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The 256gb and 512gb models have 8gb of ram. The 1tb and 2tb models have 16gb. Not a fan of tying ram to storage. https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/ https://
by EduardoBautista 2y ago
The 256gb and 512gb models have 8gb of ram. The 1tb and 2tb models have 16gb. Not a fan of tying ram to storage.
https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/
- praseodym 2y agoAnd also one less CPU performance core for the lower storage models.
- 05 2y agoWell, they have to sell the dies with failed cores somehow..
- Laaas 2y agoThe economic reasoning behind this doesn't make sense to me. What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?
- fallat 2y agoThe reasoning is money. Come on.
- blegr 2y agoIt forces you to buy multiple upgrades instead of just the one you need.
- jessriedel 2y agoBut why does this make them more money than offering separate upgrades at higher prices? I do think there is a price discrimination story here, but there are some details to be filled in.
- foldr 2y agoIt's not obvious to me that Apple does make a significant amount of money by selling upgrades. Almost everyone buys the base model. The other models are probably little more than a logistical pain in the butt from Apple's perspective. Apple has to offer more powerful systems to be credible as a platform, but I wouldn't be surprised if the apparently exorbitant price of the upgrades reflects the overall costs associated with complicating the production and distribution lines.
- blegr 2y agoIt’s not about the price of upgrades though, it’s about their bundling together and the ridiculously stingy base specs that often make the upgrade non-optional. People who buy a base MacBook Air probably aren’t thinking about keeping it for 8 years or using it for heavy workloads.
- foldr 2y agoSure, but bundling them together reduces the supply chain complexity and reduces Apple's costs. If the options were more fine grained, Apple would sell even less of each model and it would be even less worth their while. Also, I have seen lots of people on HN complain about the price itself, even if it's not what you yourself object to.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sneak 2y agoThat’s not what “force” means.
- blegr 2y agoYes, but you understood what I meant since you could assert that it’s not what it means.
- jessriedel 2y agoI think it’s a price discrimination technique.
- a_vanderbilt 2y agoMargins and profit. Less variations in production makes for higher efficiency. Segmenting the product line can push consumers to purchase higher tiers of product. It's iOS anyways, and the people who know enough to care how much RAM they are getting are self-selecting for those higher product tiers.
- vinkelhake 2y agoIt's just Apple's price ladder. The prices on their different SKUs are laid out carefully so that there's never a too big of a jump to the next level. https://talkbackcomms.com/blogs/news/ladder https://talkbackcomms.com/blogs/news/ladder
- naravara 2y agoLogistical efficiencies mostly. It ends up being a lot of additional SKUs to manage, and it would probably discourage people from moving up a price tier if they would have otherwise. So from Apple’s perspective they’re undergoing more hassle (which costs) for the benefit of selling you lower margin products. No upside for them besides maybe higher customer satisfaction, but I doubt it would have moved the needle on that very much.
- izacus 2y agoThey push you to buy the more expensive model with higher margins. This is what they did when I was buying iPad Air - it starts with actually problematically low 64GB of Storage... and the 256GB model is the next one with massive price jump. It's the same kind of "anchoring" (marketing term) that car dealers use to lure you into deciding for their car based on the cheapest 29.999$ model which with "useful" equipment will end you costing like 45.000$
- aeyes 2y agoHonest question: What data do you store on an iPad Air? On a phone you might have some photos and videos but isn't a tablet just a media consumption device? Especially on iOS where they try to hide the filesystem as much as possible.
- izacus 2y agoNo data, but iOS apps have gotten massive, caches have gotten massive and install a game or two and 64GB is gone. Not to mention that occasionally is nice to have a set of downloaded media available for vacation/travel and 64GB isn't enough to download week worth of content from Netflix. This is why this is so annoying - you're right, I don't need 512GB or 256GB. But I'd still like to have more than "You're out of space!!" amount.
- gehsty 2y agoFewer iPad SKUs = more efficient manufacturing and logistics, at iPad scale probably means a very real cost saving.
- michaelt 2y agoBecause before you know it you're Dell and you're stocking 18 different variants of "Laptop, 15 inch screen, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD" and users are scratching their heads trying to figure out WTF the difference is between a "Latitude 3540" a "Latitude 5540" and a "New Latitude 3550"
- gruez 2y agoI can't tell whether this is serious or not. Surely adding independently configurable memory/storage combinations won't confuse the user, any more than having configurable storage options don't make the user confused about what iphone to get?
- its_ethan 2y agoConfiguring your iPhone storage is something every consumer has a concept of, it's some function of "how many pictures can I store on it"? When it comes to CPU/GPU/RAM and you're having to configure all three, the average person is absolutely more likely to be confused. It's anecdotal, but 8/10 people that I know over the age of 40 would have no idea what RAM or CPU configurations even theoretically do for them. This is probably the case for most iPad purchasers, and Apple knows this - so why would they provide expensive/confusing configurability options just for the handful of tech-y people who may care? There are still high/med/low performant variations that those people can choose from, any the number of people for whom that would sour them away from a sale is vanishingly small, and they would be likely to not even be looking at Apple in the first place
- skeaker 2y agoYes, the additional $600 they make off of users who just want extra RAM is just an unfortunate side effect of the unavoidable process of not being Dell. Couldn't be any other reason.
- kmeisthax 2y agoApple already fixed this with the Mac: they stock a handful of configurations most likely to sell, and then everything else is a custom order shipped direct from China. The reason why Apple has to sell specific RAM/storage pairs for iPads is that they don't have a custom order program for their other devices, so everything has to be an SKU, and has to sell in enough quantity to justify being an SKU.
- abtinf 2y agoThe GP comment can be misleading because it suggests Apple is tying storage to ram. That is not the case (at least not directly). The RAM and system-on-chip are tied together as part of the system-on-package. The SoP is what enables M chips to hit their incredible memory bandwidth numbers. This is not an easy thing to allow configuration. They can’t just plug a different memory chip as a final assembly step before shipping. They only have two SoPs as part of this launch: 9-core CPU with 8gb, and 10-core CPU with 16gb. The RAM is unified for cpu/gpu (and I would assume neural engine too). Each new SoP is going to reduce economies of scale and increase supply chain complexity. The 256/512gb models are tied to the first package, the 1/2tb models are tied to the second. Again, these are all part of the PCB, so production decisions have to be made way ahead of consumer orders. Maybe it’s not perfect for each individual’s needs, but it seems reasonable to assume that those with greater storage needs also would benefit from more compute and RAM. That is, you need more storage to handle more video production so you are probably more likely to use more advanced features which make better use of increased compute and RAM.
- dragonwriter 2y ago> What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations? More costs everywhere in the chain; limiting SKUs is a big efficiency from manufacturing to distribution to retail to support, and it is an easy way (for the same reason) to improve the customer experience, because it makes it a lot easier to not be out of or have delays for a customer’s preferred model, as well as making the UI (online) or physical presentation (brick and mortar) for options much cleaner. Of course, it can feel worse if you you are a power user with detailed knowledge of your particular needs in multiple dimensions and you feel like you are paying extra for features you don't want, but the efficiencies may make that feeling an illusion — with more freedom, you would being paying for the additional costs that created, so a higher cost for the same options and possibly just as much or more for the particular combination option you would prefer with multidimensional freedom as for the one with extra features without it. Though that counterfactual is impossible to test.
- Aurornis 2y agoSeveral things: 1. Having more SKUs is expensive, for everything from planning to inventory management to making sure you have enough shelf space at Best Buy (which you have to negotiate for). Chances are good that stores like Best Buy and Costco would only want 2 SKUs anyway, so the additional configs would be a special-order item for a small number of consumers. 2. After a certain point, adding more options actually decreases your sales. This is confusing to people who think they'd be more likely to buy if they could get exactly what they wanted, but what you're not seeing is the legions of casual consumers who are thinking about maybe getting an iPad, but would get overwhelmed by the number of options. They might spend days or weeks asking friends which model to get, debating about whether to spend extra on this upgrade or that, and eventually not buying it or getting an alternative. If you simplify the lineup to the "cheap one" and the "high end one" then people abandon most of that overhead and just decide what they want to pay. The biggest thing tech people miss is that they're not the core consumers of these devices. The majority go to casual consumers who don't care about specifying every little thing. They just want to get the one that fits their budget and move on. Tech people are secondary.
- sneak 2y agoIt benefits Apple to not have people thinking about or worrying about the amount of ram in their iPad. The OS doesn’t surface it anywhere.
- samatman 2y agoIt's fairly absurd that they're still selling a 256gb "Pro" machine in the first place. That said, Apple's policy toward SKUs is pretty consistent: you pay more money and you get more machine, and vice versa. The MacBooks are the only product which has separately configurable memory / storage / chip, and even there some combinations aren't manufactured.
- phkahler 2y ago>> It's fairly absurd that they're still selling a 256gb "Pro" machine in the first place. My guess is they want you to use their cloud storage and pay monthly for it.
- CharlieDigital 2y agoThat doesn't make any sense. I'm not storing my Docker containers and `node_modules` in the cloud. Pro isn't just images and videos.
- davedx 2y agoThis is a tablet not a laptop
- skydhash 2y agoOr use an external storage. I’d be wary of using my iPad as primary storage anyway. It’s only work in progress and currently watching/reading media.
- samatman 2y agoIf that were the goal (I don't think it is), they'd be better off shipping enough storage to push people into the 2TB tier, which is $11 vs. $3 a month for 200GB. I said this in a sibling comment already, but I think it's just price anchoring so that people find the $1500 they're actually going to pay a bit easier to swallow.
- dijit 2y agoReal creative pros will likely be using a 10G Thunderbolt NIC to a SAN; local video editing is not advised unless it’s only a single project at a time. Unless you are a solo editor.
- giancarlostoro 2y agoHonestly though, that's basically every tablet you cant change the ram, you get what you get and thats it. Maybe they should call them by different names like Pro Max for the ones with 16GB in order to make it more palatable? Small psychological hack.
- dotnet00 2y agoThe Samsung tablets at least still retain the SD card slot, so you can focus more on the desired amount of RAM and not worry too much about the built-in storage size.
- Teever 2y agoIt would be cool if regulators mandated that companies like Apple are obligated to provide models of devices with SD card slots and a seamless way to integrate this storage into the OS/applications. That combined with replaceable batteries would go a long way to reduce the amount of ewaste.
- mschuster91 2y agoAnd then people would stick alphabet-soup SD cards into their devices and complain about performance and data integrity, it's enough of a headache in the Android world already (or has been before Samsung and others finally decided to put in enough storage for people to not rely on SD cards any more). In contrast, Apple's internal storage to my knowledge always is very durable NVMe, attached logically and physically directly to the CPU, which makes their shenanigans with low RAM size possible in the first place - they swap like hell but as a user you barely notice it because it's so blazing fast.
- Teever 2y agoYeah jackasses are always gonna jackass. There's still a public interest in making devices upgradable for the purpose of minimizing e-waste. I'd just love to buy a device with a moderate amount of unupgreadable SSD and an SD slot so that I can put a more memory in it later so the device can last longer.
- paulpan 2y agoI don't think it's strictly for price gouging/segmentation purposes. On the Macbooks (running MacOS), RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes. It makes sense for Apple to account for with higher RAM spec for the 1TB/2TB configurations.
- pantalaimon 2y ago> RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes. I'm pretty sure that's what all modern operating systems are doing.
- eddieroger 2y agoProbably, but since we're talking about an Apple product, comparing it to macOS make sense, since they all share the same bottom layer.
- 0x457 2y agoNot, probably, that just how any "modern" OS works. It also uses RAM as a cache to avoid reads from storage, just like any other modern OS. Apple uses it for segmentation and nothing else. Modern being - since the 80s.
- tomxor 2y agoEven on the Atari ST you would use a "RAM disk" when working with "large" data before manually flushing it to a floppy. Some people would use the trashcan icon to emphasise the need to manually flush... Not quite a cache, but the concept was there.
- wheybags 2y agoI'm writing this from memory, so some details may be wrong but: most high end ssds have dram caches on board, with a capacitor that maintains enough charge to flush the cache to flash in case of power failure. This operates below the system page cache that is standard for all disks and oses. Apple doesn't do this, and use their tight integration to perform a similar function using system memory. So there is some technical justification, I think. They are 100% price gougers though.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoIf these things will ever get MacOS support it will be useless with 8 GB of Ram. Such a waste of nice components.
- tamrix 2y agoWhy can't they just make it 12gb? It will sell far easier. It's all soldered on anyway.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoIt probably has a 128 bit buswidth. You need 32 bit per memory chip, so you end up with 4 chips. 3 GB ram chips probably exist, but are definitely not common.
- TheBigSalad 2y agoThe point is: 8GB of RAM is really, really cheap. Like $20 retail.
- greggsy 2y agoThis comes up frequently. 8GB is sufficient for most casual and light productivity use cases. Not everyone is a power user, in fact, most people aren’t.
- regularfry 2y agoMy dev laptop is an 8GB M1. It's fine. Mostly. I can't run podman, slack, teams, and llama3-8B in llama.cpp at the same time. Oddly enough, this is rarely a problem.
- prepend 2y agoIt’s the “Mostly” part that sucks. What’s the price difference between 8 and 16? Like $3 in wholesale prices. This just seems like lameness on Apple’s part.
- 2y ago
- sambazi 2y ago> 8gb of ram not again
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- paulddraper 2y agoSadly so
- ilikehurdles 2y agoThe iPod classic had 160 GB of storage fifteen years ago. No device should be measuring storage in the gigabytes in 2024. Let alone starting at $1000 offering only 256GB. What ridiculousness.
- marshray 2y agoI just checked, and my iPhone is using 152 GB of storage. I have years of photos and videos on there. Apparently the 256 GB model was the right choice for me?
- sneak 2y agoIt stores lower res proxies on the device and full res in iCloud, iirc.
- elAhmo 2y agoOnly if it is explicitly turned on. I have the 256 GB model as well, full resolution of 5+ years of photos (around 20k), around 200 GB used, 180 on iCloud via Family Sharing.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoYou haven't seen the size of my music, TV, or movie collection then. We have the technology to put it all on my phone and it should be cheaper, but it's not because of an absurd, money-and-design-only consumerist monoculture from the head bean counter who drifted far afield of the cool practicality and leadership of SJ.
- seec 2y agoCouldn't agree more. Cook deserves so much hate for what he did to Apple. I'm astounded people still worship Apple like nothing has changed at all. All the changes under the Cook leadership are appalling and reveal what is definitely one of the worse character you can get as a leader. At this point even Bill Gates looks like a good guy in comparison.
- intrasight 2y ago"Think Different" ;)
- littlestymaar 2y ago> 8gb of ram. WTF? Why so little? That's insane to me, that's the amount of RAM you get with a mid-range android phone.
- MyFirstSass 2y agoWe've reached a point where their chips has become so amazing they have to introduce "fake scarcity" and "fake limits" to sell their pro lines, while dividing their customers into haves and havenots, while actively stalling the entire field for the masses.
- littlestymaar 2y agoYes, but we're talking about the “pro” version here which makes even less sense!
- its_ethan 2y agoYou could, alternatively, read less malice into the situation and realize that the majority of people buying an iPad pro don't even need 8gb of RAM to do what they want to do with the device (web browsing + video streaming).
- deergomoo 2y agoI'm not defending Apple's absurd stinginess with RAM (though I don't think it's much of an issue on an iPad given how gimped the OS is), but I've never understood why high-end Android phones have 12/16+ GB RAM. What needs that amount on a phone? 8GB on a desktop is...well it's not great, but it's usable, and usable for a damn sight more multi-tasking than you would ever do on a smartphone. Is it just because you need to look better on the spec sheet, like the silly camera megapixel wars of the 2010s?
- pquki4 2y agoI think that is very obvious. You have a browser window and a few apps open -- messaging, youtube, email, podcast etc. When you switch between apps and eventually back to your browser, you don't want the page to reload due to other apps eating up the memory. As simple as that. It's about having a good experience.