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Introducing the next generation of Mac

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Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#931

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I have Firefox, Slack, MS Team, MS Word, MS Excel, and Onenote opened. The world's most boring office worker use case. I know it's a deceptive metric but Task Manager shows 12.5GB "In Use". 16.2 Committed. Each Firefox tab has between 250mb and 1g "Memory (Active Working Area)". HUUUUUGeeeee long tail of 100MB trailing down to 20MB services and things. Adobe has half a dozen at all times, etc etc etc. I'm game to use…

Yes, largely because two of those are (bad) Electron apps that eat way more memory than they have any right to.

Oh, I don't disagree even remotely! We can have a nice thread about optimized apps and 4k demos :)

But in context of expectations in the $1k laptop market, my point was that perfectly normal usage can grow to benefit from over 8GB of RAM these days, whatever the background reasons may be.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#932

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"How do we get these companies to stop behaving like this?" "Vote with your wallet!" "Not like that!!"

Buying and returning is just a petty, wasteful thing to do.

and degrating Personal Computer into machine under control of someone else, attacking rights of the person and stripping people from privacy completely is not a wasteful thing to do? I mean, it's a garbage by defintion and sure, it takes time for people to understand this, but this machine is useless by design for freedom respecting society, it's not a waste? it's a huge waste of resources I would say. Returning product doesn't add to this too much of waste, it simply tells what it is.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#933

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Who downvoted your comment and why ? This is a good comment and good strategy to teach them a lesson. Without some efforts those companies would not recall moral values. Richard Stallman was warning us about this development long ago and he was right. Cripled hardware is useless for hacking mind.

Because it’s just creating e-waste, and if you do it enough they’ll stop selling you things.

This is intended. They should stop selling things that attack privacy and freedom of a person, or this concept is not your priority and you are ok to have computer controlled COMPLETELY by someone else, which means ZERO privacy?

PS: Well, this one is downvoted too. Looks like some lost even a sense of what PERSONAL computer means.

OK. Keep downvoting! it's a good strategy to silence someone when there are no valid arguments.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#934
post #912

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Can’t find anything in both documents which allows booting of non Apple signed Software. The only thing I See there is something like SecureBoot on PCs, where Apple would need to sign your boot loader in order to be able to boot it.

--permissive-security is the setting that you want. You are then able to enroll hashes of unsigned kernels with kmutil.

Kmutil is only there to load kernel extensions? Or did that change with Big Sur?

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#935
post #927
post #435

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Even in Bootcamp Apple did not bother to expose all hardware to Windows . The touchpad is reported as a mouse with a scroll wheel, no option to enable hardware encryption or to use Touch ID to unlock.

Why would you expect Touch ID to work on a windows machine? As far as I know it’s only available on Apple OSes.

Windows supports various bio-metric logins and provides rather generic API. Some manufacturers use that to provide login based on veins in a finger, not fingerprints. Apple could have implemented those API.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#936

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incidentally, I place the “blame” for the poor uptake of the Touch Bar at Apple’s feet. They relied on uninterested developers to make it useful, and didn't but the necessary tools in the hands of users to make it useful themselves. In five years, they’ve done nothing to expand its capabilities since the debut. Everything cool I can do with the Touch Bar is thanks to a third-party tool, BetterTouchTool. Also enables…

I really have no clue what apple is thinking with regards to the touchbar. Why should any developer spend time developing sorely lacking features for the touch bar, when they just released the most popular mac without one? The only way I can make sense of the decision to release the air without a touch bar, is that it must be really expensive to manufacture and they were struggling to hit the $1000 price point. As a…

Automator, or IOS Shortcuts, that’s exactly the kind of thinking the Touch Bar needs.

Add that, plus the ability to map any menu command to a Touch Bar button, and it would be vastly more useful.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#937

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oh yeah? do you mean the 16"? Oh yeah looks like it. That's too big for me. Odd, 13" with two ports or 16" with 4.

You know what, my mistake actually, but the tone seems unnecessarily derisive. I was looking at the 13" and scrolled all the way down to see 4 thunderbolt ports, but that's on the "2.0GHz Intel Core i5 Quad-Core Processor with Intel Iris Plus Graphics", so not the M1 processor. I guess that shouldn't be too surprising that they're still selling it, but I'll return to being peeved about the regression to 2 ports.

My tone seemed derisive? Sorry, it was not intended! It is a bit confusing to me (apparently not just me!), just trying to figure out what's going on!

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#938
post #883
post #880

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Uhm. Adding 16GB RAM instead of 8GB costs almost nothing and which by far and large, is useful to all users. The only reason why they ship 8 GBs is because they want to sell you upgrades, similar to why Apple products come with miniscule SSD hard drives. Certainly, only professionals would need something like 512GBs right?

Almost nothing if you buy a PC. Look at the markups for a RAM upgrade in Macs, it’s gut wrenchingly greedy.

It's the same RAM, as long as you have one of the few models that is still upgradeable at all.

The fact that so many laptops have gone to soldered-in RAM is an entirely different problem, those are all ripoffs no matter what.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#939
post #921
post #824

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It's worth noting that they are charging $200 for the 8GB memory upgrade. The spot price for 16GB of LPDDR4 looks like it's currently ~$8 per DRAMexchange: https://www.dramexchange.com/ They're also charging $200 for a 256GB storage upgrade - spot price of 3D TLC is $3/256Gb ($24 for 256GB) - you can currently buy a 256GB NVMe SSD (full stick with controller) at retail for <$30 as well.

That is like saying the materials the baker needs to bake bread cost 5¢. Why doesn’t the baker price his bread at 5¢?

That might be a somewhat relevant analogy if you had a choice to go somewhere else to buy bread elsewhere, but since both memory and storage are now soldered, you are forced to upgrade for the lifetime of the product at purchase. The relevance on the parts pricing here is to point out that Apple is being extremely abusive in their pricing to their customers.

Many laptops now have soldered RAM, but other vendors have not chosen to do what Apple has done. In HP's premium laptop (Spectre x360 13t), adding 8GB of RAM is a +$70 option. For reference, an 8GB DDR4 SODIMM at retail pricing is about $30.

Also, AFAIK, no other major laptop or mini-desktop manufacturer uses soldered storage like Apple does, so in this case, the retail cost for storage is even more relevant.

These are commodity parts, so there's not any R&D to recoup - this is just profiteering on Apple's part. Especially for the Mac Mini, where there's not the same space constraints, the lack of storage upgradability is also a rather egregious form of forced obsolescence. Fine from a business perspective, but hypocritical for a company that claims to care about the environment.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#940

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I really don't get it. How much difference could 8 to 16gb be in terms of price? Is Apple really doing this to save 20$ per machine? Even if you somehow could argue that 8 is all you need now, what about in few years? No one should ever buy this device.

$20 at the volume they sell does add up. But I think a more important factor is future sales. They will likely sell more laptops as these 8GB owners upgrade earlier (in 2-3 years) as the OS and apps continue to bloat. So on one side they save $20 per laptop and they likely sell more laptops.

> $20 at the volume they sell does add up.

So charge $50 more per laptop and make $30 more profit while not producing 8 GB junk that'll be e-waste in a few years because that's barely enough RAM to run an average browser session anymore.

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