This comes up frequently. 8GB is sufficient for most casual and light productivity use cases. Not everyone is a power user, in fact, most people aren’t.
At this point I don't think the frustration has much to do with the performance but rather RAM is so cheap that intentionally creating a bottleneck to extract another $150 from a customer comes across as greedy, and I am inclined to agree. Maybe the shared memory makes things more expensive but the upgrade cost has always been around the same amount.
It's not quite in the same ballpark as showing apartment or airfare listings without mandatory fees but it is at the ticket booth outside of the stadium.
The bigger problem is when you need a new machine fast, the apple store doesn't have anything but the base models in stock. In my org we bought a machine for a new developer who was leaving town, and were forced to buy an 8gb machine because the store didn't have other options (it was going to be a 2 week wait). As you can imagine, the machine sucked for running Docker etc and we had to sell it on facebook marketplace for a loss.
I've never encountered an actual Apple Store not having specced up machines on hand (maybe not EVERY possible configuration, but a decent selection). If you go to a non-Apple retailer, afaik, they are limited to the base spec machines (RAM wise), it's not even a matter of them being out of stock. If you want anything other than 8GB (or whatever the base amount is for that model) of RAM you need to go through Apple directly. This was the case, at least in Canada a few years ago, correct me if I'm wrong/things have changed.
Mine is 8GB M1 and it is not fine. But the actual issue for me isn't RAM as much as it is disk space, I'm pretty confident if it wasn't also the 128 GB SSD model it would handle the small memory just fine.
I'm still getting at least 16 GB on my next one though.
Yeah personally I find cheaping out on the storage far more egregious than cheaping out on the RAM. Even if you have most things offloaded onto the cloud, 128 GB was not even enough for that, and the 256 GB is still going to be a pain point even for many casual home users, and at the price point of Apple machines it's inexcusable to not add another $25 of flash
Both are disgusting for the price asked. It would be a lot easier to excuse all the other compromises if the base was 16/512, which would cost Apple like 50 bucks tops per machine.
But greed is unlimited, I guess.
> What’s the price difference between 8 and 16? Like $3 in wholesale prices.
Your estimates are not even close. You can't honestly think that LPDDR5 at leading edge speeds is only $3 per 64 Gb (aka 8GB), right?
Your estimate is off my an order of magnitude. The memory Apple is using is closer to $40 for that increment, not $3.
And yes, they include a markup, because nobody is integrating hardware parts and selling them at cost. But if you think the fastest LPDDR5 around only costs $3 for 8GB, that's completely out of touch with reality.
GP said "LPDDR5" and that Apple won't sell at component prices.
You mention DIMMs and component prices instead. This is unhelpful.
See https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/memory/774... for LPDDR5 prices. You can get a price of $48/chip at a volume of 2000 chips. Assuming that Apple got a deal of $30-40-ish at a few orders of magnitude larger order is quite fair. Though it certainly would be nicer if Apple priced 8GB increments not much above $80-120.
I am aware that there are differences, I just took RAM DIMMs as a reference because there is a >0% chance that anyone reading this has actually ever bought a comparable product themselves.
As for prices, the prices you cited are not at all comparable. Apple is absolutely certainly buying directly from manufacturers without a middleman since we're talking about millions of units delivered each quarter. Based on those quantities, unit prices are guaranteed to be substantially lower than what DigiKey offers.
Based on what little public information I was able to find, spot market prices for LPDDR4 RAM seem to be somewhere in the 3 to 5$ range for 16GB modules. Let's be generous and put LPDDR5 at tripe the price with 15$ a 16GB module. Given the upgrade price for going from 8 to 16GB is 230 EUR Apple is surely making a huge profit on those upgrades alone by selling an essentially unusable base configuration for a supposed "Pro" product.
DDR5 DIMMs and LPDDR chips as in the MacBooks are not the same beasts at all.
A DIMM is 8 or 16 chips (9/18 is ECC), while the LPDDR is a single chip for the same storage. The wild density difference in chip capacity (512MB or 1GB vs 8GB) makes a huge difference, and how a stick can be sold at retail for cheaper than the bare LPDDR chip in volume.
Programming has a wierd way of requirering basically nothing some times, but other times you need to build the latest version of your toolchain, or you are working on some similarly huge project that takes ages to compile.
I was using my 4gb ram pinebook pro in public transport yesterday, and decided to turn of all cores except for a single Cortex-A53, to safe some battery. I had no problems for my usecase of a text editor + shell to compile for doing some SIMD programming.
The number of tabs you have doesn’t correlate to the number of active web views you have, if you use any browser that unloads background tabs while still saving their state.
Those are the type of "I'll go back later to it", The workflow on modern browser is broken. Instead of leveraging the bookmark functionality to improve the UX, we have this situation of user having 50+ tabs open, because they can. It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs to a more manageable numbers.
It's really not weird. The more you charge for the base product and upgrades, serving the bare minimum becomes less acceptable. It also doesn't help that the 4GB base models from years past aged super quickly compared to it's higher end cousins.
The point you're missing is that it's about the future. I generally agree, but it's obvious everything becomes more RAM intensive as time goes on. Hell, even games can take more than 8 GB of purely VRam these days.
MacBook Air starts at 1,199 euro. For insane battery life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the lightest chassis. Find me comparable laptop, I’ll wait.
The screen is the killer. you can have a nice-ish 2nd corporate laptop with decent and swappable battery on which you can install a decent OS (non Windows) and get good milage but the screen is something else.
Asking for a machine with "insane battery life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the lightest chassis" and oh, it must be completely silent is a loaded set of demands. Apple in the current market is essentially the only player that can actually make a laptop that can meet your demands, at least without doing a bunch of research into something that's equivalent and hoping the goal posts don't move again.
this is extremely funny in the context of the protracted argument up-thread about what you could reasonably be comparing the macbook air against.
like, the $359 acer shitbox probably doesn't do all the exact same thing as the MBA either, but that's actually ok and really only demonstrates the MBA is an unaffordable luxury product, basically the same as a gold-plated diamond-encrusted flip-phone.
Not your circus, not your clowns, but this is sort of the duality of apple: "it's all marketing and glitz, a luxury product, there's no reason to buy it, and the fact that they have a better product only PROVES it" vs "of course no PC manufacturer could possibly be expected to offer a top-notch 120hz mini-LED screen, a good keyboard, great trackpad, good speakers, and good SOC performance in a thin-n-light..."
Race car drivers. They are pros. Professional drivers. They definitely know how to drive a car much more efficiently than I do, or anyone that’s just into cars. I assume the race car engineers are the pros at rebuilding engines.
And as for the parent comment’s point, being into cars doesn’t mean you’re as good as a professional race car driver.
