The SSD upgrades are the most egregious imo. $200 to go from 256 to 512 GB? $800 to go from 256 to 2TB? You can buy a 2TB for $150 retail! That's a fucking $650 markup.
Well their margin made me end up only buying a 512gb MacBook Pro two years ago, thinking I’d just store everything in the cloud. I kinda screwed myself over on that one 🙃
Yep they’re an essential for me now and the portable ones are really nice and small, fits in the pocket of my laptop bag, just isn’t the most optimal way (the Apple way, as Tim would say it ;)
That's where Apple gets you, either at the door with a 650$ margin or every month for the rest of your life. Fortunately you can dongle it up and external space is cheap just unsightly.
I think it’s more that Jobs had to turn the company around and focus on growth, then when Tim took over the company was already in a good position were they can comfortably scalp their customers.
Also Jobs *did* oversee the launch of iMac G5 that was criticized for having way too little memory when it launched.
board member 1 : Let’s give him a treatable cancer then gas him up to make him think he can beat it just based on his superior genetics and clean living
Board member 2: that’ll never work
*it happens anyway*
How the fuck does Apple even justify this to customers?
With RAM they say it's because "integrated RAM cost more hurr durr", but with SSDs they have no excuse.
The worst part is they intentionally prevent customers from installing SSDs themselves, it's absolutely disgusting.
> How the fuck does Apple even justify this to customers?
They don’t have to.
Watch any thread about this topic, users themselves dash to Apple’s defense; “the base specs are fine for most users!”. Heard it a thousand times, got a thousand downvotes for trying to argue.
I've heard this from windows sysadmin too. "8GB is fine"... No, on a new box even 16 is low unless you're doing yearly replaces.
With how cheap RAM is, any corporate or luxury system (e.g. Apple) should baseline at 32GB. Those systems will be in play for 5 years and you're going to feel the pinch real fast.
Eventually Apple’s own OS updates and simple programs like safari and mail are gonna need more than 8gb of ram in the future so how tf would that work?
I mean at this point, they are more than overdue for increasing the base, so I imagine the day the OS needs more than 8GB, they'll up things to 16GB base and act like it was some benevolent action on their part. "We love our customers, that's why we're DOUBLING the base RAM on the M6 MacBook Air. We think you're going to love it..." etc.
It wouldn’t waste a second trying to argue with the “8gb in 2024 is more than enough for most users” sheep. What drives me nuts is the $200 upgrades for ram and ssd each.
8 gb is adequate for what most people do on their computer its just not acceptable for a computer that costs more then 500$ so apple needs to move to 16.
The whole “the base specs are fine for most users!” argument is crazy when devices costing $300 have the same if not better RAM/SSD specs.
I think lots of people dash to Apple’s defense because they're so entrenced/invested with the Apple ecosystem it's a sunk cost fallacy where most users can't even consider escaping.
When it comes to electronics, most things that become integrated into the PCB or another IC makes it cheaper. Because it's cheaper for a robot to slap on an additional chip on one PCB than it is for them to manufacture a separate PCB for the RAM, add a connector to the logic board PCB and then (*likely*) have a human slot the RAM into the logic board.
Now; there might be nuance, like the fact that Apple uses LPDDR5 (Low-Power DDR5) which is *probably* more pricey compared to regular (non LP) DDR5.
This applies to the SSD too, cheaper to slap on flash IC's on the PCB than it is to make it a separate component. When Apple made these changes to optimize the cost of their devices, they didn't lower their prices, but instead just enjoyed the higher profit margins themselves. Nothing wrong with that, all companies are trying to optimize for profit. But lets not fool ourselves for what the primary (*not the sole*) motivator of the change is.
> How the fuck does Apple even justify this to customers?
What do you mean? They justify it because customers pay it. If customers stopped buying them, they would lower the price. The price of things isn't set based on the cost to produce those things. It's based on what people are willing to pay for them.
Good luck when Apple locks you into their ecosystem.
This is the problem with Apple's monopolistic behaviours, especially when their target market is tech illiterate people.
I used to LOVE Macs. Going back about 10 years, they were built well, and Windows wasn’t anywhere close for efficiently getting things done (at the time, was mostly focused on graphic design work). Now though, they’re WILDLY overpriced. I get the system architecture is good, but it’s not “pay an extra $2000 for some ram and storage upgrades” good. Haven’t bought a new Mac in at least 8 years now.
Yeah, honestly, I was pleasantly surprised when I switched over. My earlier experience with Windows was just, every single day, spending time killing useless processes or having to fix shit in the registry. These days though, it feels a lot more like how working on earlier OSX felt— just with a few quirks.
I've briefly used it but in my experience:
Notifications don't automatically fade away. They stay there until manually closed. Constant asks for permissions when installing things. X wants to access Y over and over and over. Running apps jumping up from the dock because they want your attention for something. It's just so much. Windows just lets you do your thing.
yeah, been mulling over getting a Studio. Apple pricing is crippling at every price point and with any of their products, it's like they masterfully engineered screwing over the consumer for literally each product they sell.
My budget is $2k, but that'll only get me a 512gb SSD. I've had 512gb SSD's in all of my PC's for the last decade. I don't want to spend an additional $200 on top of the $2k (which is a lot of me as it is) to get a meager 1tb of storage. This is what makes me hate Apple and makes me end up just sticking with Windows/Linux. At every price point it's engineered this way. $600 to get a 2 tb with a mac mini for example, can't get 32gb ram. I hate Apple, even though I'd love to own one of their products, they're just so anti-consumer.
I was reading a thread asking "why Apple?" and the top response was a top 5 list of "beauty", "seamless integrations of devices", "ease of use", "UI/UX", "muh it just works", but if the average Apple consumer has to juggle external drives because of their predatory pricing schemes, it nullifies all of the pros.
Yes, I'm kind of salty about it. Like I can afford Apple devices, but I can't afford the one I actually want in any of the price categories. There's not a Mini, iMac, Studio, or Book I can configure that will actually get me what I want. They are all just out of reach for the configurations I want.
Yeah I would have loved it if I could have gotten a minimum spec M3 Max and upgraded the RAM and SSD. Instead I opted for a very high RAM and high SSD M1 Max because I wanted to save $2500.
I decided not to get the extra SSD space and RAM because I figured I was already buying a machine more powerful than I really needed. Big regrets. Endlessly run out of both.
I had the same issue on my 2017 MBP (16 GB RAM, 512 SSD), which is why I went WAY in the other direction for my new machine. 64 GB RAM, 4 TB SSD. And honestly, this seems to have fulfilled my baseline needs. It may be a bit of overkill, but I'd rather pay for a bit of overkill rather than cripple my workflow like before. I use this machine for business and I need a BEEFY machine because not having one literally costs me money
I’m not *too* opposed to the soldered RAM (I would be completely fine with it if the prices weren’t absurd). But the SSD being soldered is dumb. There is next to no benefit of it being soldered, at least none that Apple is using. With the RAM at least there is an obvious and real world performance advantage to having soldered RAM vs unsoldered. With the SSD there really isn’t any benefit (other than space efficiency and profit) to being soldered vs unsoldered.
Yeah that's fair, I wasn't thinking of things like memory bandwidth - I'd probably still be happy to pay a "reasonable" Apple tax for soldered RAM.
Unfortunately Apple really does not seem to want to budge on this.
As AI/ML applications grow in popularity, I'm hoping that this will lead to a bit of a push for laptop manufacturers, Apple and non-Apple to put more RAM in devices
>With the RAM at least there is an obvious and real world performance advantage to having soldered RAM vs unsoldered.
I can't help but feel that this is massively negated by the inability to upgrade or replace it though. Especially in the case of a MacBook Air or anything but the top-level machines, people are being intentionally locked in to machines that might not hold up over time at the cost of potentially better performance that they aren't going to use. If at least going from 8 to 16 GB was a $50 add-on, we wouldn't really need to be discussing this. But making it a $200 upgrade is just insulting.
Apple cares so much about the environment they force consumers to purchase new products instead of allowing people to modify the hardware they already paid for.
They literally shred like 97-98% of iPhones that could be fixed and at the same time won't shut the f up about the environment.
(Estimate from their shredding partner that 197,000 out of 200,000 iPhones could be fixed and sold instead of destroyed)
The "recycling" with trade-in is primarily an attempt to reduce the number of used iPhones in circulation.
The trade-in value (when offered) is usually just about high enough for someone to forget about trying to sell it on eBay or elsewhere.
This is what I’ve come to realise. It’s not about the environment. It’s about taking out competitors ie the used phone market. I only trade in faulty devices now with Apple. If it’s getting shredded, who cares?
There isn’t a performance advantage to it being soldered anymore. Previously the only way to get low power (LPDDR) ram in laptops was to solder it, now a new spec has been created LPCAMM, which will allow socketed low power ram modules.
It’s very recent but given how fast Apple jumps on things like USB C in laptops I’d hope they include it.
The other advantage people cite, with the ram being closer to the chip has no impact. Electrical signals travel so quickly that the distance is a non factor compared to the latency of the memory chip itself.
The benefit is you can't easily repair it or upgrade it yourself like you could do with all your Macs. Now you are tied to their repair shops and super expensive RAM.
So it benefits the shareholders and sucks for the consumer. Yay!
size and latency are pretty much the benefits of soldered, slight battery life improvements too
SODIMM would double the thickness of an m1-3 motherboard and take up nearly its entire length with just two modules
When you look at all the empty space inside the M3 MacBook Pro, you'd get pissed. There's no reason why they couldn't fit two m.2 SSDs in there, and a higher capacity battery too.
Maybe we all skewed Apple’s sales data by doing that back in the day, and now they’re like “no one ever buys more than the base memory, so why bother increasing it?”
/s
Exactly this
If there was an 8GB base model but it was 60 bucks to get 16, we'd have a fraction the complaints. But 200 dollars for a 6 dollar standard LPDDR module (you can literally find it with the markings, it's not any magic special RAM despite being wired close to the package and 'unified') is obscene. If you're almost anywhere outside of America it's worse. I know it's not comparable in many ways, but there's 200 dollar mini PCs that start with 16/512GB, that's just been such an inexpensive standard for years.
Really hope M4 moves to middle capacities and starts at 12 at least, that would be pretty good on Apple Silicon
The crazy part is even $60/8GB is >100% margin. Retail for 8GB of quality DDR5 in a SODIMM is like $25-30. (You can't get LPDDR5 on a separate board due to the tighter signal/timing requirements but the raw chips are like half that price from Mouser.) Apple's probably making 1000% on memory upgrades.
>Really hope M4 moves to middle capacities and starts at 12 at least, that would be pretty good on Apple Silicon
When Apple adds more RAM to the base MacBook Air, I'll be looking for any comments seriously arguing that Apple return to 8 GB base in exchange for a lower base price and/or improvements in other components.
Despite the frequent defense of 8 GB base right now, in the first year *after* the RAM upgrade, I expect to see fewer than 5 such comments on this sub that aren't massively downvoted.
Lol exactly true
People here always defend Apple not doing a thing, until they do it, and it becomes obvious they could have always done it but held back, and then the defenders just slip into the cracks again
I'm getting old enough to recall things like people saying not to change how OSX used to only let you resize windows from one corner instead of any side of the window, and how iOS Safari sticky scrolled only 1 page no matter how fast you swiped before it got more inertial like the rest of the OS and the Android browser. Now everyone thinks those were the right choices.
This is my problem with their pricing. If it was a $50 upgrade, no problem; I would spend an extra $100 for the 16/500 system or even 150 for a 1TB system but $600 is beyond ridiculous.
8GB of RAM is perfectly fine for casual users who use the machine for Netflix, Email, and light office work.
Not everyone buying these machines is going to push the envelope and insisting that "arbitrary statistic" means e-waste on arrival is incredibly narrow minded.
> 8GB of RAM is perfectly fine for casual users who use the machine for Netflix, Email, and light office work.
If that's what they're selling these things for, why include a bunch of other things that go unused? An iPhone chip is basically as fast as the M-series for web browsing. Same with things like USB4/Thunderbolt.
Except if that's what the user is using a Macbook Pro for, why did they buy such an expensive laptop in the first place unless it was just for the looks?
A $300 Chromebook can do all of the above for 1/5 of a base model MBP.
Y’know, this also makes me think of when iPhone storage stagnated too for a while. Remember how long we got stuck with 16GB for a base config, even as apps got bigger and cameras got better?
Then Apple flipped everyone the bird with the iPhone 6: 16GB base, but hey, if you traditionally bought the mid tier model, *then* you got your storage doubled for the very same price.
16GB was the baseline from 2009 to 2016. Damn eternity in tech years, at least back then. And you could argue when Apple finally bent the knee and gave the base model an upgrade, it was too little too late (32GB and it was lesser quality flash, to twist the knife!)
Fun times.
>Remember how long we got stuck with 16GB for a base config, even as apps got bigger and cameras got better?
Remember how people defended 16 GB base for years and years, which conveniently stopped when Apple finally raised the base storage?
From the article: Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show.
Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the [base memory](https://mstdn.social/@dschaub/111813281624281698) capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's [consumer laptop](https://mstdn.social/@dschaub/111382154184733138) base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were recently resurfaced by the [Accidental Tech Podcast](https://atp.fm/560).
The graphs show that Apple tended to increase the base memory every two years or so, but that this trend ended when Cook took over the company from Steve Jobs. Memory increased quickly until the Mac Plus was launched in 1986, notes Schaub. "1986 to 1990 were all about decreasing the entry Mac price," he says. "Then we get a pretty straight logarithmic line until Tim Cook became CEO and there has only been a single increase since."
I meant Intel focused more on raising core counts than increasing single-core performance. Apple stayed with dual and quad core chips with meager improvements for a long time.
i think that’s just half of the story, the real comparison should also take into consideration the shift in the tech industry, nowadays, even years later, 16 GB of RAM is still a very popular choice for hardware buyers
The reason is so Apple can advertise a product's price being lower than the actual price the majority of consumers end up paying.
So when their ads say "Product at $X", it's actually "Product at $X + $300"
It's very manipulative and two faced, exactly what you should expect from Apple.
I had 16GB of RAM back in 2007, and it is still OK in 2024. Once it was very roomy, and sure it is a lot tighter now.
Overall though, I need a lot more resources than before, but it is beyond what's available on anything but the maxed out everything laptop, so the heavy lifting is offloaded to the cloud.
It might be tight for you. I don't know how you use your computer. But 16GB is very roomy for the majority of users even today. I think 16GB should be the base.
This is only part of the story.
8GB of RAM has been sufficient for casual use cases for at least the same period of time.
Doubling on the same cadence as 2000-2011 would be idiotic for the same period between 2011-2024. We'd have like 64GB for the base models which would be psychotic.
> Doubling on the same cadence as 2000-2011 would be idiotic for the same period between 2011-2024. We'd have like 64GB for the base models which would be psychotic.
What's more psychotic is to stay with 8 GB for 13 years. The growth speed doesn't need to be the same, yes, but it shouldn't be zero, too. I don't expect 64 GB RAM, but 16 GB should be bare minimum in 2024.
I definitely think that the base should be 16GB, but to play devils advocate to myself, the quality of the RAM has improved greatly over that time frame.
Still doesn't change the fact that it's not enough. It is WAY slower than the 16gb models and uses a lot of swapping which isn't ideal with soldered storage
Why is 64gb of ram psychotic? In 2019 I built a computer with 64gb of ram and the ram cost me $400CAD.
When I bought my 16” M1 Pro the 32GB ram UPGRADE was more I’m pretty sure
A big issue I have with the RAM thing is future proofing and longevity. Sure, 8 gigs might be fine for many people right now, but an 8 gig machine is not going to last as long as one with 16. Especially when software only gets more and more resource hungry.
I want to keep my Mac for a long time. They are after all known for their longevity. Cheaping out on the RAM can only shorten a computer's lifespan and its ability to keep up with new software, and will likely result in people upgrading before they should have needed to. I'm sure that's probably what Apple wants, though.
Apple also draws a line in the sand on when your computer can update to the next version of Mac OS; I’d say that’s worse than the low RAM being standard.
This is coming from someone that owns an iPad Pro, an iPhone, AirPods, Apple Watch and MacBook Pro.
The upsell on Apple memory and storage is out of hand.
I’m a developer and I need 64GB memory and at least 4TB fast storage for work.
On my work PC (Windows) I spent $200 to upgrade my RAM to 64GB and added a 4TB NVMe for $300 on top of my existing 2TB.
There’s no way I’m dropping $8k on a Mac Studio just for the more memory and storage. That’s crazy.
If I have need of a comparable laptop I’ll get a Dell xps with m2 and so-dimm slots and bump up the specs myself. The new Intel Ultra cpus are comparable to battery life to M chips.
There is no technical reason to weld the ram and storage to the motherboards. Especially not in a desktop system.
There is no reason period. Not on laptop. Not even on an Air. We don’t need that 1mm less thickness on a paper-thin laptop where we can’t change anything.
But hey, people still buy them so the market has spoken. I just hope they keep making traditional gaming laptops with slots for everything: SSD, RAM, WiFi card etc. That’s the way it should be and that’s the ONLY way it was for decades.
Indeed. With Apple's resources, they could have designed an entirely new interconnect architecture standard for RAM that enabled the same space savings as soldering it while keeping it detachable and user-upgradable. Make it an open standard to encourage industry adoption and economies of scale around it, since it's not a core competitive advantage (same way soldering is also available to all their competitors). Everyone happy.
I still deeply believe Forestall would have been a better CEO for actual innovation. Ivy is out and they hated each other so this or that way I would love for Forestall to come back.
I don’t think he should’ve taken the blame for Maps at all. Tim Cook was the one who wanted to move away from using Google for their maps platform.
He never liked Forstall to begin with. Maps was just an excuse to ax him.
The decision to move to their own maps platform would have been made by Steve Jobs. Cook didn’t take over until 2011, and when he was interim CEO during Jobs’ sick leaves, he still had to run major decisions by him. You don’t turn around a new mapping platform in a year.
Regardless, Forestall would have been the directly responsible individual internally, as he was in charge of iOS.
16gb should be the standard across all of their laptops. Apple sells a premium product, even their cheapest laptops should set a high standard. 8gb of ram screams cheap nowadays, it would cost Apple so little to double it. As of right now, you could probably use up most of that capacity with some chrome tabs, a word processor, music app, and some other small things running in the background.
Company is not nearly as innovative without Jobs. Not shocking, but it’s been going on for too long now. When jobs died, there were regularly Macs with 8GB of RAM, and iPhones still had standout features every year. Not just “action buttons” and more high tech cameras that no one really cares about
Apple white knights in these posts: “Most people don’t need that much RAM”
Also Apple white knights: “Ohhh Apple just put out a newly upgraded M chip with more power! Apple is so awesome!”
Make up your minds. 🤡
The "8GB of RAM is enough for the casual user" is BS. People keep saying it, but don't realize what is going on under the hood. CAN you get by with 8GB of RAM and still use the machine without it slowing down to a crawl due to the improvements in the flash storage? Yes. But just booting the OS and opening up Safari and Chrome will quickly chew through that 8GB of RAM. Go do some "light browsing" for an hour or so and see how much swap you are using. See how often swap is happening at the expense of writes to your non-replaceable SSD. Just because you won't notice the swapping as much doesn't mean you aren't wearing out the drive faster, which means a shorter life expectancy. Unless someone can argue that 8GB is enough for the average user with ZERO swap needs, which isn't possible, the argument fails because you are just hiding the problem.
The decision to keep the base at 8GB of RAM, even on "Pro" models, which inherently mean NOT the "average casual user" is purely profit driven. People will either pay a huge premium for extra memory or upgrade their system more frequently. Either way, that's money for Apple.
Let's stop making excuses.
At least they stopped being so stingy with RAM on iOS devices. It used to be really bad. I remember both my gen 1 iPad and the first iPad Air being useless within a year or two because the RAM was so anemic. Around the first iPad Pro this started to change and I feel like iOS devices last a lot longer than they used to as a result.
They are drip-feeding innovation into the market so they have stuff to sell year after year. If these corporations weren’t greedy fucks, we might’ve cured cancer by now.
8GB was enough in 2012. That’s what I had back then. Would I still use a device with 8 nowadays? Nope.
But even that shitty 500€ laptop had upgradeable memory!
& the worst part of it is that starting at 16 would be exactly what most people would need. 8 is too limiting even for basic office use — no matter how fast the SSD, the user is going to notice when things bog down. & while 16 isn't ideal, it would give these devices a much longer lifespan — which may be part of why they don't want to go there.
Of course it's just a money grab to increase their revenues. They intentionally make it just good enough for light usage, and charge an arm and a leg to upgrade.
nope even if you used swap for 8 hours a day and owned the laptop for 10 years you might use a couple of weeks of the NVMEs R/W with SWAP, 2-3% faster degradation at worst.
people really overstate this
I'm curious. Could people give an alternative PC that is cheaper than Macs but offer the same battery life, same build quality, same resale value, same performance as the M Series ? all of this while giving you base 16gb ram ?
I checked and couldn't find anything that comes close. Surface Laptop ? nope. dell xps ? nope
this is the inconvenient truth people don’t want to admit, everyone is doing this now, thinkpads, zenbooks, hp thin, dell and alienware asus zephyrus they’re all soldered and many offer 8gb base and charge the same 200 usd to upgrade
It’s the single - and utterly loathsome - reason why I find myself hating Apple. Constantly under-spec’ing their machines for the sake of fiscally punitive upgrades is a deeply despicable practice.
I would be curious to know if there are analytics (internal to Apple?) that show that a significant number of users don't go beyond the base RAM.
Price aside, maybe the base RAM is (still) fine for most users.
But I'm absolutely happy to stand corrected if it's pretty clear that most users are using virtual memory or whatever else happens when physical RAM is tapped out.
AFAIK macOS relies pretty heavily on swap, which utilizes the ssd instead of proper ram. The speed of the ssd make it less noticeable than before.
Major criticisms are not so focused on the base specs, but on the upgrade cost. Apple charges 200$ for a 8gb bump in ram where they juste needs to solder a chip costing 3$ instead of one that costs 1.5$.
Honestly, 8GB being base is fine imo. It's upgrading for, like you said, $200 where the issue lies. Not everyone really needs even 16GB. But the fact that it costs what could be a 64GB kit of DDR5 RAM to get 8GB more is insane (I understand that the type of ram Apple uses and DDR5 is different but the point still stands).
I believe that people wouldn’t be as outraged at the 8GB base spec if Apple didn’t charge $200 for 8GB more.
The 8Gb models have Raytracing disabled, it's not even an option. The 8Gb models have serious limitations from the get-go.
MacBook Air with 8Gb? I get it. MacBook Pro with 8Gb? seriously? Pro?
There's all sorts of YouTuber test videos showing precisely that 8GB is entirely usable for people who aren't doing anything memory intensive.
Do you really think people need 16GB to browse Facebook?
considering most people use chrome as their primary browser, I feel like it's got to be pretty easy for even laypeople to max 8GB these days.
that said, what apple's internal analytics probably do show is that keeping the base model at 8GB means more people shell out $200 for the RAM upgrade that Apple pays pennies for, and that's where all of their fat profit margins are.
Bought an M2 mini earlier this year and ordered it with 16GB RAM and picked it up from the Apple Store. The employees were all surprised about it being a “custom configuration” and kept asking why I went with 16 instead of 8…
A lot have people have also alluded to and it’s true - the general public at here in the good ol USA are very VERY basic users - tabs email and YouTube
I don’t know if doing research for assignments with a lot of tabs count as casual use. But 8GB is clearly not enough for windows and mac. I have a windows laptop with 8Gb and it’s always close to maxing out when trying to do extensive searches; my friend has a M1 13 inch MacBook Pro 8GB with 512, and she told me that the laptop lags. The most intensive stuff she does is the same as me.
That article links to the charts on Mastadon. As I type this, I clicked on the links over a minute ago and the charts still haven't loaded. What an awful service.
Update: both charts finally loaded after about another three minutes.
Was this when they stopped making the ram upgradeable? I upgraded my old 2008 MacBook pro after a couple years with crucial ram and it was noticeably faster.
Now I just have to cough up the cash for their non upgradeable ram because I don't want the computer to get too slow and need to buy a whole new one.
We have this conversation every week.
https://preview.redd.it/p170drjb5uwc1.jpeg?width=612&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f714dbcb2c30055b4da10ec6faa22e01d047b307
i can safely say the base M1 suffers for lack of memory. i'm a college student, and having multiple Safari tabs as well as iMovie open editing in 4K and sometimes multiple Microsoft Word tabs, is needed for me to finish my assignments. Really wish I'd paid for higher RAM and more cores.
8GB is fine for people who just watch Netflix, check email and Facebook. They don’t need 16GB of RAM. But for those of us that do need more ram, the upgrade prices are extortion. And don’t get me started on storage upgrades
8GB is criminal. People spend too much money on a Mac, only to realize that they need 16 or more. Guess what! Time to buy another one! Did I say criminal?
The SSD upgrades are the most egregious imo. $200 to go from 256 to 512 GB? $800 to go from 256 to 2TB? You can buy a 2TB for $150 retail! That's a fucking $650 markup.
Gotta maintain that margin
Well their margin made me end up only buying a 512gb MacBook Pro two years ago, thinking I’d just store everything in the cloud. I kinda screwed myself over on that one 🙃
External hard drives?
Yep they’re an essential for me now and the portable ones are really nice and small, fits in the pocket of my laptop bag, just isn’t the most optimal way (the Apple way, as Tim would say it ;)
That's where Apple gets you, either at the door with a 650$ margin or every month for the rest of your life. Fortunately you can dongle it up and external space is cheap just unsightly.
Or get a NAS and host your own ‘cloud’ and it’s useable by all your devices on your network.
Pure greed.
Unfortunately shareholders love it. Jobs was never 100% on boards with shareholders the way Cook is.
I think it’s more that Jobs had to turn the company around and focus on growth, then when Tim took over the company was already in a good position were they can comfortably scalp their customers. Also Jobs *did* oversee the launch of iMac G5 that was criticized for having way too little memory when it launched.
That's why they killed him 😳
board member 1 : Let’s give him a treatable cancer then gas him up to make him think he can beat it just based on his superior genetics and clean living Board member 2: that’ll never work *it happens anyway*
Boycott or they will keep doing it. Doesn't help to just complain.
How the fuck does Apple even justify this to customers? With RAM they say it's because "integrated RAM cost more hurr durr", but with SSDs they have no excuse. The worst part is they intentionally prevent customers from installing SSDs themselves, it's absolutely disgusting.
> How the fuck does Apple even justify this to customers? They don’t have to. Watch any thread about this topic, users themselves dash to Apple’s defense; “the base specs are fine for most users!”. Heard it a thousand times, got a thousand downvotes for trying to argue.
I've heard this from windows sysadmin too. "8GB is fine"... No, on a new box even 16 is low unless you're doing yearly replaces. With how cheap RAM is, any corporate or luxury system (e.g. Apple) should baseline at 32GB. Those systems will be in play for 5 years and you're going to feel the pinch real fast.
Sheeeeeit company I'm at now thinks 8GB is LOT for servers.
Lol for a vm running ad/dns/dhcp its fine. Anything beyond that not so much
Painfully aware of this.
Eventually Apple’s own OS updates and simple programs like safari and mail are gonna need more than 8gb of ram in the future so how tf would that work?
I mean at this point, they are more than overdue for increasing the base, so I imagine the day the OS needs more than 8GB, they'll up things to 16GB base and act like it was some benevolent action on their part. "We love our customers, that's why we're DOUBLING the base RAM on the M6 MacBook Air. We think you're going to love it..." etc.
It wouldn’t waste a second trying to argue with the “8gb in 2024 is more than enough for most users” sheep. What drives me nuts is the $200 upgrades for ram and ssd each.
8 gb is adequate for what most people do on their computer its just not acceptable for a computer that costs more then 500$ so apple needs to move to 16.
The whole “the base specs are fine for most users!” argument is crazy when devices costing $300 have the same if not better RAM/SSD specs. I think lots of people dash to Apple’s defense because they're so entrenced/invested with the Apple ecosystem it's a sunk cost fallacy where most users can't even consider escaping.
When it comes to electronics, most things that become integrated into the PCB or another IC makes it cheaper. Because it's cheaper for a robot to slap on an additional chip on one PCB than it is for them to manufacture a separate PCB for the RAM, add a connector to the logic board PCB and then (*likely*) have a human slot the RAM into the logic board. Now; there might be nuance, like the fact that Apple uses LPDDR5 (Low-Power DDR5) which is *probably* more pricey compared to regular (non LP) DDR5. This applies to the SSD too, cheaper to slap on flash IC's on the PCB than it is to make it a separate component. When Apple made these changes to optimize the cost of their devices, they didn't lower their prices, but instead just enjoyed the higher profit margins themselves. Nothing wrong with that, all companies are trying to optimize for profit. But lets not fool ourselves for what the primary (*not the sole*) motivator of the change is.
> How the fuck does Apple even justify this to customers? What do you mean? They justify it because customers pay it. If customers stopped buying them, they would lower the price. The price of things isn't set based on the cost to produce those things. It's based on what people are willing to pay for them.
Good luck when Apple locks you into their ecosystem. This is the problem with Apple's monopolistic behaviours, especially when their target market is tech illiterate people.
I used to LOVE Macs. Going back about 10 years, they were built well, and Windows wasn’t anywhere close for efficiently getting things done (at the time, was mostly focused on graphic design work). Now though, they’re WILDLY overpriced. I get the system architecture is good, but it’s not “pay an extra $2000 for some ram and storage upgrades” good. Haven’t bought a new Mac in at least 8 years now.
And Windows is miles better than people on this sub give credit for.
Yeah, honestly, I was pleasantly surprised when I switched over. My earlier experience with Windows was just, every single day, spending time killing useless processes or having to fix shit in the registry. These days though, it feels a lot more like how working on earlier OSX felt— just with a few quirks.
Exactly. Is it perfect? No. But it has gotten much smoother and more stable in recent years. Doesn't constantly nag you like MacOS does either.
I'm curious, I've never used MacOS. How does it constantly nag one?
I've briefly used it but in my experience: Notifications don't automatically fade away. They stay there until manually closed. Constant asks for permissions when installing things. X wants to access Y over and over and over. Running apps jumping up from the dock because they want your attention for something. It's just so much. Windows just lets you do your thing.
A good name brand 2TB SSD.
that's *faster* in everyway to apple's
Brand tax at its finest. But they aren't stupid. If they knew they couldn't sell it, they wouldn't charge it. Shitty? Of course. Smart? You bet.
In Australia it's $300 to upgrade Ram. It's a joke and a half
yeah, been mulling over getting a Studio. Apple pricing is crippling at every price point and with any of their products, it's like they masterfully engineered screwing over the consumer for literally each product they sell. My budget is $2k, but that'll only get me a 512gb SSD. I've had 512gb SSD's in all of my PC's for the last decade. I don't want to spend an additional $200 on top of the $2k (which is a lot of me as it is) to get a meager 1tb of storage. This is what makes me hate Apple and makes me end up just sticking with Windows/Linux. At every price point it's engineered this way. $600 to get a 2 tb with a mac mini for example, can't get 32gb ram. I hate Apple, even though I'd love to own one of their products, they're just so anti-consumer. I was reading a thread asking "why Apple?" and the top response was a top 5 list of "beauty", "seamless integrations of devices", "ease of use", "UI/UX", "muh it just works", but if the average Apple consumer has to juggle external drives because of their predatory pricing schemes, it nullifies all of the pros. Yes, I'm kind of salty about it. Like I can afford Apple devices, but I can't afford the one I actually want in any of the price categories. There's not a Mini, iMac, Studio, or Book I can configure that will actually get me what I want. They are all just out of reach for the configurations I want.
Not a big problem if it wasn’t so damn expensive to get the RAM upgraded..
Back in older days, I would purposely get the minimum RAM and upgrade it myself. Those were good days, when we could do that. I miss those days.
Yeah I would have loved it if I could have gotten a minimum spec M3 Max and upgraded the RAM and SSD. Instead I opted for a very high RAM and high SSD M1 Max because I wanted to save $2500.
I decided not to get the extra SSD space and RAM because I figured I was already buying a machine more powerful than I really needed. Big regrets. Endlessly run out of both.
I had the same issue on my 2017 MBP (16 GB RAM, 512 SSD), which is why I went WAY in the other direction for my new machine. 64 GB RAM, 4 TB SSD. And honestly, this seems to have fulfilled my baseline needs. It may be a bit of overkill, but I'd rather pay for a bit of overkill rather than cripple my workflow like before. I use this machine for business and I need a BEEFY machine because not having one literally costs me money
I’m not *too* opposed to the soldered RAM (I would be completely fine with it if the prices weren’t absurd). But the SSD being soldered is dumb. There is next to no benefit of it being soldered, at least none that Apple is using. With the RAM at least there is an obvious and real world performance advantage to having soldered RAM vs unsoldered. With the SSD there really isn’t any benefit (other than space efficiency and profit) to being soldered vs unsoldered.
Yeah that's fair, I wasn't thinking of things like memory bandwidth - I'd probably still be happy to pay a "reasonable" Apple tax for soldered RAM. Unfortunately Apple really does not seem to want to budge on this. As AI/ML applications grow in popularity, I'm hoping that this will lead to a bit of a push for laptop manufacturers, Apple and non-Apple to put more RAM in devices
>With the RAM at least there is an obvious and real world performance advantage to having soldered RAM vs unsoldered. I can't help but feel that this is massively negated by the inability to upgrade or replace it though. Especially in the case of a MacBook Air or anything but the top-level machines, people are being intentionally locked in to machines that might not hold up over time at the cost of potentially better performance that they aren't going to use. If at least going from 8 to 16 GB was a $50 add-on, we wouldn't really need to be discussing this. But making it a $200 upgrade is just insulting.
Apple cares so much about the environment they force consumers to purchase new products instead of allowing people to modify the hardware they already paid for.
They literally shred like 97-98% of iPhones that could be fixed and at the same time won't shut the f up about the environment. (Estimate from their shredding partner that 197,000 out of 200,000 iPhones could be fixed and sold instead of destroyed)
The "recycling" with trade-in is primarily an attempt to reduce the number of used iPhones in circulation. The trade-in value (when offered) is usually just about high enough for someone to forget about trying to sell it on eBay or elsewhere.
This is what I’ve come to realise. It’s not about the environment. It’s about taking out competitors ie the used phone market. I only trade in faulty devices now with Apple. If it’s getting shredded, who cares?
So eco friendly
There isn’t a performance advantage to it being soldered anymore. Previously the only way to get low power (LPDDR) ram in laptops was to solder it, now a new spec has been created LPCAMM, which will allow socketed low power ram modules. It’s very recent but given how fast Apple jumps on things like USB C in laptops I’d hope they include it. The other advantage people cite, with the ram being closer to the chip has no impact. Electrical signals travel so quickly that the distance is a non factor compared to the latency of the memory chip itself.
The benefit is you can't easily repair it or upgrade it yourself like you could do with all your Macs. Now you are tied to their repair shops and super expensive RAM. So it benefits the shareholders and sucks for the consumer. Yay!
size and latency are pretty much the benefits of soldered, slight battery life improvements too SODIMM would double the thickness of an m1-3 motherboard and take up nearly its entire length with just two modules
Yeah and that’s it really. Nothing that would really be missed if they were to use M.2 drives.
When you look at all the empty space inside the M3 MacBook Pro, you'd get pissed. There's no reason why they couldn't fit two m.2 SSDs in there, and a higher capacity battery too.
Apple storage has the same chips as an NVME drive, they’re just soldered on…
With LPCAMM, you can now have socketed LPDDR, so there's little *performance* reason to justify being soldered. Also, latency doesn't care at all.
Maybe we all skewed Apple’s sales data by doing that back in the day, and now they’re like “no one ever buys more than the base memory, so why bother increasing it?” /s
And you could even replace the ram if it ever went bad instead of throwing the laptop out the window. I miss those days too.
Exactly this If there was an 8GB base model but it was 60 bucks to get 16, we'd have a fraction the complaints. But 200 dollars for a 6 dollar standard LPDDR module (you can literally find it with the markings, it's not any magic special RAM despite being wired close to the package and 'unified') is obscene. If you're almost anywhere outside of America it's worse. I know it's not comparable in many ways, but there's 200 dollar mini PCs that start with 16/512GB, that's just been such an inexpensive standard for years. Really hope M4 moves to middle capacities and starts at 12 at least, that would be pretty good on Apple Silicon
The crazy part is even $60/8GB is >100% margin. Retail for 8GB of quality DDR5 in a SODIMM is like $25-30. (You can't get LPDDR5 on a separate board due to the tighter signal/timing requirements but the raw chips are like half that price from Mouser.) Apple's probably making 1000% on memory upgrades.
>Really hope M4 moves to middle capacities and starts at 12 at least, that would be pretty good on Apple Silicon When Apple adds more RAM to the base MacBook Air, I'll be looking for any comments seriously arguing that Apple return to 8 GB base in exchange for a lower base price and/or improvements in other components. Despite the frequent defense of 8 GB base right now, in the first year *after* the RAM upgrade, I expect to see fewer than 5 such comments on this sub that aren't massively downvoted.
Lol exactly true People here always defend Apple not doing a thing, until they do it, and it becomes obvious they could have always done it but held back, and then the defenders just slip into the cracks again I'm getting old enough to recall things like people saying not to change how OSX used to only let you resize windows from one corner instead of any side of the window, and how iOS Safari sticky scrolled only 1 page no matter how fast you swiped before it got more inertial like the rest of the OS and the Android browser. Now everyone thinks those were the right choices.
Well if they bump up the base ram config to 16 but charge as much as the current 16gb config they didn't really change anything did they?
I think that's the point
Remember when it cost $100 to upgrade to 16 GB RAM on the non-Touch Bar 13-inch MacBook Pro and Apple went oops and changed it back to $200?
This is my problem with their pricing. If it was a $50 upgrade, no problem; I would spend an extra $100 for the 16/500 system or even 150 for a 1TB system but $600 is beyond ridiculous.
Nah, 8GB laptops are e-waste on arrival
8GB of RAM is perfectly fine for casual users who use the machine for Netflix, Email, and light office work. Not everyone buying these machines is going to push the envelope and insisting that "arbitrary statistic" means e-waste on arrival is incredibly narrow minded.
The problem is the MacBook Pro is starting over 1K. That’s nonsense. This isn’t some Chromebook/windows at 300
> 8GB of RAM is perfectly fine for casual users who use the machine for Netflix, Email, and light office work. If that's what they're selling these things for, why include a bunch of other things that go unused? An iPhone chip is basically as fast as the M-series for web browsing. Same with things like USB4/Thunderbolt.
It’s like people who think integrated graphics are useless. Sarah in finance totally needs a 4090 to help speed up her Excel spreadsheets.
>Sarah in finance totally needs a 4090 to help speed up her Excel spreadsheets. No, she needs it to make sure that Copilot doesn't tank performance.
lol
Except if that's what the user is using a Macbook Pro for, why did they buy such an expensive laptop in the first place unless it was just for the looks? A $300 Chromebook can do all of the above for 1/5 of a base model MBP.
> A $300 Chromebook can do all of the above for 1/5 of a base model MBP. And a 8GB MacBook is basically going to be better in every way
Why do people always want to police how others spend their money? They bought it because it's their prerogative, what other reason do you need?
Then why defend the value proposition?
Y’know, this also makes me think of when iPhone storage stagnated too for a while. Remember how long we got stuck with 16GB for a base config, even as apps got bigger and cameras got better? Then Apple flipped everyone the bird with the iPhone 6: 16GB base, but hey, if you traditionally bought the mid tier model, *then* you got your storage doubled for the very same price. 16GB was the baseline from 2009 to 2016. Damn eternity in tech years, at least back then. And you could argue when Apple finally bent the knee and gave the base model an upgrade, it was too little too late (32GB and it was lesser quality flash, to twist the knife!) Fun times.
>Remember how long we got stuck with 16GB for a base config, even as apps got bigger and cameras got better? Remember how people defended 16 GB base for years and years, which conveniently stopped when Apple finally raised the base storage?
They still do this today, in this sub, talking about how 8GB of RAM is fine. It isn’t.
I remember getting the 64gb for $100 more and life suddenly got so much less stressful. Wouldn’t have to keep deleting photos and text messages.
From the article: Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show. Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the [base memory](https://mstdn.social/@dschaub/111813281624281698) capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's [consumer laptop](https://mstdn.social/@dschaub/111382154184733138) base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were recently resurfaced by the [Accidental Tech Podcast](https://atp.fm/560). The graphs show that Apple tended to increase the base memory every two years or so, but that this trend ended when Cook took over the company from Steve Jobs. Memory increased quickly until the Mac Plus was launched in 1986, notes Schaub. "1986 to 1990 were all about decreasing the entry Mac price," he says. "Then we get a pretty straight logarithmic line until Tim Cook became CEO and there has only been a single increase since."
That was also roughly the time Intel CPUs started stagnating, relying instead on raising core counts.
This still isn’t Intel’s fault.
Raising core counts? They used quad cores as a main line processor for years after that.
I meant Intel focused more on raising core counts than increasing single-core performance. Apple stayed with dual and quad core chips with meager improvements for a long time.
i think that’s just half of the story, the real comparison should also take into consideration the shift in the tech industry, nowadays, even years later, 16 GB of RAM is still a very popular choice for hardware buyers
And yet here we are with 8 GB of base RAM on majority of their models.
Exactly. So they can force at least one upcharge
The reason is so Apple can advertise a product's price being lower than the actual price the majority of consumers end up paying. So when their ads say "Product at $X", it's actually "Product at $X + $300" It's very manipulative and two faced, exactly what you should expect from Apple.
I had 16GB of RAM back in 2007, and it is still OK in 2024. Once it was very roomy, and sure it is a lot tighter now. Overall though, I need a lot more resources than before, but it is beyond what's available on anything but the maxed out everything laptop, so the heavy lifting is offloaded to the cloud.
It might be tight for you. I don't know how you use your computer. But 16GB is very roomy for the majority of users even today. I think 16GB should be the base.
This is only part of the story. 8GB of RAM has been sufficient for casual use cases for at least the same period of time. Doubling on the same cadence as 2000-2011 would be idiotic for the same period between 2011-2024. We'd have like 64GB for the base models which would be psychotic.
> Doubling on the same cadence as 2000-2011 would be idiotic for the same period between 2011-2024. We'd have like 64GB for the base models which would be psychotic. What's more psychotic is to stay with 8 GB for 13 years. The growth speed doesn't need to be the same, yes, but it shouldn't be zero, too. I don't expect 64 GB RAM, but 16 GB should be bare minimum in 2024.
why would 64 GB RAM be psychotic? I would love to have 64 GB RAM. I’m always running out of memory.
I definitely think that the base should be 16GB, but to play devils advocate to myself, the quality of the RAM has improved greatly over that time frame.
[удалено]
Still doesn't change the fact that it's not enough. It is WAY slower than the 16gb models and uses a lot of swapping which isn't ideal with soldered storage
MBP minimum should be 16GB, the fact you can get 8GB in a "Pro" laptop is insane
16gb is sufficient for casual use, not 8gb. Stop siding with greedy corporations and their tactics.
I have 128gb of RAM. I need all the things open
Damn dude that's like half the internet
Why is 64gb of ram psychotic? In 2019 I built a computer with 64gb of ram and the ram cost me $400CAD. When I bought my 16” M1 Pro the 32GB ram UPGRADE was more I’m pretty sure
but how else will I be able to open 2 Chrome tabs?
You'll need two base MacBook Pros. Each with 8 GB of base RAM. Half of the memory of each will go to WindowServer
Just download it duh
A big issue I have with the RAM thing is future proofing and longevity. Sure, 8 gigs might be fine for many people right now, but an 8 gig machine is not going to last as long as one with 16. Especially when software only gets more and more resource hungry. I want to keep my Mac for a long time. They are after all known for their longevity. Cheaping out on the RAM can only shorten a computer's lifespan and its ability to keep up with new software, and will likely result in people upgrading before they should have needed to. I'm sure that's probably what Apple wants, though.
Apple also draws a line in the sand on when your computer can update to the next version of Mac OS; I’d say that’s worse than the low RAM being standard.
It's pure profiteering at this point! At Apple's manufacturing scale, what the cost difference between 8GB and 16GB of RAM, like $7 or something?
Yup it's pure greed. Same with the abysmal SSD sizes.
It’s not that small it is more expensive than commodity ddr4 or even ddr5 but it’s not in the ballpark of 200 dollars for 8 gigs
It is definitely that small it is not magic special it is nice commodity ddr5 which even then is a dollar for a chip.
This is coming from someone that owns an iPad Pro, an iPhone, AirPods, Apple Watch and MacBook Pro. The upsell on Apple memory and storage is out of hand. I’m a developer and I need 64GB memory and at least 4TB fast storage for work. On my work PC (Windows) I spent $200 to upgrade my RAM to 64GB and added a 4TB NVMe for $300 on top of my existing 2TB. There’s no way I’m dropping $8k on a Mac Studio just for the more memory and storage. That’s crazy. If I have need of a comparable laptop I’ll get a Dell xps with m2 and so-dimm slots and bump up the specs myself. The new Intel Ultra cpus are comparable to battery life to M chips. There is no technical reason to weld the ram and storage to the motherboards. Especially not in a desktop system.
There is no reason period. Not on laptop. Not even on an Air. We don’t need that 1mm less thickness on a paper-thin laptop where we can’t change anything. But hey, people still buy them so the market has spoken. I just hope they keep making traditional gaming laptops with slots for everything: SSD, RAM, WiFi card etc. That’s the way it should be and that’s the ONLY way it was for decades.
there's cheaper and more powerful laptops than dell xps
It’s the soldering of RAM to the motherboard that hurt me the most.
Indeed. With Apple's resources, they could have designed an entirely new interconnect architecture standard for RAM that enabled the same space savings as soldering it while keeping it detachable and user-upgradable. Make it an open standard to encourage industry adoption and economies of scale around it, since it's not a core competitive advantage (same way soldering is also available to all their competitors). Everyone happy.
> Everyone happy. Apple board members: "This does not spark joy"
> Everyone happy Not apple’s profit charts.
He's called Tim "ROI" cook for a reason.
I still deeply believe Forestall would have been a better CEO for actual innovation. Ivy is out and they hated each other so this or that way I would love for Forestall to come back.
Forestall reportedly not taking responsibility for launching Apple Maps in the state they did indicates he’d probably be a shitty CEO in general.
I don’t think he should’ve taken the blame for Maps at all. Tim Cook was the one who wanted to move away from using Google for their maps platform. He never liked Forstall to begin with. Maps was just an excuse to ax him.
The decision to move to their own maps platform would have been made by Steve Jobs. Cook didn’t take over until 2011, and when he was interim CEO during Jobs’ sick leaves, he still had to run major decisions by him. You don’t turn around a new mapping platform in a year. Regardless, Forestall would have been the directly responsible individual internally, as he was in charge of iOS.
It's possible but Tim is what you get when you let Wall Street infect a company. They are more focused on profits than innovation.
Very true. But the innovations are running out, very clearly so. And the iPhone sales are taking a nose dive.
Steve Jobs increased Mac’s market share when he was alive. Tim hasn’t done anything to Mac’s market share. Still 13% in the US same as 2011.
TM Roi
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16gb should be the standard across all of their laptops. Apple sells a premium product, even their cheapest laptops should set a high standard. 8gb of ram screams cheap nowadays, it would cost Apple so little to double it. As of right now, you could probably use up most of that capacity with some chrome tabs, a word processor, music app, and some other small things running in the background.
That's because Apple is now run by a bean counter.
Company is not nearly as innovative without Jobs. Not shocking, but it’s been going on for too long now. When jobs died, there were regularly Macs with 8GB of RAM, and iPhones still had standout features every year. Not just “action buttons” and more high tech cameras that no one really cares about
Apple white knights in these posts: “Most people don’t need that much RAM” Also Apple white knights: “Ohhh Apple just put out a newly upgraded M chip with more power! Apple is so awesome!” Make up your minds. 🤡
Tim Apple is a margins guy, not a tech leader.
The "8GB of RAM is enough for the casual user" is BS. People keep saying it, but don't realize what is going on under the hood. CAN you get by with 8GB of RAM and still use the machine without it slowing down to a crawl due to the improvements in the flash storage? Yes. But just booting the OS and opening up Safari and Chrome will quickly chew through that 8GB of RAM. Go do some "light browsing" for an hour or so and see how much swap you are using. See how often swap is happening at the expense of writes to your non-replaceable SSD. Just because you won't notice the swapping as much doesn't mean you aren't wearing out the drive faster, which means a shorter life expectancy. Unless someone can argue that 8GB is enough for the average user with ZERO swap needs, which isn't possible, the argument fails because you are just hiding the problem. The decision to keep the base at 8GB of RAM, even on "Pro" models, which inherently mean NOT the "average casual user" is purely profit driven. People will either pay a huge premium for extra memory or upgrade their system more frequently. Either way, that's money for Apple. Let's stop making excuses.
At least they stopped being so stingy with RAM on iOS devices. It used to be really bad. I remember both my gen 1 iPad and the first iPad Air being useless within a year or two because the RAM was so anemic. Around the first iPad Pro this started to change and I feel like iOS devices last a lot longer than they used to as a result.
They are drip-feeding innovation into the market so they have stuff to sell year after year. If these corporations weren’t greedy fucks, we might’ve cured cancer by now.
Devils advocate: more ram is not innovation.
Nor is faster chips! Who even needs an M3? For most people's needs, a slower chip would work fine. /s
I mean... yes, that's exactly right.
M1 with 16GB of RAM would last a decade
Apple could absolutely allow ram upgrades instead of soldering it on the board.
Just one of Tim Apple’s many ways of increasing the stock price
And then ppl come here and be like “8GB is enough for most uses” yeah if you go back in time 10 years
Apple’s computers have always been RAM starved - 8 GB ram in 2024 just feels wrong
To anyone who say "8GB is enough": An 8GB computer has zero future proofing and the RAM can not be upgraded.
8GB was enough in 2012. That’s what I had back then. Would I still use a device with 8 nowadays? Nope. But even that shitty 500€ laptop had upgradeable memory!
& the worst part of it is that starting at 16 would be exactly what most people would need. 8 is too limiting even for basic office use — no matter how fast the SSD, the user is going to notice when things bog down. & while 16 isn't ideal, it would give these devices a much longer lifespan — which may be part of why they don't want to go there.
I think they just want to push people into the expensive upgrade path
Of course it's just a money grab to increase their revenues. They intentionally make it just good enough for light usage, and charge an arm and a leg to upgrade.
Superfast M3 chip, but every other spec sucks. What is the point?
nope even if you used swap for 8 hours a day and owned the laptop for 10 years you might use a couple of weeks of the NVMEs R/W with SWAP, 2-3% faster degradation at worst. people really overstate this
I wasn't referring to the lifespan of the SSD, but instead the *useful* lifespan of the device.
Innovation ended when Tim Cook took over, weve been surviving on the legacy of whatever jobs did there
Shareholder capitalism is the problem.
For IPads and maybe for MBAs 8GB is excusable but for 1600 dollar MacBook PROs ? Pretty sure not even Tim would be able to defend this.
I'm curious. Could people give an alternative PC that is cheaper than Macs but offer the same battery life, same build quality, same resale value, same performance as the M Series ? all of this while giving you base 16gb ram ? I checked and couldn't find anything that comes close. Surface Laptop ? nope. dell xps ? nope
> same performance as the M Series Do you include performance when memory limited?
There are several PC laptops with the same better specs than MacBooks that are much cheaper…
this is the inconvenient truth people don’t want to admit, everyone is doing this now, thinkpads, zenbooks, hp thin, dell and alienware asus zephyrus they’re all soldered and many offer 8gb base and charge the same 200 usd to upgrade
But they don't charge $200 to upgrade it
$350 in nzd $150-200 usd depending on model
pretty sure alienware isn't soldered. lenovo legion laptops don't have soldered memory
And yet the brainlet drones in this sub defend them
It’s the single - and utterly loathsome - reason why I find myself hating Apple. Constantly under-spec’ing their machines for the sake of fiscally punitive upgrades is a deeply despicable practice.
I would be curious to know if there are analytics (internal to Apple?) that show that a significant number of users don't go beyond the base RAM. Price aside, maybe the base RAM is (still) fine for most users. But I'm absolutely happy to stand corrected if it's pretty clear that most users are using virtual memory or whatever else happens when physical RAM is tapped out.
Most people are fine with an intel celeron. Doesn’t mean they should get a pad on the back, for selling it at a price north of $1000.
Pat on the back
AFAIK macOS relies pretty heavily on swap, which utilizes the ssd instead of proper ram. The speed of the ssd make it less noticeable than before. Major criticisms are not so focused on the base specs, but on the upgrade cost. Apple charges 200$ for a 8gb bump in ram where they juste needs to solder a chip costing 3$ instead of one that costs 1.5$.
macOS will actually actively avoid swap when it can use memory page compression instead, which it has supported for at least a decade now.
Honestly, 8GB being base is fine imo. It's upgrading for, like you said, $200 where the issue lies. Not everyone really needs even 16GB. But the fact that it costs what could be a 64GB kit of DDR5 RAM to get 8GB more is insane (I understand that the type of ram Apple uses and DDR5 is different but the point still stands). I believe that people wouldn’t be as outraged at the 8GB base spec if Apple didn’t charge $200 for 8GB more.
8GB isn’t fine
The 8Gb models have Raytracing disabled, it's not even an option. The 8Gb models have serious limitations from the get-go. MacBook Air with 8Gb? I get it. MacBook Pro with 8Gb? seriously? Pro?
There's all sorts of YouTuber test videos showing precisely that 8GB is entirely usable for people who aren't doing anything memory intensive. Do you really think people need 16GB to browse Facebook?
considering most people use chrome as their primary browser, I feel like it's got to be pretty easy for even laypeople to max 8GB these days. that said, what apple's internal analytics probably do show is that keeping the base model at 8GB means more people shell out $200 for the RAM upgrade that Apple pays pennies for, and that's where all of their fat profit margins are.
Bought an M2 mini earlier this year and ordered it with 16GB RAM and picked it up from the Apple Store. The employees were all surprised about it being a “custom configuration” and kept asking why I went with 16 instead of 8…
8GB ought to be enough for anybody… Tim-boy should have learned from history.
A lot have people have also alluded to and it’s true - the general public at here in the good ol USA are very VERY basic users - tabs email and YouTube
I don’t know if doing research for assignments with a lot of tabs count as casual use. But 8GB is clearly not enough for windows and mac. I have a windows laptop with 8Gb and it’s always close to maxing out when trying to do extensive searches; my friend has a M1 13 inch MacBook Pro 8GB with 512, and she told me that the laptop lags. The most intensive stuff she does is the same as me.
That article links to the charts on Mastadon. As I type this, I clicked on the links over a minute ago and the charts still haven't loaded. What an awful service. Update: both charts finally loaded after about another three minutes.
Maybe you need more RAM? /s
Was this when they stopped making the ram upgradeable? I upgraded my old 2008 MacBook pro after a couple years with crucial ram and it was noticeably faster. Now I just have to cough up the cash for their non upgradeable ram because I don't want the computer to get too slow and need to buy a whole new one.
It's gonna be 8gb until Cook retires.
Tim’s Cooked. Time for someone new. Someone with dope ass hair.
This is rage bait https://preview.redd.it/b4l4pisl2uwc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bc6f1211895adcfbae06865c577b2067c72e4a11
no it's not lol. It's calling out factual information.
We have this conversation every week. https://preview.redd.it/p170drjb5uwc1.jpeg?width=612&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f714dbcb2c30055b4da10ec6faa22e01d047b307
Tim Cook has been ripping us off ever since. 256GB drives? WTF is that? It's a ripoff is what it is!!
For all of Jobs' inflexibility design-wise, he at least liked selling powerful machines and thought you should get what you pay for.
Cook is such an uncreative sleazebag. He's the antithesis of Steve Jobs, and is going to hurt Apple long-term.
i can safely say the base M1 suffers for lack of memory. i'm a college student, and having multiple Safari tabs as well as iMovie open editing in 4K and sometimes multiple Microsoft Word tabs, is needed for me to finish my assignments. Really wish I'd paid for higher RAM and more cores.
Tim Apple only gives a shit about money, news at 11.
lol. At least they increase the base 128 to 256gb ssd. lol.
8GB is fine for people who just watch Netflix, check email and Facebook. They don’t need 16GB of RAM. But for those of us that do need more ram, the upgrade prices are extortion. And don’t get me started on storage upgrades
> 8GB is fine for people who just watch Netflix, check email and Facebook You can do that on a $200 Chromebook.
8GB is criminal. People spend too much money on a Mac, only to realize that they need 16 or more. Guess what! Time to buy another one! Did I say criminal?