Apple has a memory problem and we’re all paying for it::Apple still sells expensive “Pro” computers with just 8GB of RAM and charges a fortune for more.
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Alternate title: Apple charges fortune for underspecced machines, morons still buy them
Please tell me, as someone who has not given Apple money in over a decade, how I am paying for this.
Apple fans will say with a straight face they can’t use anything other than a Mac.
Apple fan here, and I love what they’ve done with hardware the last few years. That said…. I have to agree. Base RAM config is silly low, and higher RAM and SSD configs are stupid expensive. It’s a money maker for sure, I wish it wasn’t so obviously a cash grab. I’d be ok with a bit more padding in the base hardware price if the ram wasn’t so expensive to upgrade.
In the old days this was a moot point because you buy base config and immediately swap for after market big sticks- I did that for decades, but these days with soldered RAM and storage…. Eh, it’s a bit of a kick in the balls.
I am stoked for my new M3 next week though, good thing work pays for it!
Imagine if you had to buy it yourself. Really. Screw apple. I’m done with their blatant manipulation and control.
Apple fan here
asking for contempt? ;-)
Jealousy is more like it. MacOS is amazing.
MacOS is the worst part about Apple. Their hardware is amazing, but the software (third and first party) sucks.
How so? It’s a polished Unix desktop that runs most open-source and a bunch of proprietary apps, including Final Cut and Logic. It’s natively POSIX and has a proper shell.
I haven’t had any problems 🤷♂️
Many Linux distros support Mac devices.
For what? Or at what?
If you were asking that genuinely I’d answer. But I’m trolling you all just as much as you think you’re trolling me.
I’ve barely used MacOS, so it’s a genuine question
MacOS is extremely barebones. Almost two years ago I got a MacBook to work on a customer project. Until then I’ve only been on Linux and Windows 10. And boy was I in for a surprise. I kind of got used to it, but let me give you a few examples.
You want to tab between windows and not apps? Better pay for an app. You want to snap your windows left or right? An app. You want to control which app outputs to which audio device? You guessed it - an app. Clipboard? App. Configure mouse acceleration? An app (linear mouse).
I mean, the OS is polished and looks great. And if all you do is swoosh windows left and right in Starbucks, that’s all you need. But for anyone else it’s just sad how little it supports out of the box.
Jesus Christ it has most of those things. What are you even talking about?
PEBCAK
Can you point me at the right settings? I googled around and that’s what I found. Maybe I came up with old results which aren’t up to date?
I will answer any specific questions you want to know about macOS. You mentioned a number of things above, so what would you like assistance with?
Alight, thanks. Let’s see if I can explain this.
I couldn’t find native support for the following:
- snap windows left and right with keyboard shortcuts (Win Key + Arrows on Windows)
- set a default output device (eg speakers), but select apps (Spotify for example) should output through my USB DAC.
- I can tab between applications, but the only way to tab between all active Windows was with a third party app. It mostly works fine, but has a few quirks.
Yyyeeeeaaaaa…… those all exist within MacOS natively.
So maybe I missed it or we are talking about the same things. Can you point me at the right thing to look for? Since you seem to be aware how these work natively.
- snapping windows by keyboard shortcuts (Win Key + Arrows on Windows)
- I want to have one output device by default (eg speakers), but select apps (Spotify for example) should output through my USB DAC.
- I can tab between applications no problem, but when I looked up how to change between windows of the same app (eg text editors), I came up with nothing. How is the shortcut called?
Cheers
Tab between windows: Alt+~
All the other stuff is available for free so why does it matter that it doesn’t come with it if 99.9% of people don’t need it?
The closing sentence of the article…
“as Apple customers, we shouldn’t stand for it”
Apple customers…
“Here’s my $200”
[…] we’re all paying for it
How? How am I paying for Apple’s shortcomings?
Well, every competitor to Apple used to have expandable storage on their flagship phones. Removable batteries too that were a breeze to replace if they went bad. They all copied apple, and terrible storage and glued in batteries that are hard to replace is standard now. U have to pay 100 x what a micro SD for the same amount of storage would be, and replacing a battery, while possible to do on your own now requires special knowledge and tools. If you’re building your own PC, it probably doesn’t affect your PC, but laptops have also followed suit. Glued in batteries/ hard drives are the norm, and it’s way harder to modify a shelf model laptop than it was 10 years ago. Apple is the King of enshittification. I’m so tired of companies copying them and all their greedy, customer fucking moves.
i’m still mad about the headphone jack.
Often the cheaper models from a company will have a headphone jack. Sadly the moment you go for a higher model they expect you to use wireless headphones ( cause you got money anyway right…right).
that also means that they can add the headphone jack to the more expensive ones, but they won’t because you pay more money for the device… how does that make sense?
Yes, with the exception of Sony. All their phones have headphone jacks.
They did remove them but the outcry from customers we so bad they put them back on immediately.
I have the Xperia 10iii and love it. I use the headphone jack all the time. And the SD card of course. I couldn’t imagine using a phone with headphone jack and SD card slot.
I almost included that in the rant lol, but it was long enough
Modularity/expand-ability comes at a cost. Both monetary cost and performance cost. We used to have gpus with expandable memory but we dont anymore.
Thats because by having the memory integrated into the board, we can put it much closer to the chip, greatly increasing the bandwidth and lowering the latency. This is exactly what Apple has done with its memory and why it isnt expandable anymore. Apple’s memory is 5x+ faster than ddr5 in terms of bandwidth. Also you fully take advantage of the entirety of the available memory bus, instead of having empty lanes chilling for potential upgrades.
By having an integrated battery, you can have the battery have all kinds of wacky shapes that fill your design better.
Having a microsd slot takes a lot of space and can result into a significant degraded user experience if the user uses a slow microsd. And even a fast microsd is slower than integrated storage.
All these things are possible but they come with some sacrifices. Part of the change is because of enshittification but some changes is because they make sense.
“we’re all paying for it”
Journalism these days is fucking awful
It’s from a news organisation called “MacWorld”. What were you expecting exactly?
Well I do think the high cost of expansion RAM in Apple products is tied to school shootings, gerrymandering, and the prison industrial complex.
If I’m being generous, it’s macworld.com speaking to an audience of Apple users.
But no, I am not paying for it. I’m over here drooling at M1 chips, but then stopping when I see the baggage that comes with it.
Ms are only worth drooling over as far as power consumption. Relatively cheap 7840u outperforms M2 in every benchmark. I9s are just in a completely different league.
I’ll wait for Snapdragon X Elite from a more reasonable company or a RISC-V chip in a Linux laptop if stars really align.
Memory is memory. Apple’s attempt at branding these machines as “different” as if they were more efficient at using that memory, is absolutely fucking stupid. These Pro machines are used for large file operations like videos, and their response is simply “guess you need to pay more”.
I feel like they’re trying to get back to the PPC days where generally available parts are not cheap. I hope plenty of cheap alternatives show up on Newegg or wherever. Fuck this bullshit.
I absolutely love Apple Silicon—the performance to power ratio is wonderful, and the high-speed memory makes things like LLMs work great—but the RAM upcharge is insane, and shipping anything “Pro” with 8GB of RAM should be criminal in 2023.
I really hope that Qualcomm can make some noise with their new laptop/desktop processors. Anything to light a fire under Apple’s ass and make them stop skimping on RAM.
Which LLM are you running on your macbook?
I cannot +1 this hard enough. There was once upon a time, back in the Darwin days, when I had my eyes on a Macbook as my next computer. Apple Silicon almost got me there again. I’m itching for a Snapdragon X Elite Oryon OMGLOLBBQ SBC, but I’m not holding my breath. I bet laptop makers snap up all the chips for 2024, and then I get one in 2025.
I’ve been using an iPad with m1 for a while, can’t wait to get this power on a regular machine… but the ram price makes me want to wait another gen at least.
Microsoft’s exclusivity deal with Qualcomm expires soon, so there should be more options coming around. After all this time, RISC will finally change everything (without getting into the technical details of how it did already).
Damn, even my phone got 8GB memory
My phone (pixel 6 pro) has 12gb and it’s a 2021 model. It’s outrageous a pro laptop only has 8.
My phone is a Galaxy A52 from 2021. Not even a flagship. It costed me around $500 new.
My phone (Moto G Stylus 5G 2022) costed $300 and has 8GB RAM and 256GB storage
It seemed obvious to me that they do this so that they can say the MBP costs “as low as X”, but in fact everyone needs to pay at least $200 more
We are? Pretty sure I ain’t.
Yeah, I’m not complaining either
I’m not paying for it, I just go to downloadmoreram.com, DUH
He’s paying for it. Many of us don’t buy Apple products.
Managed my whole life just fine without ever owning a single apple product.
back in the day my ipods each died within two weeks (original and replacement), I have not given a cent to this company since then
RAM is boring… THE FINISH IS TITANIUM!!!
THAT’S LITERALLY OUR ENTIRE MARKETING CAMPAIGN!
It’s even worse when you consider there’s no dedicated video memory, so this is shared between graphics and the rest of the system.
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If Windows didn’t wanna make me punch my monitor at least once a month, that’d be a good deal…
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Problem: the software I primarily use under Windows are
• Photoshop • A 20 year old negative scanner software • Games
The latter is less of a problem nowadays, however, I‘d like to use HDR in supported titles and Linux HDR support wasn’t really a thing yet, last time I checked…
Same with macOS, I primarily use proprietary software that doesn’t have a Linux version, nor decent Linux alternatives
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Doesn’t solve the negative scanner and HDR issues though… The scanner has a solution, in theory, however I’m not ready to spend 100€ on scanner software for Linux, when the 20 y/o free software works just fine…
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That I‘d love to replace my Windows with Linux but QEMU is not a solution for my problems.
To each their own, after having had the ‘pleasure’ of maintaining a fleet of Macs I’m personally quite happy with Windows these days. I’m never touching anything running MacOS ever again, that bullshit OS almost made me want to practice my frisbee skills on more than one occasion. Stability issues galore, that stupid single menubar that changes depending on which window has focus, crap like ‘sudo rm somefile’ failing with a ‘not enough disk space remaining to remove file’ error message when the disk is full, and many many other issues that were such a pita to solve. MacOS feels like having to work with one hand tied behind your back and a hammer in the other. Never again.
I mean, some of those are preference things. I like the menu bar on top because it’s easy to home in on it. It’s always up there. For every program. No searching.
I cannot complain about stability, either. I had a hackintosh running macOS on PC hardware, that was more stable than Windows on the same machine…
And I also rarely do things in the terminal besides ssh-ing into my Linux server…
I’d agree though, that Windows is easier to maintain. It’s just a pain in the ass to daily drive, because, at least in my experience, something will always refuse to work for no apparent reason, even though it’s supposed to.
I am having the same feeling towards the Mac I have to use at work. That stupid piece of shit is just a usability nightmare. I’ve no idea why people insist on Apple products being simpler or more efficient to use. It’s just not true.
I guess it depends on individual preferences and experiences
