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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

#271

Post by xw3090 »

wafriedemann wrote: post #196

The problem I have with 16GB as a upgrade is that the base model is widely available and often on sale. 16GB does exist as preconfigured option, but it is a lot harder to come by. It's mainly sold as BTO, which means you have to pay full price. That makes that extra 8GB of RAM ridiculously expensive. I mean it's already ridiculously expensive, but the fact that base models sell with huge discounts increases it even f…

Why does APPLE RAM cost so much?? (Apr 19, 2005) https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-does-apple-ram-cost...

Maybe one day Apple will lower memory prices. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it...

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

#272

Post by rtp4me »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #216
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I replaced an M1 Pro with an M2 Air and have had nothing but improvements in my daily computing. Juggling Xcode, terminal tools, web browsers, Slack, Discord, music/podcasts, video streaming, video CALLS, all the background sync, email, VS Code, occasionally photoshop for flavor. It just doesn't slow down, at all, at any point. The M series SOCs are just fucking absurd. In every space besides gaming and graphics, the…

Same here. Turned in my 14" MBP M1 for a M2 15" MB-Air (1TB NVMe, 24G RAM). Lightweight, fast, excellent 15" screen. Hands down the best laptop I have ever had (and I have a stack of MBP boxes in my closet from the past 10yrs).

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

#273

Post by lost_tourist »

sbuk wrote: post #205
dns_snek wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It doesn't cost apple $200 to go from 8GB to 16GB, it's likely 1/10th of that since they are ordering processors in the millions at the lowest point available in silicon manufacturing. I've never had an apple product fail either and I can't say that for other laptops (hp/dell) I still have my MacBook pro from 2011, using it as a NAS (running linux tho) my Dell from that year is long since dead.

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

#274

Post by lost_tourist »

shmde wrote: post #38
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 -…

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.

I like my mac book pro but I'm not eating it up or justifying it. I'm just biting my tongue and paying it, knowing I get roughly 2x as much time out of my apple devices as I do out of cheaper PC/Android stuff. Plus I need a mac for some of my work that is proprietary.

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

#275

Post by skydhash »

willi59549879 wrote: post #208
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.

Wasting users time (factor: 1000) instead of developers' time (factor: 10) is cheaper for company, but it's not an advantage for society. It's why I use Mac OS, you can find quality native apps still. Stuff like Things 3, Bear, iA Writer, Doppler,...

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

#276

Post by xw3090 »

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…

It seems in 2004 the web was much more indignant on Apple memory prices. Let's pick up the pace people!

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=a...

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

#277

Post by lost_tourist »

ge96 wrote: post #25
Osiris wrote: post #11

When I started my current job they gave me an M1 Mac with 8GB because it’s what they had on hand. I could barely run my IDE and a web browser. At least 1GB was for video memory, and it was swapping constantly. I couldn’t run docker containers because of how much input lag I would get. 8GB is barely usable and shouldn’t even be an option for a Pro machine. I used it for a week before switching to a personal desktop wi…

What kind of comparison is that 8 to 64. 8 GB for windows also sucks as well or Linux (save with tiling manager), software just bloats over time. Imo 8gb is not enough as baseline, today's 8gb is 16. I remember 4GB being good in 2015.

mehhhhh you don't need a tiling window manager; lxde, lxqt, xfce are all fine "regular" window managers for low memory machines as long as you don't load a bunch of garbage that you don't have to have.

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

#278

Post by YetAnotherNick »

runjake wrote: post #192
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…

> Tech’s stagnated for over a decade I don’t know where to begin with this, but on topic, the M1 came out in 2020 and was a big tech leap in how PCs are done. Sure, all the individual technologies within existed elsewhere first. But Apple executed and delivered great products.

M1 was not that big of a leap for trillion dollar company. If you looked in A12 bionic or other processor from Apple before M1, M1 wasn't that different in IPC/core or any metric. Also Apple was 2 generation in semiconductor process ahead due to TSMC contracts.

If you look closely, yes apple is bit better in manufacturing, bit better in materials etc. and I have many apple products, but its products isn't that different from many small companies. Unlike say Google, whose software engineering and scale they can handle for complex services is almost impossible to match for small companies.

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

#279

Post by musha68k »

Delk wrote: post #253
musha68k wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not in my experience. “Normal users” are starting to run into this issue as I can anecdotally pass along (browsing, google suite, slight photoshop use, etc). I actually had lots of reservations before I “green lighted” those first gen M1 MacBook Airs at 8GB across family and friends. Unfortunately I unreasonably fell for the rather over hyped reviews across the board (“I want to believe”). It’s especially on me…

> It’s especially on me as my last private intel MBP before my “maxed out” M1 MBP wore out its on-board SSD after only 4 years and that one was large (1TB) with ample memory for the time (16GB). I wonder how that's possible, and whether that's an outlier rather than a case of probable risk to SSDs. I've got the impression that it shouldn't be likely to wear out a modern or semi-modern SSD with any kinds of typical la…

It’s probably fully deterministic in that case. It was bought summer 2015 and the SSD intermittently started to have write errors end of 2019 so 4.5 years. Were you running a “hackintosh” on that one? macOS is way more memory intensive than Linux on desktop in my experience / usage pattern.
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