$ markup because Apple needs to make profit too. Is it Stockholm syndrome I dont know.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aurareturn 3y ago
  It probably costs Apple way less than $50-$60 for 8GB. The margins must be very high. I understand the business aspect of this for Apple. I'm not mad at them. I'll pay $200 to upgrade the RAM so that I can keep using macOS and have a well-built laptop that makes no noise. Apple knows this. It's just good business in my opinion. But I guess to you, I'm an Apple geek who has Stockholm syndrome.

Osiris 3y ago

When I started my current job they gave me an M1 Mac with 8GB because it’s what they had on hand. I could barely run my IDE and a web browser. At least 1GB was for video memory, and it was swapping constantly. I couldn’t run docker containers because of how much input lag I would get. 8GB is barely usable and shouldn’t even be an option for a Pro machine. I used it for a week before switching to a personal desktop with 64GB.

changoplatanero 3y ago
I work at apple and i use a m1 mac with 8gb for all my work
- Osiris 3y ago
  How? What apps are you using? As soon as I plug in an external monitor it turns into molasses. If I try to do a screen share for a video call, it lags. My memory pressure graph was always maxed out. If I ran the test suite for one repo the system became unresponsive. Docker would eat 4GB with only two containers (just redis and postgresql for local dev) I had to manually tune docker to use a little as possible. It was a nightmare.
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    You're clearly a dev who requires at least 16GB. For many office workers, 8GB is fine.
    - Osiris 3y ago
      I supposed if you only used your $1800 MacBook Pro to use the web browser, then yeah, 8GB would be fine.
      - aurareturn 3y ago
        I wouldn't buy the $1600 M3 14" MBP if that's what you're referring to. I can get an M2 Pro with 32GB for $1800 used easily. That's what I'd spend my money on if I had to get a laptop with $1800.

7e 3y ago

Upgrading to 16GB costs as much as dinner for two at a moderately nice restaurant.

Osiris 3y ago
Where do you live? I pay half that to take my family of 5 out.
- 7e 3y ago
  Legal Sea Foods: one soup, one main, one drink. Tax, tip, then parking. $100 per person.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Hopefully you don't live at Legal Sea Foods, which is a popular New England restaurant, so maybe you're in Boston where it's that expensive?
- arcticbull 3y ago
  You’ll certainly get close to that in SF with a couple drinks at $20 a pop.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- keep_reading 3y ago
  Any major US city? Dinner for two with my wife is ~$200, yeah...? (I'm not even in California or NYC)
deleted 3y ago
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3np 3y ago

Counter to title, as a non-mac-user I probably benefit from entry-level Macs having 8GB vs 16GB RAM - it increases pressure on devs to actually try to reign in their ballooning web/Electron apps when resource waste becomes noticable on modern hardware. Accounting for second-order effects over longer timeframes it could be a net benefit for desktop users. 8GB should be plenty. That it isn't is a software problem.

Osiris 3y ago
It’s a weird argument. It’s more weird because Apple isn’t the only computer manufacturer. I’ve never sat in a software development meeting in which the amount of RAM on customer machines was discussed, let alone used as an argument in favor of spending significant time doing software optimizations. I would be very surprised if Apple selling laptops with 8GB of RAM had any effect whatsoever on software development priorities.
- 3np 3y ago
  More likely to manifest as "PM complains that our app runs like dogshit on their new computer, just like those user reports we have been ignoring until now"
quickthrower2 3y ago
Unfortunately if you use typescript (tsc) it absolutely gobbles memory up
- 3np 3y ago
  So your use-case may require more and the entry-level model may not be an appropriate choice for you. I can also come up with dozens of not-too-uncommon scenarios where 16GB won't suffice, either (4k video editing + commonly mandated corpware, for one).
pornel 3y ago
I don’t think it will work: • Devs and their managers don’t use the 8GB version. • Electron is used because it’s cheap to develop for. You can hate its RAM-eating guts all you want, but for cross-platform UIs there’s no competition. Nobody wants to pay for maintenance of 5 separate front ends in 3 languages.

jmspring 3y ago

I've got a couple of different Macbooks...My first M1 was a 16gig M1 Air. I usually splurge for more storage (and memory), 16gig was the most that was available at that time. The machine still works well for development, running VMs, etc. It's no longer my main machine, but it works great for when I have to travel.

hurryer 3y ago

Luxury status items are not priced on BOM. That's the whole point, showing that you don't care paying way beyond actual costs. It would be a strategic signaling mistake for Apple to sell RAM upgrades at actual cost, it would decrease their luxury brand value. If you don't mind signaling poor and want to pay just actual costs buy a PC.

al_borland 3y ago
This would only make sense if there was some way for people to show off their extra RAM. A MacBook Pro with 8GB or RAM, or 24GB for $400 more, look exactly the same, and no one cares how much RAM someone else has. It's not a flex.
- stevage 3y ago
  Whoa, I didn't know there was such a thing as a 15" MacBook Air with 24 GB. That may very well be my next computer. My old MBP died, and the cost of a new MBP is extortionate. Thank you!
arcticbull 3y ago
Premium pricing absolutely factors in. They charge $200 instead of say $199.99 because it’s meant to feel expensive, not like a good deal.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

Whenever I pointed this out "very wide memory bus very close to the M3 chip" I got voted down here. But the Mx performace you get is partially because of the wide memory bus of the unified memory. The downside is the cost and the you-can't-upgrade-card you have been dealt. Please don't point out again it's "just" DDR5 and not in a system-in-a-package and just like any other laptop. "We shouldn’t accept this" Well you raved about the CPU performance and how Apple is genius, you can't eat the cake and have it (the cake is a lie!) (LDDR5 8gb is ~$25)

skrebbel 3y ago
If I may take a guess, maybe you get downvoted not because of the content of your arguments but because of their coherence. For instance, who is this “you” you’re raving against? How is CPU performance related to the cost if 8gb RAM? Consider re-reading your comment before you hit post and the downvotes might well disappear.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  I would disagree. Usually my comments have some upvotes or none. But my Apple comments get consistent downvotes. "How is CPU performance related to the cost if 8gb RAM?" "But the Mx performace you get is partially because of the wide memory bus of the unified memory. The downside is the cost" I did write this in the comment I think and the others - but I agree not as clearly in this one as in others. (My Apple/M[x]/Memory comments often drop karma below zero and than get upvoted - as a reaction? I do think this is more of a community topic, I don't think my other comments are clear and my Apple/M[x]/Memory comments get downvotes because they are unclear/confusing. If I write "Steve Wozniak is just a human" it seems in the center of the distortion field)
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    > "How is CPU performance related to the cost if 8gb RAM?" > "But the Mx performace you get is partially because of the wide memory bus of the unified memory. The downside is the cost" FWIW I still have no idea what you mean here.

tedunangst 3y ago

Anyone with a literally useless 8GB macbook, you can send it my way and I'll, uh, dispose of it for you.

deleted 3y ago

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PeterStuer 3y ago

Don't remember building with anything less than 32GB in the last 6 years if not longer. The cost savings of going with just 16GB were just too tiny. 8GB? I can't even remember the time I would have considered that adequate.

krisleipus 3y ago
I have personal M1 Pro with 16GB, and work M1 Pro with 32GB. I code on both, run Docker, etc. Can't notice any difference in performance.

matsemann 3y ago

My cheap student laptop in 2012 had 32 GB ram. My laptop at work ~6 years ago 64 GB. That we still have to care about memory is insane to me.

jatins 3y ago
How does it feel to be rich? :)
- matsemann 3y ago
  What's your point?
  - jatins 3y ago
    Not much of a point, just friendly banter. I understand it's a bit off topic for HN so hope you didn't mind Edit: though if I must make a point it was just that it's relatively uncommon to have fully speced out machines as a student

rpmisms 3y ago

I have two M1 Airs with 8gb apiece, run standard webdev loads with docker and over 100 tabs on each, and have zero issues ever. The memory management is absurd, and since I'm not working with large datasets, I'm happy. 32gb is my minimum on any other machine.

KevinMS 3y ago
same here: both firefox and chrome open, VScode, terminal, multiple dev apps, node processes, PDF reader, Bunch of terminal processes, etc. Memory pressure is green. Its almost like they dont believe us. Sure 8GB sounds stingy, but I'd only need to upgrade if I started using VMs that gobbled up memory for themselves.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
  I wouldn't even buy a phone with just 8 GB of ram, atleast for an android

bdcravens 3y ago

The comparison with Windows laptops isn't apt (yes, I know I avoided the obvious pun there) The SoC design of Apple silicon makes an 8GB M3 MBP faster than a 16GB Intel machine.

snickerbockers 3y ago

>That does not mean that 8GB is “enough,” though. Even relatively casual users who load up on browser tabs and inefficient Electron apps (household names like Slack, Teams, Discord, etc.) can find performance compromised by running out of RAM. As much as i love to rip on Apple's overpriced garbage, i think this speaks more to what an embarrassing clusterfuck the web has become. I remember doing all the listed tasks on computers that didn't even have 8GB HDDs.

JodieBenitez 3y ago

I don't understand... I routinely run my M1 Air with 4 instances of jetbrains IDEs, have dual screen, Safari with tens of tabs, additional apps like Rocket chat and more... and the machine never go past 8gb ram. What's going on with others ?

fragmede 3y ago
Tens? try hundreds of tabs, across three browsers. also Docker.
- JodieBenitez 3y ago
  Why should I use hundreds of tabs ? I don't think I could even use this, I'd be lost. Also Why should I use Docker ? From the article: > Yes, you need more than 8GB No, I don't.
devjab 3y ago
I run my minimum spec m1 air with docker, vsc and all the same things I run on my work lenovo t14 or something with 32gb ram and my m1 runs better. So I'm not sure why 8gb wouldn't be enough for most things on a macbook, and I do wonder what the hell windows is doing. That being said. I don't see why Apple wouldn't put 16gb in the M3 pros. I mean, I don't really get why you'd buy the smallest pro instead of just getting the air, but it does seem cheap of Apple to only put 8GB of ram into it.
CharlesW 3y ago
> What's going on with others ? What's going on is that almost none of the people posting here have used an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB of RAM, and don't realize that it's a very different experience than trying to use a PC with 8GB of RAM.

happytiger 3y ago

You can justify this all you want, but the truth is, for the price point, Apple is failing its customers with its minimum memory offering. It’s not about what works: it’s about the perception customers have of the company, and this looks cheap. Apple is a premium offering and questions like these are a product management failure that can damage the brand. If you find yourself defending your product for looking inferior as a premium positioned product you have already made terrible mistakes. Apple should raise ram minimums simply to eliminate the perception of value questions. God knows (as does every investor) that they have the margin to do it.

massenpunkt 3y ago

This was one of the reasons that made me switch from iPhones to Android phones.

j7ake 3y ago

Apple computers are reliable for 5 plus years. The additional few hundred dollars to upgrade the memory or storage is peanuts once amortised over the life of a computer.

fafhnir 3y ago

Don't buy it with 8 Gigs. Where's the Problem? If it's to expensive, buy another one! Is there a "humen right" or something that says: NO ONE SCHOUL HAVE LESS THAN 16 GIGS! A Pro(!) Machine which costs 4.000 Bucks with M3 Max, 36 Gigs and 1TB of SSD and ist used for 3 years or so costs 112 Bucks a month. For an absolute powerhouse which is doing Desktop-class Worstation-Performance on the go! And for a machine i am working on 8 hours a day and earn my money! And as a Pro who has to buy a 112$/month machine you should have paid this thing in one or two hours work per month. As a hobyist - well, it's a hobby! Buy whatever you can afford.

deleted 3y ago
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Havoc 3y ago

Apple has a memory opportunity. They've got enough customers that will just blindly pay whatever they ask. They know it and they're charging accordingly

mo_42 3y ago

I think this is just about pricing. A Macbook with 8GB RAM is a shitty product. But you get to advertise that Macbooks start at 1599. Apple does a lot of analytics maybe they see that there's really a group of people who just use the default apps with some light browsing. But I think it's rather unlikely.

goosedragons 3y ago
But why can't it start at $1600 with 16GB? For hundreds less you can get something like a Surface Laptop 5 or Asus Zenbook with similar builds and hi-res screens with 16GB RAM.

librasteve 3y ago

I agree that 8GB is too small. My theory is that the Apple M processor guys have entered a dark pact with the marketing guys that runs like this: - we are going to need a speed bump after the initial switch to the M series to keep the momentum - we can get 8GB on the same SOC as the CPU much cheaper than 16GB (this was different with the Intel non SOC multi package architecture) And so RAM for a mac is now analogous to camera lenses on an iPhone … it going to be the main driver of upgrades when the step change to M / SOC saturates It also explains why the late Intel modules were limited to 8GB

dvfjsdhgfv 3y ago

This public shaming is very useful. It's all about the money: as long as they are able to charge ridiculous amounts for RAM upgrades, they will do it.

timeon 3y ago

I was hoping they would use better argument then just: 'We need to run Electron apps'. Especially in context of 'pro'.

frizlab 3y ago

> As I write this, with just a handful of browser tabs open, Slack, and a distraction-free writing app (iA Writer—it’s great), I’m consuming just about 11GB on my M2 MacBook Air. Yeah it does not matter how memory you have, the system is supposed to use as much as it can from it. So this does not mean anything. I’m not saying 8GiB is enough, just that this particular sentence makes no sense.

thetis 3y ago

For what it's worth: here's a youtube video of an M2 macbook air running stable diffusion https://youtu.be/Zbrd8bSK0zc https://youtu.be/Zbrd8bSK0zc

CharlesW 3y ago
Importantly, an 8GB Macbook.

tjpnz 3y ago

Weren't Apple taking another shot at gaming with some AAA games recently being demoed on Apple silicon? 8GB is barely enough these days with many titles requiring at least 12 to run games at minimum settings, newer releases like Starfield require 16. That's for PC with discrete graphics too.

ho_schi 3y ago

8GB RAM would be enough. If not companies searched and found a successor for Flash. Is is Electron! It wastes memory, it is slow, it doesn’t integrate to Linux, Windows and MacOS and it allows to deploy bloated JavaScript locally. But it is cheap for them! Basically the target of companies is avoiding to employ programmers for native applications. These people cost money. And optimization cost money. So they opt to waste our resources. The new ThinkPad/MacBook with soldered RAM does cost us a lot but not them. And if you just use Googles Chrome - which made all this possible with V8 - you still have a problem. Every website believes it is okay to load JS from literally everywhere and show any kind of animated media. Plus no ad-blocker. And us, opening hundreds of tabs with Epiphany, Firefox, Safari or Chrome ;)

madeofpalk 3y ago
It's not the point, but it doesn't hurt that, at least on macOS the 'real native' APIs are... terrible! SwiftUI only just got rounded borders this year https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71744888/swiftui-view-with-rounded-corners-and-border https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71744888/swiftui-view-wi.... People here complain about CSS, but that's been a platform feature since like 2003. On Windows the UI toolkit story is just as much of a pain, with microsoft reinventing the toolkit every other year, and it still lacks basic layout features solved in CSS.
- jolt42 3y ago
  Unless it lacks the ability to give a MacOSX Look & Feel, I don't see a problem.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    Unfortunately, that's kind of the case. SwiftUI on Mac looks like ass https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1557357661171204098 https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1557357661171204098 https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/SystemSettings.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/SystemSettings.html
- ho_schi 3y ago

tibbon 3y ago

8GB feels like the base model car. It technically gets you there, but you should probably opt for at least the most minimal of upgrades.

tromp 3y ago

From another point of view this author's arguments may look a little odd. He has not much problem with Apple charging $1799 for a MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM. His problem is that Apple sells another model with 8GB for $1599. A $200 difference for a 8GB difference, what a ripoff! Does that mean he'd be happier if Apple sold the base model for $1699 instead of $1599, making the 8GB memory upgrade cost a more reasonable $100?

diffeomorphism 3y ago
No, the point is that the 8GB model is just for pretending that the base price is not 1799. The price difference is just apple telling you this (if 8GB were viable, they could not charge that much to unsabotage the machine).

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

How is giving people more options a bad thing? If somebody does want a larger screen and two monitor setup but will only ever be using it for light web, the 8GB machine is probably perfect for them. And thinking "you shouldn't be paying extra" is just bias. Just select the configuration you need, look how much it costs and figure if this is what you want to pay. You are not paying anything extra. They clearly tell you how much you are going to pay for the configuration you want.

madeofpalk 3y ago
The actual complaint implicit in all this is that the upgrade pricing has always been, and still is, pretty expensive.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  But that complain doesn't make sense IMO. There are other laptops you can buy for cheaper. And even Apple has Macbook Air which is much cheaper while still more than enough to do most types of office tasks or internet browsing. So someobody wants not only a Macbook, but also a new Macbook and top model for that matter. It is like saying you want to buy top of the line Mercedes and complain the options are expensive. Yes, they are expensive, but nobody forces you to buy top of the line Mercedes. If you can't afford, don't complain about it.
dcow 3y ago
The point is not that more options is bad, it’s that Apple is marking ram up more than what the author considers a reasonable amount. In the past you could buy a 3rd party sodimm module and pop it in for much cheaper but now you can’t since everything is an SoC now.
bakugo 3y ago
When the "option" is paying $200 for an extra 8GB of RAM or 512GB of storage that would cost 1/10th of that if you bought it as a separate part, yes, it's a bad thing.
throwaway290 3y ago

taeric 3y ago

I'll add to the chorus of folks that is somewhat baffled that 8GB is not enough. That is a ton of memory.

eptcyka 3y ago
It is not a ton if you're using the laptop for professional software development or for professional whatever software work that would call for professional hardware - I am specifically excluding professional work that can be done on a MacBook Air from 2017.
tornato7 3y ago
I do heavy dev work on my M1 Air with 8GB, meaning multiple IDEs, dozens of Chrome tabs, iPhone simulators, and plenty of electron apps all open at once. Never had an issue with it. MacOS is very good at paging to it's super-fast SSD.
savanaly 3y ago
Add on to that the observation that memory for your average consumer computer is something of an arms race between the manufacturer of the consumer's computer and the developers of the software they'll use. Manufacturers want to have a computer with enough memory that it never feels like a constraint to the user (and blog posts like this one enjoin them to do that). At the same time, developers of software want to consume as much memory as possible-- up to the point where they've used it all and any extra becomes noticeable as perf problems to the user. So Apple keeping their default memory offering low could be seen in a certain noble light...like honoring a nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
goosedragons 3y ago
Not when you compare against other devices and consider that bloat is a thing and programs and websites use more RAM now than they did to accomplish essentially the same thing. If Apple was asking $600 that might be OK, but at $1600? How many laptops at that price point have 8GB RAM? Heck a $400 Steam Deck has 16GB.
doublepg23 3y ago
The iPhone 15 Pro that launched some months ago has 8G 8G is paltry on a desktop computer that should last years.

ilamont 3y ago

If 8GB will be a bottleneck for many today, imagine the performance of that non-upgradeable laptop in a few years’ time. Apple used to sell an iMac with non-upgradable RAM: we found this iMac has the memory soldered to the motherboard removing any possibility of adding additional memory. Users will be permanently locked in to the 8GB of memory, as there is no Apple factory upgrade option. https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/25084-teardown-of-lower-cost-2014-imac-reveals-memory-not-user-upgradable https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/25084-teardown-of-lower-cost... Lots of returns and refurbs on that model.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
CharlesW 3y ago
> Lots of returns and refurbs on that model. You imagine, or you have data?

ianai 3y ago

I think the best reaction would be shame. Just a big round of shame for a trillion dollar company being so greedy to cripple their top equipment. Tech’s stagnated for over a decade and largely because of greed and at the expense of innovation. Prove me wrong? Do something genuinely new, like a mass produced cpu on germanium. Make a modern OS that’s a successor to unix-and plan9. Edit-Or at least a moddable iphone that can plug into a monitor/keyboard/mouse. Edit2-shame the company though, not the people who walk around carrying iphones or other apple devices. The company is the problem here.

runjake 3y ago
> Tech’s stagnated for over a decade I don’t know where to begin with this, but on topic, the M1 came out in 2020 and was a big tech leap in how PCs are done. Sure, all the individual technologies within existed elsewhere first. But Apple executed and delivered great products.
- ianai 3y ago
  Sure. Running an OS that is carrying a lot of legacy OS X with introduced bugs and cruft. I love *nix and hope to keep using it for a long time more. But if you plunked 2002 me into modern day, apple’s offerings would be pretty cool but not what I’d expect after 2 decades. You could buy a desktop with 4 gigs of ram in 2010.
  - ianai 3y ago
    They could get me to shut up for probably 4 years if they cemented a deal to produce the next Nintendo console with Nintendo in a way Nintendo would be fully onboard with delivering. Think steam deck or mac mini level of hardware/cost.
  - jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
    Most of your comments in this thread read like you are completely unaware of the tech and manufacturing leaps we've already passed and are currently trying to pass. You are allowed to complain if you want to, but your complaints are unsubstantiated. Signalling we haven't made significant and or substantial advances since 2002 is a joke - especially if your barometer is buying RAM. There's always research ongoing to improve tech and a lot of it is on the market already, but just because researchers figured something out doesn't mean it's feasible on a large manufacturing scale or that thermodynamics will even allow it to work well. Comparing devices in 2002 to 2023 and not noticing the drastic improvements just shows a lack of understanding and or signs of living in complete denial to just complain.

wafriedemann 3y ago

The problem I have with 16GB as a upgrade is that the base model is widely available and often on sale. 16GB does exist as preconfigured option, but it is a lot harder to come by. It's mainly sold as BTO, which means you have to pay full price. That makes that extra 8GB of RAM ridiculously expensive. I mean it's already ridiculously expensive, but the fact that base models sell with huge discounts increases it even further. I will NEVER EVER pay for this upgrade out of sheer principle. I'd rather switch to another system.

selfhoster69 3y ago
Yep, I faced this same issue when I bought an M2 Air early March. The 16GB BTO upgrade was roughly 40% more expensive compared to the discounted base 8GB model.
rs999gti 3y ago
Macs are luxury goods, price is the price. If you have an issue with it then you are not the market. No one goes to a Lambo dealer and complains about the cost of an oil change. Price is the price for luxury goods.
- NewJazz 3y ago
  Apple has an 8% global market share for PCs. In Q42022, they shipped 7 million units. Lamborghini shipped less than 10k units in 2022, total. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/11/apples-mac-market-share-jumped-even-though-pc-sales-fell-for-the-sixth-consecutive-quarter.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/11/apples-mac-market-share-jump... https://www.lamborghini.com/en-en/news/lamborghinis-record-breaking-2022 https://www.lamborghini.com/en-en/news/lamborghinis-record-b... https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/19/apple-shipped-seven-million-macs-despite-market-drop-in-2022 https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/19/apple-shipped-sev...
  - a123b456c 3y ago
    Comparing Apple to Lamborghini is laughable. Apple is Audi at best. More like Volkswagen or Honda to me.

underbluewaters 3y ago

Having these amounts of RAM on the base models hurt walk-in retail customers as well. Recently I had a computer die and luckily my boss found some extra funds in our budget that needed to be spent ASAP. I had an opportune moment to get a machine that day, but only if I could walk into the Apple Store and get it off the shelf. I settled for less RAM than I would have liked because a "custom order" would have taken weeks to arrive. I have no problem with low-memory being an option, but why stock only meager amounts of RAM on the models sold in the store?

CharlesW 3y ago
I bought my 16GB MacBook Air from a store. And FWIW, vendors like B&H and others regularly stock high-spec Macs that you can get overnight.

actionfromafar 3y ago

Hot take: What would happen if Macs with twice the memory were more common? There’s always an Electron or whatever ready to eat that extra RAM. Apple is probably doing the low end PC users a favour here, by proxy. (Not that Apple cares in the slightest, it’s a side effect.)

satvikpendem 3y ago

As long as people keep buying, companies will keep selling. That is how it is, according to the laws of supply and demand. If you want Apple to stop selling 8 GB machines for that much, convince a large enough contingent of consumers to stop buying. Indeed, Mac sales have been down the past few years.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

Absurd behavior from a company who spent a fortune on an ad for their environmental initiatives to essentially ship e-waste to force your hand to the higher price. Yes it's e-waste, it can't be upgraded, it can't be amended later those machines are under performing for life for essentially saving a few dollars just to give the false idea the machine is cheaper than they actually want to sell it at.

indigomm 3y ago

The reason they do this is to have a low headline price, yet push you into upgrading more than just the RAM. Customers see the low 'starting from' price, but then get pushed into upgrading for more RAM. At which point they see that they can change for a more powerful machine with the same RAM for only a bit more. You come in for an M3, but walk out with the M3 Pro.

rs999gti 3y ago

The problem is Macs are not for poor people. They are the Bentleys and Mercedes of the laptop world. All prices for everything in the brand are overinflated, because you are paying for the brand and prestige. You want Honda prices for upgrades on your Mercedes. An equivalent Windows laptop can do mostly everything the Mac can do except have an Apple on the lid.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
> An equivalent Windows laptop can do mostly everything the Mac can do except have an Apple on the lid. Or develop / test / use Mac software. Or even check how Safari works for your SAAS (without resorting to BrowserStack or similar).
- rs999gti 3y ago
  > Or develop / test / use Mac software. Or even check how Safari works for your SAAS (without resorting to BrowserStack or similar). You're making my point still. Because you are developing software and testing in the Mac environment, over there everything is more expensive.

fastaguy88 3y ago

What a brouhaha. Apparently the people buying MacBook Pro's are so non-professional that they are duped into buying a machine with too little RAM? I think they get a 30 day return free, so if they find out they were duped, why not just upgrade. And while the upgrade cost may be extortionate compared to NewEgg, a 16Gb machine is just $200 more, still considerably cheaper than the same model was in the Intel days. I suspect that people who have decided to pay extra for the Pro model may actually have some idea how much RAM they need.

etempleton 3y ago

I think Apple should have more memory in their base pro models, but it can not be understated to those who have not used an 8GB Macbook Air how that does not impact day-to-day computer usage compared to a similar spec. Windows machine. I had used an M1 Air with 16Gb for work in the past and was impressed by it but was skeptical of the 8 Gb version. That is until I bought one because it was on sale. If you are doing video editing or using similarly memory intensive applications you will see issues, but you can in a sense say 8GB is ~equivalent to 16 GB on Windows for average use cases.

daft_pink 3y ago

The issue I have with the base model Mac's being under-memoried is that the base models are the high volume models that have sales and are easier to get at vendors other than the Apple Store. iPhone's have been under memoried at significant periods during their life, but most stores carried an upgraded model. I find the non base model Mac's often aren't available at launch, have longer lead times and force you to go to the Apple Store where you won't get any discount of any kind and often find a longer lead time even there.

dockd 3y ago

Making money by selling RAM is baked in to Apple's DNA. Apple charged a premium for the original Mac to go from the entry level 128 Kbytes to 512 Kbytes of RAM. Here we are almost 40 years later and that business model is still in place.

LoganDark 3y ago

What are you going to do about it? Nothing. You can do nothing about it. People are going to keep buying it, and "voting with your feet" does nothing. You don't matter to Apple. There is nothing that is going to be done, and this is going to continue.

dangus 3y ago

Look, Apple knows what that have. They have a product people want. RAM and storage are their bread and butter margin-padding products and that has been the PC OEM’s game for decades. There’s no shame in getting your bag. Apple isn’t the only company that makes laptops with soldered memory, although soldered SSDs are less common. Some of the most popular models from brands like Dell and Lenovo have soldered memory, like the XPS 13 and X1. Joe Consumer will never take a screwdriver to their laptop anyway, and your company certainly won’t pay for IT people $100 an hour to make upgrades and replace batteries. They’ll just “lease” computers and refresh on a ~3 year cycle because their apes for employees are going to spill coffee and crumbs on the damn thing anyway. Just call these Apple systems what they are and pretend they cost $200 more than the base price in the first place and get over it. Either the costs makes sense to you or it doesn’t and go buy something else like 80% of the PC market already does. Nobody seems to mind that brands like Razer and Alienware make overpriced gear because they aren’t as popular as Apple. Yes, we get it, the base M3 14” “Pro” has “Pro” in the name and it’s not “Pro.” Who fucking cares? There are thousands of products that use the word “Pro” without being “Pro.” And yes the M3 14” MacBook Pro costs $400 less than the M3 Pro equipped model. The $1999 model gained 2GB of memory compared to the previous generation.

stalfosknight 3y ago

If you want more than 8GB then configure your order to have more RAM. If you think you shouldn't have to custom order your laptop to be what you want, then take your money elsewhere in this free market. This isn't that hard, people.

dsign 3y ago

While I agree with the general feeling of the article, I would like to bring some attention to the fact that Apple’s competition is on the business of monetizing their user base in a worse manner. Windows is so shock-full of dark patterns these days (I’m speaking of the start menu, the upgrade wheel, the survtech in the browser and the OS), that I will be between the sword and a dark place when I need to upgrade my hardware next time. The Windows 11 upgrade is free, which speaks to Microsoft’s commitment to make me their product. Who knows, maybe I will end up paying five grands for a Mac Studio. In terms of hardware, that same amount of money would buy me a beefy workstation that I could arm myself, but Linux won’t run more than half of the software I use these days.

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago

Since when does the price of a product relate to the cost of the BOM? I mean, for many Intel CPUs, they're literally exactly the same products off the manufacturing line that are just binned differently, despite significant price differences in the market.

nyanpasu64 3y ago

> The cheapest MacBook Pro you can configure with more than 8GB is $1,800! > the true starting cost of a M3 MacBook Pro is $1,699 because to buy one with only 8GB of RAM is crazy. Does a MBP with 16 GB of RAM cost $2000 or $1700?

stevage 3y ago

Boy, I wouldn't even consider buying a new computer with less than 32GB. This is basically a marketing trick to to make you think a MacBook Pro is cheaper than it is. For the specs I would need it's now over $5k AUD. Sigh.

clouddrover 3y ago

> In Apple’s case, you have no choice. You can’t upgrade later. You can’t pay anyone else’s price. You have to pay Apple’s exorbitant $200-for-8GB upgrade cost. Of course you have a choice. If the price isn't right then don't buy it. > This is pure corporate greed from the world’s biggest and richest technology company, and as Apple customers, we shouldn’t stand for it. A company is only useful to you if its interests align with yours and if it is producing something worth the money. If a company is not worth your time or money then put your time and money toward something else.

Koshkin 3y ago

Just think for a moment of a machine with 24KB of RAM which ran the first version of UNIX.

indianmouse 3y ago

Ugh! Apple and it's fanbois! It's useless to argue against and pure waste of time. Don't but their products and don't argue. They are just another greedy, dominating corporate. Nothing more, nothing less. It's how they project in people's mind is good they are. All other stuff of innovation, fantastic product etc etc is just pure marketing gimmick. Nothing works beyond a few years and one still needs to upgrade. Take a ThinkPad and throw it in dust and it still functions even after 12 - 13 yrs with the latest upgraded OS support. Can anyone show a single apple product that exists? Oh no! They don't have any product that had so much life or upgrade ability since apple sucks cash from time to time from their beloved fanbois! And yet folks compare it against other products missing the core discussion here about the mind altering behaviour and how apple drives the consumer base while commanding a premium for the silliest of the silly feature or upgrade. That's the command they've over the ecosystem and once one gets caught, there's no turning back. It's like Hotel California. You can check in anytime, but you can never leave and you pay with your soul.

b800h 3y ago

From the article: "As I write this, with just a handful of browser tabs open, Slack, and a distraction-free writing app (iA Writer—it’s great), I’m consuming just about 11GB on my M2 MacBook Air." How the hell did we end up here? This level of waste is mind-boggling. Honestly, this makes me want to run MenuetOS as my daily driver.

mixmastamyk 3y ago

I made sure to get 16GB on our ten year old MBP and it is still going strong. I don’t recommend anyone get less on a machine that can’t be upgraded. Kid is using a framework with 16GB as well. Why? It’s 2023 and cost an extra $40.

lucasyvas 3y ago

> Are the new M3 Macs great computers? Sure. I don't want to be overly negative on what is intended by this concluding line, but it's part of the problem. It should re-state the point that has been driven home - the entry level MacBook Pro is a bad product for its audience. Just leave it at that - it doesn't say the whole line suffers the same fate, but it's OK to say it's a bad offering without making excuses for them. It does mention the issue again after, but don't say they're unilaterally great on the whole if they're not - it gives them justification to dismiss the issue if they are still "great". The entry level MacBook Pro is not a device you could recommend to the majority of professionals. We all know it. You should either get the Air, or a MacBook Pro with 16GB+.

pas 3y ago
it's perfect for sitting in meetings and vscode remote work, and/or very professionally SSHing here and there ...