As an Apple fan, what Apple charges for RAM is insulting. Pre 2012 it was standard practice to buy your MacBook Pro with the minimum RAM, and you could upgrade the RAM yourself buying from Crucial and the like for WAY CHEAPER than what Apple sold the RAM for. To stop that Apple started soldering the RAM to the logic board. I’d have no problem buying RAM from Apple if they charged a fair market price. Sadly Apple seem hell bent on ripping us off.
While some customers will end up paying a lot for more RAM, I have to wonder if Apple really has a good idea about how many potential sales they're losing at the same time, too.
They've lost several Mac purchases I would have otherwise made over the last decade, thanks solely to the unjustifiable cost of getting a reasonable amount of RAM for my needs.
Yet, as far as I know, Apple has no way of tracking those lost sales. They've never asked me, and I've never told them.
I know I'm not alone. I have a number of colleagues, friends, and family who've been ready to buy different types of Apple computers, but then opted not to once they see how much even a relatively small RAM upgrade will cost. Again, I doubt that Apple is aware of those lost sales.
I assume that they do take this into account and come to the conclusion that the real existing profits from the outrageous prices on RAM and SSD storage outweigh the potential profits from people who don't buy their hardware b/c the refuse to pay the hefty markup.
I totally bought a MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon, fully knowing that I'm getting ripped off big time with added RAM and storage. Yet, it's still the least painful platform for me, and the hardware is really nice, even a few years on. In the end, I expect get a meaningful lifespan of 5+ years of daily use out of the machine. I wouldn't know any other laptop which could provide this kind of service life while constantly being a joy to work with.
Apple know that their user base consists of many people like myself, and milk them accordingly.
I have to agree. In an alternate reality where their RAM upgrade pricing is in line with normal market prices, I'm probably a Mac user for the past 10+ years.
Every couple of years I take a good look at their machines and I always reach the same conclusion. Even though I could afford any specification of MBP, their upgrade pricing always feels like a rip-off and I don't enjoy feeling ripped off, so I buy something else.
The sad part is that people assume those two ate roughly inversely related. But I feel like there’s a lot of negative externalities and long term system effects that would disprove it.
We were well into years of SSD's in laptops in the 2.5" sata format and Macbooks of the time (ie: 2012 models and even some after) were still chucking 5400 rpm spinning rust in there AND charging SSD prices for it.
It was bananas then, and they are just doing the same with a different component now.
There were plenty of other reasons they started soldering the RAM, and their desire to lock in customers to bogus upgrade prices simply meant that “but customers will lose the ability to upgrade their RAM from third parties for cheaper!” argument to not solder the RAM fell on deaf ears.
in the days of the macs being on intel silicon yeah ram was crucial. with the 16gb most dev's those doing web api's and fronteds will find 16gb sufficient. at one point I had a 32gb m1 - 16". just too heavy yet performance was similar to my m2 air with 16gb ram. performance as in never felt the difference.
I hate to say it but their minimum configs feel like a pricing scam. Like the price of a hotel room before taxes & fees. Even store employees will tell you that you really have to go one level up.
Exactly, and I feel this is true American marketing, and what makes Apple a real California company.
Just like American subway, or airfare, or greyhound buses, or even healthcare: at a high, advertised price, it gives you a standard, but miserable, bare minimum, and unsustainable way of living, and pushing you to pay for a high premium to upgrade to make it bearable, at a price a lot of people can’t afford. It’s why Apple is an American company at heart.
And each level up in RAM typically includes a bump to CPU and/or GPU core counts as well, so it is even more difficult to discern the true pricing. Annoying, but also understandable that they don't want to produce every possible combination of specs.
Don't get me started on needing to buy a 1TB+ iPad Pro to get double the RAM, though.
There's a concern that they would have to make AI pluggable so you could use different providers. So far they haven't done that, so for now they simply aren't offering AI at all (on the iPhone; I don't think DMA applies to Macs).
There are regulations as to data privacy when using AI and Apple avoiding the EU seems to indicate that they're actively ploughing through the user's privacy
Has to be, even a small model is 4gb of RAM. Open up any O365 based product in Chrome and kiss another 2gb goodbye if you only have 8gb you're left with very little after the OS...
The non-integer scaling on the Airs puts me off. I want perfect text rendering at a great resolution as that's well over 50% of the reason to get a MacBook. So it's the Pro for me
The panel resolution is fixed, so it'll have the same number of pixels on it regardless of what you "set the resolution to."
For maximum visual fidelity, it'd be ideal to scale to some power of 2. Apple's stock settings offer resolutions that ... don't always follow that rule.
Yes but the effective resolution of the 13 inch air when it is at 2x scaling is pretty cramped, which is why the default is to use blurrier fractional scaling.
I think the one thing people are missing about Apple is that they silently aren't a PC parts maker anymore. They make the high performance competitor to something like the Raspberry Pi, not a traditional PC. This bump is largely going to be keeping their system specs good enough for AI specs while also supporting someone's normal workload. It's a great upgrade if you're never going to use AI. Apple has made something special with tight specs that the average user doesn't fully understand yet.
Finally. With 16B the amount of tech support I do for Apple M* products will likely drastically reduce. But unless they also upgrade the storage there'll still be people filling up the internal and then being unable to create the timemachine backups for their octopus of external storage devices.
The ThinkPad X220 I had in university could be loaded with 16gb ddr3 ram... Who knows what apple will re-introduce in 2034 as an "incredible innovation in computing".
I was thinking the opposite: it's actually surprising how long 16 GB has remained a useful amount of RAM? At home I use a 10 year old 16 GB laptop and the amount of RAM never seems to be the problem. Any sloth is always due to one or both of the outdated GPU and outdated CPU.
(First time I bought a PC with 16 GB RAM was 2011. It wasn't a ridiculous amount of RAM back then, just usefully more than necessary. 16 GB has probably been a sensible amount for 15 years now.)
(Whether I'd buy a computer today with 16 GB of soldered-in non-upgradeable RAM - that's another question. And my answer would be: I wouldn't. However that is not because it would be useless on day of purchase!)
Depends a lot on what you do. For casual browsing, even 8GB can be fine. For gaming, 16GB is often more than enough, though rarely 32 has minor benefits. For productivity, 32 is fine. Only really heavy stuff needs more.
Is it? I don't know what the most popular Windows laptops are, but tooling around Lenovo's site, the starting configs for laptops seem to be either 8, 16, or 32 GB. Some soldered, some not.
I doubt that's needed. 1TB is great and all, but unless you're downloading games or handling a lot of media, you're unlikely to use it all. I don't think most people need that much, and will get by just fine with 512GB or even less (my current work laptop for software dev has a 256GB SSD, and while I could use more if I wanted to, I don't need to think about disk usage, even with a small Windows 11 VM on the same disk)
My MacBook Air M1 has 16GB RAM and the base 256GB RAM. I decided I wanted to try some native Apple Silicon games like “Resident Evil: The Village” and “Death Stranding”. So I took a 1 TB WD_BLACK external SSD, installed macOS Sonoma and made sure to boot from that hard drive when I wanted to play games. It works perfectly. Sadly there is no way to add RAM externally ha ha.
I boot from the 256GB storage that is soldered on the MacBook Air M1’s logic board when I want to do anything else. I have about 174 GB free currently.
My understanding is that the performance is based around Apple silicon being optimized for the NeXT/ObjC model of retain/release, which they got down from 30 nanoseconds on Intel to 6.5ns on M1 (14ns on emulated Intel).
IMO 8gb is still barely acceptable for most consumers in 2024, but not for any laptop that you'd expect to get more than say two years of usefulness out of, so… yeah it's about time.
I’m not exactly an expert on this, but I do know from experience that Objective-C programming (and anything coming out of an ARC compiler, like Swift) is a constant game of grabbing memory, using it, and releasing it. My impression is that if you can release memory faster, that means greater availability in the pool.
Guesses aside, I spent a lot of time in Xcode on an 8gb M1 while waiting for the M1 Pro to come out three years ago. It was great, much better performing than the 16gb Intel it was replacing. I still don’t think 8gb is really a big deal for most people, getting more is just important for speculative future needs.
The behavior you describe would be a function of the memory allocator in use (system allocator, custom allocator) and independent of the hardware. It's at a much, much higher level than the hardware or even the page compression.
At the risk that I’ve missed a joke, the unified memory architecture reduces the amount of RAM you have available since “RAM” for any computer with discrete graphics doesn’t include VRAM.
I think they are saying it from the perspective rather than two separate banks which are rarely both full it's one bank which is only ever full when 100% of the hardware is full. That said I think many miss that's how integrated graphics memory management had been working on x86 systems for many many years already. I.e. the "dedicated RAM" slider in the boot firmware is a legacy holdover that should be set to a minimum token value, not something which determines the limit the iGPU has access to. macOS also works this way, there is a token amount of the unified memory reserved for the iGPU still, you just can't adjust that amount higher since there is no legacy holdover for it to make sense to do so.
They are saying it from the perspective of the RAM being on the same die as the CPU. This is one of the innovations of the Apple Silicon architecture as it SIGNIFICANTLY reduces memory access latency.
It's not just TSMC's 3nm process. It's also Apple engineering.
This engineering was common in x86 CPUs by 2013 when AMD introduced Heterogeneous System Architecture which utilized Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access. The approach has its upsides and downsides, the latter generally being a unified bus tends to have much lower overall bandwidth (even in the Max) and runtime scalability issues. Upsides are more obvious for the types of systems people want APUs for in the first place though so that's usually fine.
The main bit of engineering Apple should be lauded for in the memory department is the gumption to throw the hundreds of GB/s at the mid and high end models.
HSA was not “unified” in the modern sense. It still required designating memory as gpu or cpu side and these implied different cache coherency rules that meant memory couldn’t actually be shared, by default. To actually share memory you had to use a special “garlic bus” that guaranteed visibility and ordering and massively slowed down performance. Similarly, it was also impossible for the gpu to see cpu memory unless it was pinned and tagged for a special “onion bus”, but at least this was relatively fast iirc.
In contrast apple actually has everything tied into a single unified space with a single controller that immediately makes all writes visible regardless of where the happen.
They’ve also got enormously more memory bandwidth to play with. M1 Max is close to PS5 in both shader configuration and memory bandwidth.
Generally it's more about the number of chips you need. If you can get to x GB of RAM with the same number of memory chips, just higher capacities, then the power difference is truly quite miniscule. If you have to double up chips to reach the capacity then you start drawing more power (though still on the order of a couple Watts max difference at those sizes). Even then it's not always a constant couple Watts, RAM+memory controllers uses less power when you're not actively writing data.
I hope one day they can fix the engineering problems so I can buy a machine and keep it for more than two years without fear of some cheap components exploding. A purchased computer should work for a decade at least. If this sounds over the top, look at what the repair shop guys are saying...
Edit: Thanks for the downvotes, its not popular but an unfortunate reality. These issues are related to 2016-present Apple laptops. My 2012 MBA is running just fine, but I cannot trust these soldered systems.. there's other content around about the 13v being dumped into the SSDs when another component fails. There are engineering issues.
There are some people with 300k on their original Chevy Silverado transmission. But there are MANY people that have them blow up every 100k miles. So, would you say the 4l60e is a good transmission because yours went 300k?
Im in the Central valley and have helped at least 5 friends replace or rebuild theirs. If you visit a transmission shop, this is the transmission that keeps them in business because it's one of the few cars where someone will still spend $3k to fix a 20 year old car.
Well the repair cost if you have this problem on a computer would approach the used value of the computer, so its likely to become ewaste. It wasn't a problem before the 2016 machines, and its still a problem on the current machines. Meanwhile my pre-2016 apple laptops are still in use by family members without issue
I agree with you. I was responding to the guy that said his is fine..... As if that proves anything. So I gave the 300k mile example of the most troubled transmission in the industry.
I knew I'd get downvoted, but there are known SSD / T2 chip issues with 2016+ macs. Still present in Mx mac laptops. 2012 Macbook Air was my favourite laptop ever. See Louis Rossman etc... if you get lucky you get lucky, but I don't like the odds, so Apple hardware for me is a subscription model...
I have not heard anything about SSD issues from my friends in the IT department who service hundreds of laptops…
Personally I’m still running an M1 MacBook Air which has been bulletproof for almost 4 years now. Before that I ran a 12” MacBook for 5 years. My last problem with a Mac laptop was in the 17” PowerBook days, circa 2010 (I suspect the case flexed and damaged the logic board)
I figure in an enterprise setting, machines get replaced within a few years?
I simply don't trust these latest machines to last without a particular issue happening. There's a fair amount online from the repair shops guys who are repeatedly encountering this issue. It seems like some kind of buck converter fails earlier than expected due to being run closer to its limits, and when it goes it dumps 13v into the SSD chips, destroying them, and bricking the machine, requiring SSD desoldering and component replacement, which isn't cheap or easy to fix. What % risk is unknown, but if the failure appears to be MTTF being reached early, then the longer I hold onto the machine the more likely I will encounter the issue and I don't fancy the risk...
My 2012 11" MBA is still absolutely fine, its the machines after 2016 to now that have the same issue.
Which hardware are you using that has more longevity than a typical Mac laptop?
I've become increasingly annoyed by the software deterioration, with my laptop losing gobs of power while "sleeping". The only thing stopping me from changing back to windows for my next laptop is (my perception of) the terrible hardware choices on that side.
My mental model for typical windows laptops is that they are worse brand-new (e.g. screen, trackpad, battery life) and have wildly worse longevity.
It's about a specific issue known in the 2016+ laptops, I just don't want to carry the risk of this known issue bricking my laptop out of warranty. And still exists in the current ones.
I have a 2012 i7 Thinkpad T530, that is still useful. My whole life desktop machines are usually useful for about a decade. Cheap laptops don't seem to last more than 4-5 years at most, but the top end laptops built really well can last a long time. It's nice to hand useful technology down to family members also.
Low power sleep states seem to have been broken for many years in most laptops. Apple machines do not have this issue it appears.
there isn’t an “issue” beyond the TPM being a potential point of failure, and all x86 laptops nowadays have a similar TPM and similar point of failure.
What do you think happens if your AMD cpu dies? That cpu has a pluton security module inside and if it dies, bye bye bitlocker keys.
you’re getting downvoted because you’re spreading decade-old FUD from the days before the tech community had wrapped their head around TPM. Any secure system is going to be equally dead if your TPM dies and this very much includes every windows laptop etc.
none of those have anything particular to do with the T2 chip and if the TPM in your windows laptop got clobbered you'd still lose all your data anyway. The physical shape of the SSD is irrelevant in that scenario since you lost the key to decrypt it regardless.
again, yes, I know rossman doesn't like apple laptops but this has nothing to do with the T2 chip being some hidden landmine or defect. People just aren't used to the idea of the TPM being a thing that controls their data integrity.
Old ThinkPads wear like iron. Even some of the newer Lenovo ones with the crappy keyboards. I have one such from 2014, it was some guy's DJ machine before I bought it and it still works great.
I still have a 2012 Air. It's on its second battery, which is shot, but until recently everything else worked. Unfortunately the mic has mostly stopped working as of late. Still, we got a lot of use out of that thing, and my kids still use it--just can't use it for video conf any more.
Exactly, it's great to hand things down to family like that. And with the 2016+ laptops, with these known issues, its quite possible it just becomes ewaste with an expensive repair that you can't do yourself at home
This is likely a function of yields of the process. The better the yields, less the need to bin chips by what works. Likely the M4 yields are quite good at this point. Just a WAG.
An 8 GB Mac is not a 16 GB with defective RAM; it literally only has 8 GB. The RAM is separate dies and Apple presumably buys known good DRAM so the yield isn't their problem.
Both the memory controllers and RAM on the Mx are on die components. The number of controllers (binned) count here. I should have been more specific in what I was saying.
"The 14-core M3 Max only enables 24 out of the 32 controllers, therefore it has 300 GB/sec vs. the 400 GB/sec for all models of the M1 and M2 Max, while the 16-core M3 Max has the same 400 GB/sec as the prior M1 and M2 Max models."
FWIW, almost every x86 computer made in the past 10 years has an on-die memory controller. The only exception is a handful of decade-old machines with "Northbridge" chips inside.
