It’s like in the 90s when the base ford mustang became a poorly made vehicle with little power that looked like a sports car but really they selling out and taking advantage of their customers.
I would have more respect for Apple if they just charged $200 more for the base and put 16GB of ram it instead passing off machines with insufficient amount of ram as a premium model of their devices.
Look up their Mac sales figure - it's down. And I do believe it is because consumers aren't stupid and recognize that the new Macs have planned obsolescence built-in with their soldered RAM and SSDs.
The Gaslighting is also high with Apple claiming that their "8GB equals 16GB" because they are Apple:
> Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent, because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture. Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently. - https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/08/8gb-ram-m3-macbook-pro-...
I guess this is a factor, but the main reason I haven't bought a new Mac is that they quit making the 27" iMac. Turning that beautiful screen into a paperweight or strictly-retro computer, only to turn around and buy a Mini and Studio Display, seems silly. OpenCore Legacy Patcher has kept me up-to-date so far, but there's an end on it. It doesn't help that my office is part of the "fancy" part of the house and so having exactly one cable (power) running into the computer is a nontrivial aesthetic benefit. It really does look sleeker, because it is.
If Apple laptops have to use their system memory for their graphics stuff, doesn't this mean that their 8GB of RAM leaves even less memory available for applications? I mean, even the cheapest graphics cards out there ship with a few GB of dedicated memory.
Mac isn’t the only product they sell where the storage prices are higher than the alternatives and higher than the cost of the underlying hardware. All of Apple’s products come with SSD and RAM upgrades that are above market rates and above the competition.
I don’t think consumers are stupid either, I think they know the storage upgrades are marked up, and still buy Apple products, for other reasons. I bought Apple laptops and was happy about them despite their cost - they were truly great machines and outshined the cheaper non-Apple laptops I’ve had.
Anyway, Mac sales have been down for a while because what would have been laptop and desktop sales are being now replaced with tablets and phones. Apple’s strategy hasn’t changed yet, and their overall sales and revenue on premium priced products haven’t show any sign of downturn yet.
That's a creative euphemism for price gouging.
Framing it as greed and lack of innovation seems like a not well thought out argument. Which companies are you buying tech from that aren’t aiming for a profit, and wouldn’t change more if they could? As a dev I feel like I’ve been forced out of the Apple ecosystem, and I’m having a hard time being a fan these days, but I wouldn’t dare claim they’re not innovating. The M-series is a massive innovation and challenging everyone, and it follows behind literally world-changing innovations like iphone. For its time, OSX was an innovative successor to unix built on unix. They have a long list and a solid history of innovation that continues to this day, despite always having had seemingly high prices on RAM, so let’s look for a better argument why they should offer it for less.