Even if you somehow could argue that 8 is all you need now, what about in few years? No one should ever buy this device.

This reminds me of how movie theatres offer a small, medium and large but the large popcorn only costs slightly more than the medium, thus enticing you to go for the large.

Only recently Lenovo started to solder their parts so base models lost their power :(

The spot price for 16GB of LPDDR4 looks like it's currently ~$8 per DRAMexchange: https://www.dramexchange.com/

They're also charging $200 for a 256GB storage upgrade - spot price of 3D TLC is $3/256Gb ($24 for 256GB) - you can currently buy a 256GB NVMe SSD (full stick with controller) at retail for <$30 as well.

Many laptops now have soldered RAM, but other vendors have not chosen to do what Apple has done. In HP's premium laptop (Spectre x360 13t), adding 8GB of RAM is a +$70 option. For reference, an 8GB DDR4 SODIMM at retail pricing is about $30.

Also, AFAIK, no other major laptop or mini-desktop manufacturer uses soldered storage like Apple does, so in this case, the retail cost for storage is even more relevant.

These are commodity parts, so there's not any R&D to recoup - this is just profiteering on Apple's part. Especially for the Mac Mini, where there's not the same space constraints, the lack of storage upgradability is also a rather egregious form of forced obsolescence. Fine from a business perspective, but hypocritical for a company that claims to care about the environment.

You can call me bitter but this sort of manipulation is making me extremely salty to the point where I'll be having seething hate for the company for the rest of my life.

The RAM is embedded into the SoC. Maybe the 8GB are salvaged chips where half of the memory is unusable?

But I think a more important factor is future sales. They will likely sell more laptops as these 8GB owners upgrade earlier (in 2-3 years) as the OS and apps continue to bloat.

So on one side they save $20 per laptop and they likely sell more laptops.

So charge $50 more per laptop and make $30 more profit while not producing 8 GB junk that'll be e-waste in a few years because that's barely enough RAM to run an average browser session anymore.

What about it? It's not like someone who mostly browses the web, checks email, works with office documents, and so on, will change what he does in a few years...

The fatal flaw in this argument is the failure to realize that web pages are bloating, video is becoming more prevalent, higher resolution images, etc.

So “browses the web” has ever increasing hardware requirements if you want to maintain the experience.

8GB is definitely underpowered

I would like to see Photos on those benchmarks, that is one program that would benefit from lots of ram, and would be used by many of the Air’s customers.

And yet most PC laptops, with same or higher prices, have the same base spec, so there's that...

I know it's a deceptive metric but Task Manager shows 12.5GB "In Use". 16.2 Committed.

Each Firefox tab has between 250mb and 1g "Memory (Active Working Area)".

HUUUUUGeeeee long tail of 100MB trailing down to 20MB services and things. Adobe has half a dozen at all times, etc etc etc.

I'm game to use any other "more realistic" specification or monitor as I know that with memory paging and virtualization things are wonky.

I don't think this indicates I MUST have 12 or 16 or 32GB - I have a 4GB media PC that works just fine. But I do believe it's an indicator average user can use 16GB, if it's available. Or in other words, if I buy a $1000USD laptop, I don't think 16GB is going to waste away unused with zero benefit ever :-\

Again, perfectly willing to be educated :).

You're lucky any of those other applications opened at all!

But in context of expectations in the $1k laptop market, my point was that perfectly normal usage can grow to benefit from over 8GB of RAM these days, whatever the background reasons may be.

If I were going for a desktop it'd be at least 64GB.

When people complain about Electron apps, the response is always "modern computers have so much memory anyway, it's fine!"

But then when a manufacturer introduces a computer with slightly less memory (but still a perfectly reasonable amount) the big question is whether it can run all those Electron apps!

Is there a way to break the cycle? This isn't good!

Slack and discord, on the other hand, are real drags.

are we really talking about the same whatsapp ? it takes a good 4 seconds to load here. I don't remember ever waiting for MSN Messenger to load, on potato-powered computers.

(I’m definitely not arguing that that’s a bad thing; it just makes Telnet more annoying)

That will do it.

2. Their entire presentation focuses on editing large image files, editing 4k video, machine learning, and graphics-intensive games (games were mentioned more than anything else)

So, given how these are marketed, they are extremely low on RAM and storage.

My "typical Mac user" in this case, is my wife. Her 8GB MBP is holding up very well.

The green/yellow/red graph in the Memory tab of Activity Manager is the best way of seeing if you need more RAM at a glance. In my experience, macOS won't do any swapping in the green. In the yellow, the system is still pretty usable but there's some swapping going on. When it turns red, your SSD will be getting thrashed pretty hard.

Why wouldn't it be? The iPad Pros max out at 6gb and yet they overperform the vast majority of laptops out there.

Today I wouldn’t buy less than 32GB.

Performance is always better and the machine will last much longer

At the moment, that's debatable, since the only 32GB Macs you can buy are Intel ones...

What Apple appears to have done is transpose the hardware from iPad to Mac without thinking about the different requirements of each. There is a reason that RAM is not part of the package on laptop CPUs. This might work for casual users but people spending $$$ on a "pro" computer will wise up pretty fast.

I have a 2019 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM and it runs OS X fine for dev work. RAM compression and fast SSD storage make a big difference. The newer Macbooks will have even faster SSDs.

I think the main reason Apple don't want to add lots of RAM to the base Macbook models is that it's the wrong compromise between battery life and performance for most users. They are probably betting on continuing gains in SSD performance obviating the need for additional RAM.

The iPad Pro has strong raw CPU performance in any case. It certainly outperforms plenty of entry-level Windows laptops.

The vast majority of people need a social media, word editor, reminder list, chat machine.

The goal shouldn’t be to increase ageing technology but to replace it with something better.

To be honest, I find even 16GB to be limiting. The lack of offering of a 32GB configuration killed the immediate sale for me, absolutely no exaggeration.

Because you can't upgrade it post-market, I'd consider these to be some of the least future-proofed releases from Apple in a while.

100GB sounds like paltry for 10 years of technological advancement. In 2010 DDR4 didn't exist yet and DDR3 only supported up to 16GB per ram stick (8 on Intel at the time). Now we have ram sticks with capacities up to 256GB. The 2010 MacBook Pro only came with 4GB! But really "640K ought to be enough for anybody", am I right?

You can buy a Thinkpad P15 with 128GB of RAM today, so I'd expect more like multi-TB RAM by 2030.

I've had 16 gigs for the last 8 years. I thought about getting 32, but I haven't noticed needing more memory and it does use (battery) energy so I decided against it.

It’s worked for them for iPad and iPhone. Samsung et all would boast more ram but oddly enough iPhones were and remain faster

A laptop can run many things simultaneously. Web browser, Office suite, Musik, EMail client, Cloud sync... Even my mother struggled with 8GB RAM on here work machine and she is by far no PC expert. She writes emails and letters, opens spreadsheets and websites. Sometimes she gets a call and has to open another document or website. End of RAM.

I would NOT recommend the 8GB Macbook Pro for professional work.

Even with 16, 32gb of ram, Android phones still don’t have buttery smooth 60 FPS while iOS has never been smoother

Android's lack of smoothness is due to thread contention, whereas the iOS kernel uses a dedicated UI thread running at high priority. RAM size has no impact on UI performance, beyond a sufficient amount for the kernel.

I use a Pixel 3 and iPhone 8 on a daily basis.

Now that apple has the remaining 95%, it is letting their power users down. But that is only natural, establishing a beachhead with the powerusers was "just" a genious marketing move that worked pretty well.

And they still are. Just not in their base configuration, like they have never been. I've been using their stuff since the Motorola era.

Was there any time Apple gave "ample" RAM/DISK in their base configuration? No.

If anything, now it's better than ever...

The Air is going a more iPad route; totally silent and more than enough performance for typical tasks, but under sustained load it's going to throttle hard.

I'm very curious to see benchmarks on these things. Also wondering if processors are performance binned from one SKU to another, or if it's really just the amount of RAM and storage.

Apple's been known to have secret hardware differences like that, the 2018 iPad Pro had 4GB of RAM unless you specced it up to 1TB storage, which included a secret upgrade to 6GB RAM. You wouldn't know from the specs, since Apple doesn't talk about how much RAM their iPads have.

Now here we are with the M1 and Apple doesn't talk about the clock speed. All MacBook Pros have an M1, but do they all have the same clock speed? Maybe.

[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/10/21559228/apple-new-macbo...

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air/space-gray-ap...

It has 7W CPU in slightly smaller body than new Air, so I expect Air's performance review to be 'the story about throttling'.

At 1500$ for 16GB version 13" Pro seems like a really good value deal for on the go workstation - if M1 benchmarks come out decent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlOPPuNv4Ec&t=3m56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlOPPuNv4Ec&t=5m30s

That's just a headscratcher.

You still don't get the same feel as physical keys, but no Siri, no sliders to adjust volume or brightness, no stuff shifting around as you switch apps.

Apple ramps their chip performance dramatically and frequently in iOS devices; that’s how they hit such high benchmarks but also deliver long battery life and stay cool. Those chips spend most of their time not performing.

In such a system, having “the same chip” in two different devices will not tell you much about their relative performance under real world loads.

Also, what's the difference between the left and the right versions? just the storage? can't you configure the storage? why do they make it look like there are 2 different options.

Just the storage. They're suggested configurations, presented to make it easy for the masses, not the HN tinkerers.

I can't remember the brand of the cooler pad, but it had two 10 cm fans.

So lower clock speeds on the CPU/GPU and more use of the low-power cores.