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Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

macworld.com

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Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#201

Post by spaceman_2020 »

ianai wrote: post #181

I think the best reaction would be shame. Just a big round of shame for a trillion dollar company being so greedy to cripple their top equipment. Tech’s stagnated for over a decade and largely because of greed and at the expense of innovation. Prove me wrong? Do something genuinely new, like a mass produced cpu on germanium. Make a modern OS that’s a successor to unix-and plan9. Edit-Or at least a moddable iphone tha…

I’m in the market for a new Macbook. Should I get the M2 instead of the M3? The base M2 had 16GB RAM

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#202

Post by sbuk »

deafpolygon wrote: post #140
aurareturn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what happens when an SSD reaches the write limit. It'll simply not let you write more data and becomes read only.

I have personally experienced this issue. It just gets very slow before slowly dying outright.

What on earth are you doing to make that happen? Either you’re use case is thrashing the SSD, you have a faulty part or you’re exaggerating.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#203

Post by bigstrat2003 »

aurareturn wrote: post #50
shmde wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple geeks eating up and justifying anything and everything that apple throws at them is hilarious to see. It takes 50-60$ for a 8GB stick and people justifying that 200$ markup because Apple needs to make profit too. Is it Stockholm syndrome I dont know.

It probably costs Apple way less than $50-$60 for 8GB. The margins must be very high. I understand the business aspect of this for Apple. I'm not mad at them. I'll pay $200 to upgrade the RAM so that I can keep using macOS and have a well-built laptop that makes no noise. Apple knows this. It's just good business in my opinion. But I guess to you, I'm an Apple geek who has Stockholm syndrome.

Well... yeah, your behavior is that of someone who has Stockholm syndrome. I'm not saying this to be hostile, but there's a world of difference between "I accept this because it's the best option for me despite the drawbacks" and "I don't mind getting price gouged because the big tech company has to make money somehow". We all make business decisions that aren't ideal (because we have to), but you don't need to lick the company boot while you're at it.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#204

Post by throwaway290 »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #171

How is giving people more options a bad thing? If somebody does want a larger screen and two monitor setup but will only ever be using it for light web, the 8GB machine is probably perfect for them. And thinking "you shouldn't be paying extra" is just bias. Just select the configuration you need, look how much it costs and figure if this is what you want to pay. You are not paying anything extra. They clearly tell yo…

Agreed. News at 11: cheapest model of [insert product here] only has [insert low spec here] which is not enough for anything but most trivial uses. Therefore [insert brand here] is bad? How about "do a few minutes of research and buy what fits your requirements"? Or even "buy and return if it's not enough for your requirements"?

And as for non-replaceable RAM, that's the same thing as with battery or SSD or whatever else-- no one makes a fuss about it because no one wants to lug around large heavy laptops. Non-replaceable components is what made these super small and light and blazing fast if you pay for specced up versions.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#205

Post by sbuk »

dns_snek wrote: post #148
aurareturn wrote: post #8

8GB is still good enough for office workers and students. Heck, I used an M1 8GB Air for 1 year as a dev. Although I wish I had more RAM, it still served me well. For $899 (on sale sometimes), the 8GB M2 Air is absolutely a steal. The screen quality, thinness, battery life, build quality, SoC, quietness, coolness, metal enclosure, touchpad, and speakers are simply unmatched by anything in the PC world at that price -…

> On a slightly related note: $/GB for RAM hit a wall starting in 2011 Now that's just disingenuous, it's a log scale and it shows that memory prices fell 40% from 2012 to 2022. Apple charges $200 to upgrade M1 Macbook Air from 8GB to 16GB. A comparable 8GB stick of DDR4-3600 costs $25 retail.

You’re comparing apples to oranges. The RAM is (or extremely close to being) part of the package. A stick of RAM is a commodity part. The M-series package isn’t.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#206

Post by underbluewaters »

Having these amounts of RAM on the base models hurt walk-in retail customers as well. Recently I had a computer die and luckily my boss found some extra funds in our budget that needed to be spent ASAP. I had an opportune moment to get a machine that day, but only if I could walk into the Apple Store and get it off the shelf. I settled for less RAM than I would have liked because a "custom order" would have taken weeks to arrive.

I have no problem with low-memory being an option, but why stock only meager amounts of RAM on the models sold in the store?

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#207

Post by actionfromafar »

Hot take:

What would happen if Macs with twice the memory were more common? There’s always an Electron or whatever ready to eat that extra RAM.

Apple is probably doing the low end PC users a favour here, by proxy.

(Not that Apple cares in the slightest, it’s a side effect.)

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#208

Post by willi59549879 »

ho_schi wrote: post #163

8GB RAM would be enough. If not companies searched and found a successor for Flash. Is is Electron! It wastes memory, it is slow, it doesn’t integrate to Linux, Windows and MacOS and it allows to deploy bloated JavaScript locally. But it is cheap for them! Basically the target of companies is avoiding to employ programmers for native applications. These people cost money. And optimization cost money. So they opt to w…

electron is quite heavy, but still it will be fine with a few hundred of ram. Electron enabled many people to write cross platform applications with relative ease and now there are projects like tauri that want to achieve that with using less resources.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#209

Post by sbuk »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #203
aurareturn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably costs Apple way less than $50-$60 for 8GB. The margins must be very high. I understand the business aspect of this for Apple. I'm not mad at them. I'll pay $200 to upgrade the RAM so that I can keep using macOS and have a well-built laptop that makes no noise. Apple knows this. It's just good business in my opinion. But I guess to you, I'm an Apple geek who has Stockholm syndrome.

Well... yeah, your behavior is that of someone who has Stockholm syndrome. I'm not saying this to be hostile, but there's a world of difference between "I accept this because it's the best option for me despite the drawbacks" and "I don't mind getting price gouged because the big tech company has to make money somehow". We all make business decisions that aren't ideal (because we have to), but you don't need to lick…

So disagreeing with someone else’s behaviour when choosing their tech means they have Stockholm syndrome? No, you may not think you’re being hostile, but you are.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#210

Post by CoolGuySteve »

coldtea wrote: post #99
shmde wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple geeks eating up and justifying anything and everything that apple throws at them is hilarious to see. It takes 50-60$ for a 8GB stick and people justifying that 200$ markup because Apple needs to make profit too. Is it Stockholm syndrome I dont know.

Well, on the other hand, they got AS great performance, amazing battery life, tremendous snapiness, no noise, and so on, first - which you didn't get for a while on the Windows laptop world, even for comparable priced machines, even if they had double the RAM. Not even getting into the trackpad, build quality and materials over cheapo plastic, and so on. For personal and work purposes I use both Apple and Windows lap…

The difference is that you got an Intel CPU instead of an AMD one that's built on a smaller node and has a far more efficient GPU.
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