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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 proposi

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.
- defrost 3y ago
  I have the usual variety of machines and I like to keep the old ones running for "regular people" in the family. Yesterday an older machine with 4GB of actual memory and 12GB of paged memory on a fast drive running Windows 10 (I know, not an Apple story) died mid use and auto rebooted. The cause? Google Chrome, 14 tabs, 8 inactive, an app running extracting subtitles from a queue of MKV files, a terminal window and ... <drumroll> .. windows update triggered to sanity check for new updates in the background. The (windows) update checks are getting pretty damn heavy these days, you can hear the drives thrashing in the background as every critical file is version and CRC checked and who knows what else these days. The failure and rebooting was likely linked to my hard limit on paged memory - just this dedicated 12 GB partition and no more .. but the workload was light by any past standard and it's the first instance of the updater kicking in and exhausting resources.
  - xp84 3y ago
    4GB with Windows seems to be bad to a degree I didn't previously realize. A friend had been assigned a Surface Go 3 from work, and it had a current or recent gen i5 or something, and 4GB of non-upgradeable RAM. My friend assumed she had malware, turns out the OS just consumed 2.5GB or so of RAM, and more than a couple of tabs or programs wouldn't just slow it down, it essentially locked up. It really only functioned after a reboot and before you tried to do anything. As much as I'd like to shame Apple for its 8GB junk, the Surface Go 3's 4GB RAM floor is an absolute travesty.

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.

defrost 3y ago
I have the usual variety of machines and I like to keep the old ones running for "regular people" in the family. Yesterday an older machine with 4GB of actual memory and 12GB of paged memory on a fast drive running Windows 10 (I know, not an Apple story) died mid use and auto rebooted. The cause? Google Chrome, 14 tabs, 8 inactive, an app running extracting subtitles from a queue of MKV files, a terminal window and ... <drumroll> .. windows update triggered to sanity check for new updates in the background. The (windows) update checks are getting pretty damn heavy these days, you can hear the drives thrashing in the background as every critical file is version and CRC checked and who knows what else these days. The failure and rebooting was likely linked to my hard limit on paged memory - just this dedicated 12 GB partition and no more .. but the workload was light by any past standard and it's the first instance of the updater kicking in and exhausting resources.
- xp84 3y ago
  4GB with Windows seems to be bad to a degree I didn't previously realize. A friend had been assigned a Surface Go 3 from work, and it had a current or recent gen i5 or something, and 4GB of non-upgradeable RAM. My friend assumed she had malware, turns out the OS just consumed 2.5GB or so of RAM, and more than a couple of tabs or programs wouldn't just slow it down, it essentially locked up. It really only functioned after a reboot and before you tried to do anything. As much as I'd like to shame Apple for its 8GB junk, the Surface Go 3's 4GB RAM floor is an absolute travesty.