I understand the business aspect of this for Apple. I'm not mad at them. I'll pay $200 to upgrade the RAM so that I can keep using macOS and have a well-built laptop that makes no noise. Apple knows this. It's just good business in my opinion. But I guess to you, I'm an Apple geek who has Stockholm syndrome.

No, they perfectly explained why that isn't the case. Please read the post carefully instead of knee jerk responding.

That’s hostile. It’s obnoxious as suggesting a difference of opinion is “Stockholm syndrome”. It the same as saying “I’m not being rude, but you’re an idiot”. Yeah, you’re being rude.

HOWEVER, my M1 Air (with 8GB RAM) has and continues to be a great little machine for web browsing, email, Discord and writing. It can comes in clutch occasionally for coding.

Value? No, it's not great value. I bought a $500 Lenovo with 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM as a backup machine and the only areas where the M1 Air beats it are in the trackpad. The Lenovo even has a sleep mode which actually works and the battery life is fantastic. Even the screen is a toss-up - the OLED screen on the Lenovo is in a different class to the Apple screen in some ways but it isn't as bright so less good if you're working in direct sunlight.

For personal and work purposes I use both Apple and Windows laptops and its no comparison on those areas really, even if you go for the nice one's (Lenovo, Dell Latitude, Surface, etc). And if you add the other configurations, you get closer to the MBP price.

Eg. Latitude 7440 laptop was the one left after filtering for all the "high end" attributes (> 8GB mem, highest intel processor available for the series, FHD+ etc). Configured at: 14", 16GB, the highest processor configuration they offer, 14.0-in. display Full HD+ (which is just 1920X1200, way worse than "retina") goes for $1,659.00 on Dell's website.

I'd get the M1 over that anyday, even if I had to pay $100-$200 extra for the 16GB option. Especially since it will keep its resale value way better.

It's often mentioned that macOS is more frugal with RAM, a claim which I flat out found to be untrue. I regularly saw Dock and Finder leak and eat gigabytes of RAM each.

The unfortunate reality is that base Mac models always existed as an upsell. There were a few precious historical exceptions, most recently the M1 Mac, but that doesn't change this rule.

That's why I said normal office workers and students. I never said 8GB is enough for devs. It wasn't enough for me. It was still manageable for that 1 year before Apple Silicon MBPs got released. But of course I upgraded to an M1 Pro 16GB as soon as it came out.

I just gifted a family member an M1 Air 8GB in late 2023. I felt very comfortable that it was enough for the work this person does on the computer.

PS. 8GB is perfectly fine for Chrome web browsing. You can have 50 tabs open and it'll still run smoothly. macOS does some magic with paging. Don't know how it does it. But never had an issue with 8GB and Chrome. It was always my IDE, Typescript, and docker that gave me RAM issues on 8GB.

Costing 9 hundos a piece, Air is not something a regular company would buy for their employees.

They're more likely to buy a budget laptop in the 400-500 range which you can bet will do just fine for office work, and you can always upgrade it if necessary.

If a company really does need their employees to work a Mac, they will have to cough out a lot more for the 16GB version, and this is what the article calls corporate greed.

I happen to think that the enterprise is an untapped market for Macs. Not tech offices. Other industries that run on Lenovos and Dells.

If I'm a small business, I still wouldn't buy $500 Windows laptops for my employees. I'd buy $750 M1 Airs. They last longer, "just work", and have fewer support issues.

As an employee of a company that runs macbook fleets, hell no they don't. Every other year we have had to replace half our inventory because of the 2015 macbooks having faulty batteries that want to explode, and then the next generations being that terrible keyboard, where every single employee needed their entire top cover replaced at least once because the keyboard didn't even last a year.

Meanwhile at my previous company which ran those boring ugly dell "workstation" laptops with the fat ass batteries, Entire generations of older workstations were still in inventory because they just didn't die, and were stupidly easy to repair, and you didn't have to send them away for a month for something like "my N key doesn't work anymore" or "the battery we gave you will burn your house down"

I just don't get how people say "Macs are reliable", because the only laptops less reliable than my work macbooks have been a series of cost reduced dell laptops that screws would literally fall out of, except even when that happened, dell would send someone to come fix it the next day, in your home!

[0] https://www.makeuseof.com/m1-macbook-screens-cracking/

But hey, it's not like Apple has a history of denying problems, right?

IIRC there was a recall/replacement program for those batteries as well as earlier generations of the butterfly keyboard. I'm not a fan of the butterfly keyboard, but Apple did replace it twice for free. The final revision fixed the reliability problems for me at least.

I'd imagine the TCO on those bargain basement laptops is terrible, so I doubt they're really a big sell for corporate buyers.

(B) In my experience corporate machines simply aren't upgraded. You get enough for the job when you order it. If you need more, you get a new machine and the old one is repurposed or retired if it's remaining usable life is short.

Yeah. It would basically be insane for a company for nickel and dime laptop purchases and then pay an IT person to do bespoke upgrades. Like a lot of things that may seem sensible on a personal level where labor is cheap/free, they don't make sense when you're paying someone $50+ an hour to do them.

I remember in a n org I worked a few years ago we got new laptops with SSDs instead of HDDs. Everybody was happy except the people who worked with a lot of data as the first SSDs were very small like 128 GB (still the amount of disk space you would get in an entry-level MBP 2019 I think). So we asked for an upgrade and they replaced our SSDs rather than replacing whole laptops. But I'm sure it's place-dependent.

It is an i3, but still... this is $279! Do some bargain hunting and you can find some pretty decent machines for <$500 now.

Edit: devs get 32G pros though, and we loathe the extra RAM pricing on those. Cheap compared to the cost of a developer, though!

What? NO. 8GB is not enough for browsing and the proliferation of Electron apps these days. The solution shouldn't be constantly swapping, which is what all 8GB Apple devices do. This will lead to early SSD death and since the SSD is soldered on, that means the entire device is useless.

I see it on computers (and phones too) whose owners bought the smallest capacity to avoid spending money on something they didn't think they would use.

On the flip side, the very same laptop has a much better display than competing MacBook Air, and better in a manner that is observable in its entirety in non-professional casual use: visually better scrolling of web pages and documents; easier to see in bright sun; much more superior HDR movie watching experience.

It also has much better laptop speakers - completely irrelevant for professional use (like music production), but very relevant for movie watching.

Base 14" MBP is merely a better Netflix machine than MacBook Air is.

What you said about Pro, and what the article says about Pro, is very fair and quite excellent in fact for, uhm, actual Pro laptops, which is Mx Pro/Max based machines, not the new base 14" MBP on an Mx (small one) chip.

What I indeed find perplexing is the fact that 2 default 14" Mx MBP configurations that do not require any changes (they often ship faster, being default is a tangible difference) aren't 8 GB 512 and 16 GB 512, but 8 GB 512 and 8 GB 1TB. That I find odd, because I think yes, a small subset of office users might find a low core count but bigger RAM version useful in practice (I'm thinking some very heavy spreadsheet hitters kind of office power users, managers probably), but virtually no one in that category would actually care to have 1TB of SSD with everything being web-based and/or stored on company's servers in corporate environment. That is indeed odd. But maybe I'm wrong in my assumptions for this one - it's easy to be lacking any actual stats or data - and it's appropriate as well. I don't know.

Funnily enough, I'm typing this from a 3 year old Thinkpad that I use for work, which has in all likelyhood a slower CPU than even the M1, but it's perfectly usable for dev work, because it has 64GB of RAM.

Of course, 16 GB (or more) is nicer.

Once per day, I maybe got a slight 600ms hang when something was unexpectedly swapped in.

So I can imagine that 8GB will work okay, even if Chrome eats 30% of it.

But nowadays full dynamic applications are shipped in a browser tab, and a huge number of "desktop" applications are written in JavaScript using electron, so they're essentially an isolated chrome instance for running that app.

People talk about chrome being a resource hog, and maybe it is, but if you have dozens of JavaScript applications running in different tabs, then chrome is just taking the blame for the fact that it's essentially serving as the user application layer of your OS.

I'm glad I stuck with embedded development. The biggest resource-hog I interact with regularly is GCC.

I can be productive on a P3 with 256M of RAM.

Make sure to view "Real mem" in Activity Monitor. That's the amount of data actually stored in your RAM, the rest being swapped out. That number can be quite small, even for apps that theoretically use a lot of memory.

I have found Docker to be an "actual" memory hog with not much of it being swapped out, but could imagine that it would be possible in the case of Finder.

If the processes just allocated a lot of memory and never touched it, it might be reasonable to say they don't actually use it because the OS might never actually reserve any physical resources for it. (Happens a lot e.g. in Linux with memory overcommit allowed by default and some processes allocating dozens of gigabytes of virtual memory, most of which they never actually use.)

But would those pages then count towards swap use either? Only dirty pages end up in swap. Unless macOS counts allocated but untouched pages towards used swap as committed resources.

edit: better wording

Also, it's such a controversial thing you would think if the difference was so stark The Verge, Linus Tech Tips or Max Tech, etc. would, you know, actually measure it.

The only kinda objective side-by-side test I could find, on typical workloads, was this 2 year old video on the M1 which stated the 8gb did well on typical multitask workloads. For Chrome tab test the bottleneck was the internet speed, not RAM. Lightroom and Final Cut Export was slower, but typical multitasking workloads basically matched.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h487I_5xOZU

Obviously things change so where does this stand today?

And in usage I also find macOS and its Apps to more often than not actually take more RAM. It isn't a bad thing pe se, it often means more speed because more things are cached, available fast and the like.

However, it is quite annoying when Apple simultaneously pretend the contrary and at the same time upcharge for their soldered RAM in a greedy way. If anything, a "Pro" PC laptop in this price range will have not only at least 16GB as default but is highly likely to have 4-8GB for its dedicated GPU when with Apple Silicon, the RAM advertised has to be shared and any GPU activity lower even more what can comfortably be used as system memory.

The more time passes, the more Apple Silicon feels like the ultimate scam. At this you better have a very real need for battery life because it really does not make a lot of sense otherwise. In fact, if it is only autonomy that you need and not true mobility, it would be better to buy cheaper performance equivalent PC and buy one of those large carriable battery.

Note: Customers cannot upgrade the RAM by themselves.

I'm okay with laptops being sold with 8GB of RAM, but I'm not okay with artifically shortened lifespan caused by lack of upgradability. Manufacturers should be regulated to force them offer upgradeable RAM. I don't care what new technological innovations that may require to offer same speeds as current soldered RAM does, it's simply the right thing to do.

Disagreed. You can't make RAM upgradeable and have unified memory architecture that makes Apple Silicon good. Let's not regulate technology like this.

There were studies done that showed most people do not upgrade their RAM/storage even though they could. They just bought new computers. I can't find them now but you could probably find them if you dig around.

Silicon Graphics did it in the 90s, x86 laptops do something similar but it's not true UMA AFAIU mostly due to software / graphics API limitations.

> that makes Apple Silicon good.

Good interplay between CPU and GPU, the major advantage of UMA, does nothing for raw CPU performance. What I find attractive about Apple silicon is that it has very high performance, high efficiency CPU cores. Nothing to do with UMA.

Soldered RAM can be somewhat higher speed and lower energy than replaceable, I think that's the main real advantage. Still, I wouldn't want it.

They don't. They pre-allocate a portion of the memory to the iGPU and the CPU can't access that memory. It's not nearly the same unified memory we're talking about.

>Good interplay between CPU and GPU, the major advantage of UMA, does nothing for raw CPU performance. What I find attractive about Apple silicon is that it has very high performance, high efficiency CPU cores. Nothing to do with UMA.

I didn't imply that unified memory is the only thing that makes Apple Silicon good. Of course everything else has to be good too. But unified memory is a big part of Apple Silicon. Furthermore, going forward, UMA has real advantages over non-UMA architectures for LLMs.

I don't recall the details, yes there's a BIOS setting to assign memory to the GPU, but that doesn't actually limit the memory used by the GPU. With any current OS and driver, the actual amount of memory used is set dynamically at runtime. The rest is as I said an API (OpenGL / DirectX pre 12) limitation.

https://docplayer.net/88302897-Memory-management-in-vulkan-a...

Page 20:

Memory types: AMD APU

● Memory is really unified – all heaps are equally fast.

Meaning the application can allocate a buffer on such a heap, load/generate some data into it, and "hand it over to" (just means promise not to change it concurrently without notifying) the GPU. No copies, the GPU can now use it. [In contrast, different memory types on non-UMA systems are best for uploads (to GPU), downloads (from GPU), frequent use, one-time use... of buffers]

So, what's left of Apple's UMA advantage is, I don't know? Maybe a unified cache. Not a big deal, graphics working sets are much larger than any L3 cache. Oh, and marketing language.

Can we have one piece of soldered RAM and one slot to add more RAM later on though? (at the cost of possibly unmatched speed and other stuff that happens when you mix and match RAM as you like)

Or just don't buy LUXURY Macs. Yes, they are luxury goods, they are Louis Vuittons of the laptop world.

You and a bunch of people don't buy Macs with 8GB and complain a lot and Apple will start selling them with 16GB.

But this will never happen because people will keep buying Macs because of the panache and swagger that owning and using a Mac give them.

Maybe you're European and apple products cost a lot more where you live?

In the states, base model MacBook Airs are frequently ~$800 on sale.

You can get an official refurb MacBook Air or Pro with 16GB/1TB for ~$1300 from Apple's website right now.

Those machines are priced competitively when compared to Dell XPS, new ThinkPads, etc.

They also have much better battery life, screens, and overall build quality compared to those machines.

Also MacOS is, for all its faults, normie-accessible unlike Linux and ad-free unlike Windows.

It's wanting to run big VMs that is the real pain point with 8GB.

What about them? XCode is quite efficient with memory, and it by definition doesn't pass everything through a interpret+JIT for a higher level language.

Try opening some heinously large project with 100+ dylibs (react-native) compared against a lean, statically linked single module workspace. You can have them open side by side and it’s like experiencing hell and heaven simultaneously.

The upgrade treadmill from the 20 century computers is no longer relevant for most users, besides storage.

And for most users it will be. If we're talking "forced obsolence" Apple is probably the last to blame, given their stuff retains high ratio of original-vs-resale value (meaning they have long second hand careers).

If you believe that will not make their second-hand value and their longevity much worse, I don't know what to tell you. It is already happening. Even relatively recent Intel macs are worthless if they were not top of the line with lots of storage and RAM. The only thing keeping somewhat of a value is what Apple does not want to sell anymore: big display iMacs (27"). But that's really not surprising since half the value comes from being a good display in the first place...

On top of all that, even low-end hardware is good enough for basic task, so second-hand inventory is piling up, especially at the low end. Macs are nice but old Macs not that much nicer than cheap Huawei's and the likes...

That's not the target users for the "MacBook Pro" series.

Apple did open themselves up to ridicule for putting 8GB on a $1600 "Pro" laptop.

The article specifically talks about the _Macbook Pro_, which shouldn't target office workers and students.

Now that's just disingenuous, it's a log scale and it shows that memory prices fell 40% from 2012 to 2022.

Apple charges $200 to upgrade M1 Macbook Air from 8GB to 16GB.

A comparable 8GB stick of DDR4-3600 costs $25 retail.

8GB on the Airs is a completely different issue as these are not marketed as Pro devices.

Consumers place a lot of faith in Apple as a brand so when they go and purchase a "Macbook Pro" they should be able to assume Apple has their back and it's actually going to do what it says on the tin. It's 2023, memory demand is higher than it ever has been and selling a "Pro" computer thats destined to be living on swap so they can try squeeze another $200 out of you is pretty shitty honestly. And it's not like you can just upgrade it, you have to toss it out and get a whole new device.

As much of a conversation killer calling people "sheep" can be, as someone who doesn't use their stuff, what is surprising about this?

If you work on large C++/Rust projects you need dedicated build servers with ungodly amount of CPU/ram. A laptop cannot possibly compete with servers that draw 2000 watts each. Desktop PCs also blow laptops out of the water in terms of raw performance. And yet many professional developers have a MBP as their main device because apparently they don't need the extra performance a high end desktop delivers.

Somehow many people here believe that:

- an 8GB MBP is not pro

- a 16GB MBP is pro

- desktop with 1TB ram is unnecessary for pro use

Somehow their preferred device is the "pro" device and should be called "pro" and less capable and more capable machines are irrelevant.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Which is the problem in a nutshell. No one knows what it means.

The parent worked as a dev for a year with the machine and was happy with it. I am also a dev, and am still on a M1 8gb Air that I got in early 2021, and I'm very happy with it. Probably the best laptop I've ever had the pleasure to work on.

For my workload, I don't think the difference between a 8gb and 16gb machine would be measurable. Some people really would prefer the $200.

So watch that and tell me again why you think the difference ‘isn’t measurable’

Don’t get stuck on the Pro monitor, real Professionals simply buy more memory because they know they need it and they should be able to afford it. Apple offers the 8gb models for regular folk with light computing needs who like a nicer machine, be it called Air or Pro.

If anything, you are the one who really needs to prove why he feels the need to defend the indefensible commercial choices of an extremely rich company.

At best you are like a weirdo using short in 5°C winter and telling everyone it is fine and do not understand why everyone is telling him he is crazy and that must be uncomfortable. At worst you are the used car salesman minimizing every single problem the car he is selling to keep the price high.

In any case, your behavior is not normal nor commendable, you shouldn't be the one requesting better behavior from other people...

We’ve had AirPods Pro and the iPhone Pro for years now, the days of the word pro meaning “for professionals” are long gone.

To be clear I have no problem paying the Apple tax, the computers are worth it. The problem is that Apple has optimized the Apple tax in such a way it makes local AI applications impossible, which is a shame because they have such the best architectures for that use case.

My current work machine, a M2 Pro MBP at 32GB actually has less usable memory than my sluggish i9 MBP had - due to unified memory. The RAM configurations are just prohibitively expensive even for “well off” companies / purchasers at this point so it’s often a struggle to fight for more.

I’ve been a big Apple / Mac fan and loyal customer since Panther but we shouldn’t turn a blind eye here.

These constrained memory configurations - even when streamlined OS / system software optimizations are in place (are they? still?) - are probably playing a good part in their great margins but they do need to go with the time (bloated websites and apps) as well of course their own stacks running on top.

I wonder how that's possible, and whether that's an outlier rather than a case of probable risk to SSDs. I've got the impression that it shouldn't be likely to wear out a modern or semi-modern SSD with any kinds of typical laptop workloads.

I daily drove a 500 GB off-the-shelf SSD in a 8 GB ThinkPad for ~8 years, and while it was for personal device, I used it a lot and even played games on it, often ran into swapping, even hibernated semi-regularly at times, etc., and there were never any signs of problems with the SSD.

4 years sounds like pretty bad luck.

I guess it's possible, it just sounded like individual bad luck to me. My impression has been that you really have to write a lot to wear out the expected life of a non-ancient SSD.

I started using Macs with Mac OS 9.2 but now I want out. The pricing is absurd and there is no way to circumvent that since no upgrade possible.

I don't care much about battery life/power consumption and the actual use case is overblown, if you get one of the powerful chips and push it, you are looking at 30-50W power consumption; so even with a 100kWh battery, we are talking 2-3H at best.

In other words, if you want to game, compute, encode, render, or whatever high performance task you are still going to need a cord anyway. The rest of low power task is actually done very nicely on much cheaper devices that have more than enough battery life (from cheap tablets, including iPads to Chromebooks).

Also macOS currently has a software problem in my opinion and Apple stupidly push for subscription out of greed. If I have to subscribe for my computing needs I might as well get the cheaper devices and use software that can run anywhere, including sub 500$ potato.

Apple has made a terrible mistake strategically; you can't have your cake and eat it too. If they want to sell expensive, limited hardware they need to have cheap non-subscription software that is best in class in enough categories. If their hardware is only useful to run competitors' software and subscription stuff they have to be competitive on the hardware price...

My issue is the heavy price increase for higher RAM amounts. A $2500 machine should come with at least 64GB.

The fact is, 8 GB delivers perfectly speedy performance for many Pro workloads.

It's not enough if you're a dev running VM's, but Pro doesn't mean it's for developers only. There are a lot of other types of professionals out there, where their needs are e.g around CPU not memory.

Technically, comparable Windows laptops do exist, but hardware vendors don’t want to sell them.

For some reason, hardware vendors really want to sell Intel CPUs, and discrete GPUs. Both choices are suboptimal for most people, because modern AMD chips are more power efficient than Intel, and their integrated GPUs are pretty good by now.

If I wanted a new laptop today, I would look for a model with Ryzen 7 7840U. The chip has 8 Zen4 CPU cores, 12 RDNA3 GPU cores, and 15-30W TDP. Quietness, coolness, performance, and battery life should be very comparable to Apple’s M1 laptops.

Sadly, most laptops which have Ryzen 7 7840U include soldered LPDDR5[x] memory, but there’re couple models with DDR5 SO-DIMM slots: Framework 13, and HP EliteBook 845 G10.

BTW, I have an older laptop with Ryzen 5 5600U. It’s a generation older, but CPU performance and power efficiency are already good there. GPU performance is not great as GCN5 cores are way slower than RDNA3.