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I typed “RAM” to search for it and boy they hammer home how lucky I am to be getting 1TB SSD standard, but no mention of RAM anywhere on this page. Anyway, the
by wincy 8mo ago
I typed “RAM” to search for it and boy they hammer home how lucky I am to be getting 1TB SSD standard, but no mention of RAM anywhere on this page. Anyway, the MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of RAM. It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB.
Interestingly, 36-128GB models are showing as “currently unavailable” on the store page, and you can’t even place an order for them right now? But for anyone curious, it’s quoting $5099 for the 128GB RAM 14” MacBook Pro model.
- edvinasbartkus 8mo agoon Silicon Mac's it's never called RAM, it "unified memory"
- lxgr 8mo agoI'm honestly just glad they don't brand this as "1016 MB of unified memory". Swap and ramdisks are a thing, after all...
- tonyedgecombe 8mo ago>Anyway, it starts with 16GB of RAM. $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB Interesting that this hasn't budged since the memory shortages appeared.
- WarmWash 8mo agoFair chance that Apple has price/purchase agreements already in place. Consumers are left to fight over the excess capacity after megabuyers get their orders filled.
- mschuster91 8mo ago> Interesting that this hasn't budged since the memory shortages appeared. Apple has had enough war chests with the ability of buying the entirety of TSMC's new capacity years in advance in the past. If I were to guess, Apple locked in their entire BOM and production capacity two years ago. That's something even the large players cannot replicate because they run cash-lean and have too many different SKUs, and the small players (Framework, System76, even Steam) are entirely left to the forces of the markets.
- lm28469 8mo agoThey sell you 1gb LPDDR5X for $25 while buying it at $5, don't worry for their margins...
- jeroenhd 8mo agoI know RAM is scarce and everything, but doubling down on LLM local acceleration with all of that dedicated silicon while at the same time sticking with Apple's traditional lack of RAM availability makes for a very weird product proposition to me.
- aurareturn 8mo agoIt starts at 16GB for the base M5 and 24GB for the Pro/Max. It's been like this.
- TheCapeGreek 8mo agoApple's RAM price bumps were already insane, now they'll get worse.
- ezfe 8mo agoThey’re literally not changing
- hu3 8mo agoIt did change. They bumped $200 on the entire line. So even the 16GB version is more expensive. I'd love to have customers like Apple. Bumps $200: "it didn't change!!!" And no power adapter included.
- mschuster91 8mo ago> And no power adapter included. To be fair, ever since the advent of high power USB-C PD that really, really is not needed any more, way too many power bricks are effectively e-waste. People already have USB-C power bricks and docks everywhere and unlike pre-USB-C generations, you can use them not just across different generations of hardware, but across vendors as well.
- NetMageSCW 8mo agoI doubt if that many have USB-C high power bricks unless they are upgrading from another USB-C laptop.
- mschuster91 8mo ago> unless they are upgrading from another USB-C laptop. Which MacBooks have been for almost a decade - the 2016 MBP with Touch Bar was the first that went fully USB-C PD. Anyone who has had a MacBook in that time frame will have had at least one high power USB-C PD wall wart. The Windows world, as usual, has been different, but even there, I'm not aware of any mainstream model being sold in the last two years without even a single PD capable port.
- jsheard 8mo ago> It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB. No change from the previous models then, 16GB->32GB was already $400. They're cutting into their previously enormous margins to keep the prices stable, rather than hiking the prices to maintain their margins.
- philistine 8mo agoThey bought the fab time for that RAM 2-3 years ago. Apple is renowned for their foresight and preparation. We'll eventually see price increases from Apple's RAM upgrade, but we're not there yet.
- scottyah 8mo agoCommodity futures made sense to me at FedEx- they would pay money with a supplier for the option to buy gas/oil at X price at Y date in the future. It costs more than just agreeing to pay for it at that price in the future, but if deliveries went way down (or prices) it'd be less costly to "back out". I wonder if there's a fab time secondary market where Wall Street types are making millions off speculating fab time.
- sally_glance 8mo agoHm I don't think a secondary market would work very well, using fab time productively requires lots of knowledge and collaboration with the provider. Compared to resources like grain or oil where it's basically "just come and pick it up when it's there".
- omcnoe 8mo agoThere were/are DRAM futures markets based on this hypothesis, historically they never worked very well because DRAM prices (at least for the same size/speed) have moved downwards so consistently over decades. That is until <6 months ago.
- mlrtime 8mo ago1) Every airline buys futures for oil, this is (one of) the points of the futures market. 2) If there is a market to hedge/speculate, it will exist. Maybe not 'fab futures' but there is definitely one.
- raincole 8mo ago> M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to 307GB/s of memory bandwidth, while M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth Isn't this it?
- wincy 8mo agoAh yeah you’re right, thanks. I tried to at least make my post useful and pull up prices for the different tiers. Overall, those prices are surprisingly competitive now compared to the rest of the laptop market!
- stetrain 8mo agoOn the M5 Pro tier (not the base M5 tier that was released last November), the base memory is 24GB. My M3 Pro from a few years ago for the same price had 18GB.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo agoInsane for the "Pro" to have only 16GB of memory. My 11 year old Intel i3 laptop has 16GB of memory.
- detritus 8mo agoDon't these integrated ARM-based SoCs make much better use of RAM as opposed to old Intel-based boards? That's my understanding, anyway.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo agoThe benefits are in speed not capacity.
- wincy 8mo agoMy wife’s 8GB MacBook Air crashed yesterday with Firefox and Find My open and nothing else because of running out of RAM, so, sort of, but they’re not magic. (Find My was using 3GB of memory!)
- nozzlegear 8mo agoSo Firefox was using 5gb? There's your problem.
- wincy 8mo agoIt’s a losing battle me trying to tell my wife to close her Firefox tabs, haha, but yes, Firefox does use a lot of ram when you have 500 tabs. Maybe I’ll get her a 64GB MacBook Pro for the premium web browsing experience she so desires!
- qudat 8mo agoTabs as bookmarks, people keep falling into this trap, my wife included
- kylec 8mo agoApple doesn't tend to use "RAM" in their marketing materials, they usually use "memory", which appears 9 times in the press release.
- armsaw 8mo agoPreorders open tomorrow according to the store page. You can’t order the base RAM model today, either.
- reenorap 8mo agoThe price hasn't changed between the M4 and M5. I honestly don't know how they did it. But I had a standing order for a maxed-out M4 (128 GB RAM, 2 TB drive) and the price is the same as the M5 so I cancelled my M4 order and will pre-order the M5 MAX instead.
- tedivm 8mo agoWell, guess I was wrong about that.
- reenorap 8mo agoNo, that's not how it works at all. They still source all their RAM from Samsung, Hynix, Micron, etc.
- dmitrygr 8mo agothat is ... not at all how that works. RAM is a separate chip, that is placed on top of the substrate that holds the main dies. It is bought from normal ram manufacturers like micron. it is not "embedded in the chip" by any possible meanings of those words.
- EagnaIonat 8mo agoARM RAM is not like your typical RAM. 16GB will easily run intensive software where you would x2+ on a windows machine. Unless you are planning to do some serious inferencing, or complex multi-agent setup, then you don't need the memory.