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.

  • manmikey@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    The closing sentence of the article…

    “as Apple customers, we shouldn’t stand for it”

    Apple customers…

    “Here’s my $200”

    • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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      8 months ago

      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.

    • motor_spirit@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Well I do think the high cost of expansion RAM in Apple products is tied to school shootings, gerrymandering, and the prison industrial complex.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      If I’m being generous, it’s macworld.com speaking to an audience of Apple users.

      But no, I am not paying for it. I’m over here drooling at M1 chips, but then stopping when I see the baggage that comes with it.

      • daqqad@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Ms are only worth drooling over as far as power consumption. Relatively cheap 7840u outperforms M2 in every benchmark. I9s are just in a completely different league.

        I’ll wait for Snapdragon X Elite from a more reasonable company or a RISC-V chip in a Linux laptop if stars really align.

    • Raiderkev@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.

        • danque@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          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).

          • KptnAutismus@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            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?

          • danielfgom@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            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.

      • NIB@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        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.

  • impiri@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • egerlach@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      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.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      Microsoft’s exclusivity deal with Qualcomm expires soon, so there should be more options coming around. After all this time, RISC will finally change everything (without getting into the technical details of how it did already).

    • khalic@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.

  • CoggyMcFee@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    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

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    RAM is boring… THE FINISH IS TITANIUM!!!

    THAT’S LITERALLY OUR ENTIRE MARKETING CAMPAIGN!

    • accideath@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      If Windows didn’t wanna make me punch my monitor at least once a month, that’d be a good deal…

        • accideath@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Problem: the software I primarily use under Windows are

          • Photoshop • A 20 year old negative scanner software • Games

          The latter is less of a problem nowadays, however, I‘d like to use HDR in supported titles and Linux HDR support wasn’t really a thing yet, last time I checked…

          Same with macOS, I primarily use proprietary software that doesn’t have a Linux version, nor decent Linux alternatives

            • accideath@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Doesn’t solve the negative scanner and HDR issues though… The scanner has a solution, in theory, however I’m not ready to spend 100€ on scanner software for Linux, when the 20 y/o free software works just fine…

      • Hasuris@sopuli.xyz
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        8 months ago

        I am having the same feeling towards the Mac I have to use at work. That stupid piece of shit is just a usability nightmare. I’ve no idea why people insist on Apple products being simpler or more efficient to use. It’s just not true.

      • Aganim@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        To each their own, after having had the ‘pleasure’ of maintaining a fleet of Macs I’m personally quite happy with Windows these days. I’m never touching anything running MacOS ever again, that bullshit OS almost made me want to practice my frisbee skills on more than one occasion. Stability issues galore, that stupid single menubar that changes depending on which window has focus, crap like ‘sudo rm somefile’ failing with a ‘not enough disk space remaining to remove file’ error message when the disk is full, and many many other issues that were such a pita to solve. MacOS feels like having to work with one hand tied behind your back and a hammer in the other. Never again.

        • accideath@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I mean, some of those are preference things. I like the menu bar on top because it’s easy to home in on it. It’s always up there. For every program. No searching.

          I cannot complain about stability, either. I had a hackintosh running macOS on PC hardware, that was more stable than Windows on the same machine…

          And I also rarely do things in the terminal besides ssh-ing into my Linux server…

          I’d agree though, that Windows is easier to maintain. It’s just a pain in the ass to daily drive, because, at least in my experience, something will always refuse to work for no apparent reason, even though it’s supposed to.

  • DingoBilly@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    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!).

    • accideath@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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

      • realitista@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        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.

        • accideath@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          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

          • BrotherBear74@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            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.

          • SuperSpruce@lemmy.ml
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            8 months ago

            Use “everything” by VoidTools to search the file system. It’s the perfect search tool, very powerful and lightning fast.

  • pachrist@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I can’t believe that Apple would do this. It’s so not like them to cripple great machines with one horrendous bottleneck. Like could you imagine if they released an iMac in 2020 that they sold until the release of the M1 iMac that had a 1TB hard drive in it as a boot device? That’d be insane.

    • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Hah, I just wrote a comment about how they used to ship computers back in the 90’s that had resistors in them to make them slower, so they could sell cheaper “budget” versions of their faster computer models.

      This is a prime example of how capitalism “innovates”.

  • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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      8 months ago

      Managed my whole life just fine without ever owning a single apple product.

      • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        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