> lots of people are used to comparing storage and memory directly and have the impression you get 'less for more' when shopping Apple.

Yeah, I feel like most people in these conversations are sort of in "grocery store mode" -- sitting in an aisle comparing the ingredients of one jar of mayo versus another jar of mayo from a competing brand.

It's just not that simple anymore with Apple's new SoCs. What Apple is doing with its combo of core performance, unified memory setup, specialized compute blocks on the SoC, and the overall thermal efficiency which allows all of this to just run and run without throttling all that much--it adds up to way more than the sum of its parts. You really have to use it in your daily life to believe it and feel the difference.

I still have a mix of Intel machines and Apple Silicon machines for my work and personal life, and it's just so immediately apparent the latency difference in usage. Apple Silicon feels and runs so much better.

Sure, would I recommend more than 8GB of RAM? Yes. More SSD is better? Of course. But Apple Silicon in even its thinnest entry-level configuration is an auto-recommend for me. And the prices at that entry-level are so, so reasonable for what you're getting.

> What Apple is doing with its combo of core performance, unified memory setup, specialized compute blocks on the SoC, and the overall thermal efficiency which allows all of this to just run and run without throttling all that much--it adds up to way more than the sum of its parts. You really have to use it in your daily life to believe it and feel the difference.

The future that fusion-HSA promised is finally here. Everyone drools over the possibility of PCs getting console-like zero-copy shared memory between the various accelerators, and people want analogous features to be ported onto the current dGPU/CPU paradigm (like directstorage). Fusion-HSA never got there itself, otherwise iGPUs would be able to do zero-copy already, but Apple has done it and the silence is thunderous.

Nobody cares, everyone is just waiting for AMD to implement something competitive and then it'll be cool. Strix Point/Strix Halo I guess.

> I still have a mix of Intel machines and Apple Silicon machines for my work and personal life, and it's just so immediately apparent the latency difference in usage. Apple Silicon feels and runs so much better.

To be fair, some of this is the fact that it's *nix. If you run Linux on your Intel machines it'll be snappier than windows too. But honestly having a well-supported *nix ecosystem with first-class vendor support is a good value offering, I think that's why Apple is having a surprising renaissance with computer-touchers right now. Non-techies get the happy bubble OS, techies get something they can drill down to the terminal and do their thing with dotfiles/zshrc. And everyone likes the fact that they're a well-built laptop with incredible battery life and good performance while mobile.

> Sure, would I recommend more than 8GB of RAM? Yes. More SSD is better? Of course. But Apple Silicon in even its thinnest entry-level configuration is an auto-recommend for me. And the prices at that entry-level are so, so reasonable for what you're getting.

I agree with both you and the commenters you're responding to. If the entry-level models will work for your needs, they're value champs. You will not find a similar value offering to a mac mini at the $400 edu pricing for example. Often there are some deals at bigbox stores or electronics retailers (B+H, Best Buy, Costco, etc) that offer some decent prices on the higher range stuff as well. A loaded-out M1 Max 16" (MK233LL/A) is $3300 on B+H right now (and it was $3200 a couple weeks ago) and you can find 32GB/1TB manufacturer refurb (applecare-eligible) M1 MBPs for under $2000 pretty regularly. The refurb store also allows you a lot of the flexibility of custom configuration but especially when combined with the edu/veteran discounts it's actually a pretty reasonable deal on a lot of products.

I would really say that if you're a developer you probably want at least 1TB storage. A lot of things rely on being able to store docker images/pipenvs/node packages/etc in the expected place, and while I'm sure you can configure them to run on an external, it's a pain, and they aren't configured to "float away to the cloud" like apple does with their first-party apps. A 256gb spec is a thin client/cloud terminal only - used 16GB/256GB MBAs are very very cheap compared to the higher models and I have to think some of it is because people try it and learn the hard way 256GB isn't enough for them.

That said I definitely do feel the complaint others are making that Apple basically does "product tiering by RAM/storage envy", as I heard someone call it. Really the difference between a MBA and a MBP or between the different chassis sizes is pretty minimal when you equalize for RAM/storage, a decently loaded 15" MBA is still pushing $2k and that also gets you an entry-level MBP or a refurb loaded MBP. $2k or for a laptop is a lot but nobody else has the kind of laptop performance and battery life that Apple does right now, so it's kind of a question of whether you're just looking for the cheapest thing that checks the boxes or if you're looking at the offering holistically. Nothing wrong with an XPS or a Latitude or whatever either, but if you're spending "premium ultrabook or gaming laptop with dGPU money" you can definitely get a real nice macbook too and it fits a different set of needs.

And Apple has perfected the art of stacking their tiers perfectly so that you can talk yourself into getting the next higher model. That's why they're the most valuable company on the planet, lol.

PC enthusiasts are gonna hate this but I don't think you'll ever be able to really get to a high-performance APU without some kind of soldered memory. Consoles use soldered memory too. GDDR6 vs stacked LPDDR5X is a design call but both are clearly superior to socketed memory, you'd need an Epyc-sized socket to get an equivalent amount of memory bandwidth into an APU, and it'd pull an enormous amount of power for PHYs too. You'd probably end up with like 30w of idle power lol, meanwhile Apple is doing 25W for the whole chip. Crazy stuff.

The practical way that x86 is going to get there is what AMD is doing with Strix/Strix Halo and Intel is doing with Adamantine - you have to go to stacked cache to make up for the lack of memory bandwidth (and perhaps even still go to quad-channel like Strix Halo), and it's still going to use a lot more silicon (expensive!) and use a lot more power than just stacking some LPDDR5X on there and calling it a day. You can't get to 6-8 channels worth of bandwidth from 2 actual channels without some kind of a hack, either you run the pins super fast (GDDR6) or you move the channels on top of the package (LPDDR5X). And that's a large part of why consoles and Apple Silicon can deliver a relatively large punch (3060 perf sharing 25W with the rest of the CPU still is nothing to sneeze at!) at consumer-friendly prices.

Low-end dGPUs are done for until stacking gets common, but it's such an amazing impedence-match for stacking and people can't see it because it says Apple on the box instead of AMD.