Apple has a memory problem and we’re all paying for it::Apple still sells expensive “Pro” computers with just 8GB of RAM and charges a fortune for more.
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Alternate title: Apple charges fortune for underspecced machines, morons still buy them
Please tell me, as someone who has not given Apple money in over a decade, how I am paying for this.
Apple fans will say with a straight face they can’t use anything other than a Mac.
Apple fan here, and I love what they’ve done with hardware the last few years. That said…. I have to agree. Base RAM config is silly low, and higher RAM and SSD configs are stupid expensive. It’s a money maker for sure, I wish it wasn’t so obviously a cash grab. I’d be ok with a bit more padding in the base hardware price if the ram wasn’t so expensive to upgrade.
In the old days this was a moot point because you buy base config and immediately swap for after market big sticks- I did that for decades, but these days with soldered RAM and storage…. Eh, it’s a bit of a kick in the balls.
I am stoked for my new M3 next week though, good thing work pays for it!
Imagine if you had to buy it yourself. Really. Screw apple. I’m done with their blatant manipulation and control.
Apple fan here
asking for contempt? ;-)
Jealousy is more like it. MacOS is amazing.
MacOS is the worst part about Apple. Their hardware is amazing, but the software (third and first party) sucks.
How so? It’s a polished Unix desktop that runs most open-source and a bunch of proprietary apps, including Final Cut and Logic. It’s natively POSIX and has a proper shell.
I haven’t had any problems 🤷♂️
Many Linux distros support Mac devices.
MacOS is extremely barebones. Almost two years ago I got a MacBook to work on a customer project. Until then I’ve only been on Linux and Windows 10. And boy was I in for a surprise. I kind of got used to it, but let me give you a few examples.
You want to tab between windows and not apps? Better pay for an app. You want to snap your windows left or right? An app. You want to control which app outputs to which audio device? You guessed it - an app. Clipboard? App. Configure mouse acceleration? An app (linear mouse).
I mean, the OS is polished and looks great. And if all you do is swoosh windows left and right in Starbucks, that’s all you need. But for anyone else it’s just sad how little it supports out of the box.
Jesus Christ it has most of those things. What are you even talking about?
PEBCAK
Can you point me at the right settings? I googled around and that’s what I found. Maybe I came up with old results which aren’t up to date?
I will answer any specific questions you want to know about macOS. You mentioned a number of things above, so what would you like assistance with?
Alight, thanks. Let’s see if I can explain this.
I couldn’t find native support for the following:
- snap windows left and right with keyboard shortcuts (Win Key + Arrows on Windows)
- set a default output device (eg speakers), but select apps (Spotify for example) should output through my USB DAC.
- I can tab between applications, but the only way to tab between all active Windows was with a third party app. It mostly works fine, but has a few quirks.
Yyyeeeeaaaaa…… those all exist within MacOS natively.
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So maybe I missed it or we are talking about the same things. Can you point me at the right thing to look for? Since you seem to be aware how these work natively.
- snapping windows by keyboard shortcuts (Win Key + Arrows on Windows)
- I want to have one output device by default (eg speakers), but select apps (Spotify for example) should output through my USB DAC.
- I can tab between applications no problem, but when I looked up how to change between windows of the same app (eg text editors), I came up with nothing. How is the shortcut called?
Cheers
Tab between windows: Alt+~
All the other stuff is available for free so why does it matter that it doesn’t come with it if 99.9% of people don’t need it?
The closing sentence of the article…
“as Apple customers, we shouldn’t stand for it”
Apple customers…
“Here’s my $200”
“we’re all paying for it”
Journalism these days is fucking awful
It’s from a news organisation called “MacWorld”. What were you expecting exactly?
Maybe not this specific thing, but Apple is super influential on the industry as a whole and when other companies see people tolerate Apple’s bullshit, they follow suit.
Yep. I am reminded of 3.5mm audio jack being removed from phones because Tim Cook was ‘brave’.
Well I do think the high cost of expansion RAM in Apple products is tied to school shootings, gerrymandering, and the prison industrial complex.
That is in the context of “Apple customers”.
Just a thought.
[…] we’re all paying for it
How? How am I paying for Apple’s shortcomings?
Well, every competitor to Apple used to have expandable storage on their flagship phones. Removable batteries too that were a breeze to replace if they went bad. They all copied apple, and terrible storage and glued in batteries that are hard to replace is standard now. U have to pay 100 x what a micro SD for the same amount of storage would be, and replacing a battery, while possible to do on your own now requires special knowledge and tools. If you’re building your own PC, it probably doesn’t affect your PC, but laptops have also followed suit. Glued in batteries/ hard drives are the norm, and it’s way harder to modify a shelf model laptop than it was 10 years ago. Apple is the King of enshittification. I’m so tired of companies copying them and all their greedy, customer fucking moves.
i’m still mad about the headphone jack.
Often the cheaper models from a company will have a headphone jack. Sadly the moment you go for a higher model they expect you to use wireless headphones ( cause you got money anyway right…right).
that also means that they can add the headphone jack to the more expensive ones, but they won’t because you pay more money for the device… how does that make sense?
how does that make sense?
Because capitalism
Yes, with the exception of Sony. All their phones have headphone jacks.
They did remove them but the outcry from customers we so bad they put them back on immediately.
I have the Xperia 10iii and love it. I use the headphone jack all the time. And the SD card of course. I couldn’t imagine using a phone with headphone jack and SD card slot.
I almost included that in the rant lol, but it was long enough
Modularity/expand-ability comes at a cost. Both monetary cost and performance cost. We used to have gpus with expandable memory but we dont anymore.
Thats because by having the memory integrated into the board, we can put it much closer to the chip, greatly increasing the bandwidth and lowering the latency. This is exactly what Apple has done with its memory and why it isnt expandable anymore. Apple’s memory is 5x+ faster than ddr5 in terms of bandwidth. Also you fully take advantage of the entirety of the available memory bus, instead of having empty lanes chilling for potential upgrades.
By having an integrated battery, you can have the battery have all kinds of wacky shapes that fill your design better.
Having a microsd slot takes a lot of space and can result into a significant degraded user experience if the user uses a slow microsd. And even a fast microsd is slower than integrated storage.
All these things are possible but they come with some sacrifices. Part of the change is because of enshittification but some changes is because they make sense.
“We” is referring to Apple customers.
Yea this is a Macworld article.
I absolutely love Apple Silicon—the performance to power ratio is wonderful, and the high-speed memory makes things like LLMs work great—but the RAM upcharge is insane, and shipping anything “Pro” with 8GB of RAM should be criminal in 2023.
I really hope that Qualcomm can make some noise with their new laptop/desktop processors. Anything to light a fire under Apple’s ass and make them stop skimping on RAM.
Which LLM are you running on your macbook?
I’ve been using an iPad with m1 for a while, can’t wait to get this power on a regular machine… but the ram price makes me want to wait another gen at least.
I cannot +1 this hard enough. There was once upon a time, back in the Darwin days, when I had my eyes on a Macbook as my next computer. Apple Silicon almost got me there again. I’m itching for a Snapdragon X Elite Oryon OMGLOLBBQ SBC, but I’m not holding my breath. I bet laptop makers snap up all the chips for 2024, and then I get one in 2025.
Memory is memory. Apple’s attempt at branding these machines as “different” as if they were more efficient at using that memory, is absolutely fucking stupid. These Pro machines are used for large file operations like videos, and their response is simply “guess you need to pay more”.
I feel like they’re trying to get back to the PPC days where generally available parts are not cheap. I hope plenty of cheap alternatives show up on Newegg or wherever. Fuck this bullshit.
Damn, even my phone got 8GB memory
My phone (pixel 6 pro) has 12gb and it’s a 2021 model. It’s outrageous a pro laptop only has 8.
My phone is a Galaxy A52 from 2021. Not even a flagship. It costed me around $500 new.
My phone (Moto G Stylus 5G 2022) costed $300 and has 8GB RAM and 256GB storage
It seemed obvious to me that they do this so that they can say the MBP costs “as low as X”, but in fact everyone needs to pay at least $200 more
I’m not paying for it, I just go to downloadmoreram.com, DUH
I don’t pay for the computer, I just go to downloadmorecomputer.biz
This is the way
Yes. Unfortunately people who buy Apple don’t care. This is what happens when you prioritise brand and design over functionality. You end up paying more for the brand (worse shit, but hey you can feel good about buying such a great product!).
As an Apple user: I do care. However, the alternative is using Windows, which makes me wanna punch my monitor at least once a month. And I’m not even using it as a primary OS.
I don’t prioritize design and don’t care about brand at all but I care about a frust free experience and I just don’t have that with windows.
Running a hackintosh was less frustrating than using windows on the very same hardware…
If Linux supported the software and the features I need/want, I would very much just use that
There are things in Mac that also make me want to punch my monitor. No tree view in Finder, so I have to open two windows to copy stuff? No titles in the launcher so I have to scroll over all the windows to find the one I need? It’s a nightmare for working with documents. I much prefer windows for that.
What does Windows do to make you want to punch your monitor?
For example (and that is only one out of many over the years), on my one PC search just refused to work. Windows search isn’t great but not having it is even worse than that and no matter what I did, neither the search in the Start menu nor in the Explorer worked. Couldn’t type in anything. If I opened the on screen keyboard, it did work but not with my physical one. I even reinstalled Windows from scratch and it worked for a few weeks and then stopped again. No one why. Only got fixed once I went back to Win 10.
Another Example is Microsofts over-insistence to force Edge, bing, OneDrive, Office365, etc. on you. It feels like, once a month, when I log in, I get a splash screen to please subscribe to one of those services and also use Bing and also, they put the Edge icon back onto my Desktop.
It’s things like those that just annoy the shit out of me. I want to use my PC, not to constantly fix it. And it’s a myriad of other thing like that. Some small, some bigger.
It’s not that macOS is better in every way, there are a few things Windows undoubtedly does better (like having a keyboard shortcut to open the file explorer) but for my day to day use, macOS has kept out of my way and just done what it’s supposed to. And sadly macOS is a package deal with Macs, which are great, hardware wise but also very expensive. But considering the software advantage, the Apple tax is worth it, at least to some extent
I personally never had much problems with Windows 11, but I fully understand the edge frustration. I used MacOS for many years, but not without tweaking and porting the hell out of it. The problem with Apple for me is their lack of reparability and the absurd prices of their hardware. I now mostly use Linux, although it’s far from perfect and nowhere near as good as some claim, so I’m still forced to stick with Windows.
Use “everything” by VoidTools to search the file system. It’s the perfect search tool, very powerful and lightning fast.
Noted. Does it also start programs?
You can click on the files it shows, and if it’s a .exe file you can start the program
So it’s not useful for that. But having a decent search is defs a pro.
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We are? Pretty sure I ain’t.
Yeah, I’m not complaining either
It’s even worse when you consider there’s no dedicated video memory, so this is shared between graphics and the rest of the system.
He’s paying for it. Many of us don’t buy Apple products.
Managed my whole life just fine without ever owning a single apple product.
back in the day my ipods each died within two weeks (original and replacement), I have not given a cent to this company since then
RAM is boring… THE FINISH IS TITANIUM!!!
THAT’S LITERALLY OUR ENTIRE MARKETING CAMPAIGN!
