My sister just bought a MacBook Air for college, and I had to beg her to spend the extra money on 16gb of memory. It feels like a scam that it appears cheap with the starting at price, but nobody should actually go with those “starting at” specs.
Yeah it’s about future proofing. 8 GB might be okay for basic browsing and text editing now, but in the future that might not be the case. Also in my experience people who only want to do basic browsing and word editing, end up inevitably wanting to do more complex things and not understanding that their device is not capable of it.
Exactly. I told her that 8gb might be fine for a year or two, but if she wants this thousand plus dollar laptop to last four years she needs to invest the extra money now. Especially once she told me she might want to play Minecraft or Shadow of the Tomb Raider on it
Good, 8 is unusable for my workloads and 12 feels like they’re just fucking with us
Welcome to 2010
I upgraded from 8GB to 16GB like 2 months ago.
Welcome to 2010 to you as well then!
Check out 9gag.com for funny pictures!
Or iFunny if you’re feelin’ saucy!
and maximum since you probably won’t be able to upgrade it since silicon doesn’t allow upgrades
Yeh can upgrade them at purchase. From 256gb storage to 512gb will only cost you one kidney.
It’s not an upgrade though it’s just a different model. They’re not modules you can install and I don’t even think Apple can install them you just get a different motherboard.
Which is objectionable for so many reasons, not least of all E-Waste.
Yeh I get that. Its treated as if its an upgrade - a sales upsell to a different unit I guess, rather than an upgrade to the literal unit the customer is receiving. Yep objectionable all round.
My point is you cannot effectively upgrade after the fact. You have to buy a whole new device.
There’s reasons behind this. LPDDR IIRC works most efficiently when it’s closer to the CPU than what dimms would allow for.
Boosts speed and lowers the power requirements.
It also incentivizes people to buy larger SKUs than they originally wanted, which, bluntly, is probably the main driver for going that direction… I’m just saying that there’s technical reasons too
The technical benefits are honestly quite overblown. The M-series didn’t get the massive speed lift because it moved to soldered RAM near the CPU, it got the massive speed lift because it doesn’t have to copy stuff between the CPU and GPU, the proximity to the CPU is a pretty modest improvement. So they could’ve gotten 95% of the benefit while still offering socketed RAM, but they decided not to, probably to drive prices up.
There’s actually an argument that makes the point of driving prices down with soldered RAM.
The individual memory chips and constituent components are cheaper than they would be for the same in a DIMM. We’re talking about a very small difference, and bluntly, OEMs are going to mark it up significantly enough that the end consumer won’t see a reduction for this (but OEMs will see additional profits).
So by making it into unupgradable ewaste, they make an extra buck or two per unit, with the added benefit of our being unupgradable ewaste, so you throw it out and buy a whole new system sooner.
This harkens back to my rant on thin and light phones, where the main point is that they’re racing to the bottom. Same thing here. For thin and light mobile systems, soldered RAM still saves precious space and weight, allowing for it to be thinner and lighter (again, by a very small margin)… That’s the only market segment I kind of understand the practice. For everything else, DIMMs (or the upcoming LPCAMM2)… IMO, I’d rather sacrifice any speed benefit to have the ability to upgrade the RAM.
The one that ticks me off is the underpowered thin/lights that are basically unusable ewaste because they have the equivalent of a Celeron, and barely enough RAM to run the OS they’re designed for. Everything is soldered, and they’re cheap, so people on a tight budget are screwed into buying them. This is actually a big reason why I’m hoping that the windows-on-ARM thing takes off a bit, because those systems would be far more useful than the budget x86 chips we’ve seen, and far less expensive than anything from Intel or AMD that’s designed for mobile use. People on a tight budget can get a cheap system that’s actually not ewaste.
Indeed. Making that initial decision even more of a forced decision toward the expensive upsell. Its evil. And wasteful as you said.
Considering that RAM is shared with the GPU, it’s still not enough.
It’s OK - for an extra $400 they’ll sell you one with an extra $50 worth of RAM.
It doesn’t even cost that for them.
I think they meant what the end user would NORMALLY pay, which is the better comparison.
But Apple isn’t buying consumer ram, they’re spending $8 to put on a different chip instead. If other laptop manufacturers are charging $50, it’s because they think they can get away with it, like apple.
Think that’s not really what’s being compared, but ok
The point is that the scam is actually even worse.
It’s really not. Other companies with socketed RAM also upsell, they are just limited in how much they can ask because the customer has the option to DIY adding more RAM. So the cost these companies charge is roughly the price to the customer of upgrading their own RAM, plus a bit extra for the convenience of not having to do that.
For example, Framework upcharges by something like 20-50% for RAM and SSDs when comparing to equivalent parts. It’s not just Apple, all OEMs do it, but Apple can charge much more because the user can’t easily replace either on their own.
$800 for $30 of ram
“yeah but that’s like having 32GB on a lame PC”
I know it’s not a like for like comparison, but the Pixel 9 Pro that launched this month has 16gb of RAM.
Yup, while the current iPhone 15 Pro is the only model which has 8 GB of RAM, with the regular iPhone 15 having 6 GB. All iPhone 16 models (launching next month) will still only have 8 GB according to rumors, which happens to be the bare minimum required to run Apple Intelligence.
Giving the new models only 8 GB seems a bit shortsighted and will likely mean that more complex AI models in future iOS versions won’t run on these devices. It could also mean that these devices won’t be able to keep a lot of apps ready in the background if running an AI model in-between.
16 GB is proper future-proofing on Google’s part (unless they lock new software features behind newer models anyway down the road), and Apple will likely only gradually increase memory on their devices.
Pretty much what NVIDIA is doing with their GPUs. Refusing to provide adequate future proof amount of VRAM on their cards. That’s planned obsolescence in action.
And like Apple, Nvidia has no shortage of fanboys that insist the pitiful amounts of (V)RAM is enough. The marketing sway those two companies have is incredible.
It’s a complete joke that Sapphire had an 8GB version of the R9 290X, what, 11 years ago or something? And yet Nvidia is still selling 8GB cards now, for exorbitant prices, and people lap it up.
I don’t use Apple computers but if we’re going into phones, iOS is extremely memory efficient. I’m on a six year old XS max with 4GB and it works like the day I got it, running circles around Android phones half its age.
If you were being cynical, you could say it was planned obsolescence and that when the new ai feature set rolls out that you have to get the new phone for them.
I think they got caught with their pants down when everybody started doing AI and they were like “hey, we have this cool VR headset”. Otherwise they would’ve at least prepared the regular iPhone 15 (6 GB) to be ready for Apple Intelligence. Every (Apple Silicon) device with 8 GB or more get Apple Intelligence, so M1 iPads from 2021 get it as well for example, even though the M1’s NPU is much weaker than some of the NPUs in unsupported devices with less RAM.
They are launching their AI (or at least everything under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella) with iOS 18.1 which won’t even release with the launch of the new iPhones, and it’ll be US only (or at least English only) with several of the features announced at WWDC still missing/coming later and it’s unclear how they proceed in the EU.
With how polished Apples AI on mobile was at launch compared to Gemini on Android at launch were it could not even do basics like timers I suspect Apple had it in the works for far longer and it would not have been a total surprise.
Also you are describing the situation at launch for new hardware, the software will evolve every year going forward and the requirements will likely increase every year. If I am buying a flagship phone right now I want it to last at least 3 years of updates, if not 5 years. The phone has to be able to cope with what is a very basic requirement that is enough RAM.
This isn’t some NPU thing, this is just basic common sense that more RAM is better for this, something the flagship iPhones could have benefited from for a while now.
It’s a good comparison actually because Apple keeps saying that their ram is faster because it’s soldered (Which is true but only if you squint). I don’t really think it makes a difference because if you run out of space you still run out of space, the fact that you can access the limited space more quickly doesn’t really help.
Well phone RAM also tends to be solded onto the board too so it’s a pretty good comparison.
When I hear about ram being soldered, I think of cheap computers with the memory permanently attached to the motherboard for planned obsolescence and/or cost.
The current mac silicon has memory integrated into the one chip that houses the cpu, gpu, cache, and memory. This approach has pros and cons, one of the biggest cons being upgradability.
It would be great if something like 64gb was stock for the prices they charge, but the fact I can run my laptop for days without it getting hot gives them a pass in my book.
It’s really sad that this needs to be an actual headline.
Lol, right? I had a dell laptop with 16GB in 2010. How are apple customers ok with this?
Ooohhh, wowie!
Meanwhile.im looking into upgrading my 64 gigs to 128, in small part because I might need to, in large Bart because I CAN.
Stop buying apple crap
for the same price other laptops sell for 64GB
what a bargain
I don’t really care unless it has the same price point as the 8gb one.
But we all know it won’t be.
£15 more RAM. £150 more price.
Has anyone ever successfully de-soldered Apple RAM and replaced it?
Isn’t the RAM inside the actual SoC with the Apple Silicon line? I haven’t really opened any of 'em up.
As for older Macs - sure, I know someone who replaced 8 gigs with 16 on either an Air or Pro model that had 16 available as an option but was shipped with 8. It’s just something you do when you have way too many Mac boards lying around at work and your bosses say you can’t get a new work laptop.
Pretty sure it is baked in as part of the SOC, not soldered on after the fact?
Naturally the price for the cheapest model will also be going to up several orders of magnitude more than the cost of materials, labor, and healthy profit margin to account for that as well I’m sure.
In 1999, the iBook was US$1599 (equivalent to $2925 in 2023) (source).
The 2010 13" Air was $1299 (more in today’s $) (source).
The current 13" M3 Air is $1099 (source).
So yeah, they may well raise prices, but the cost of Apple’s entry-level hardware has decreased in absolute terms over the years, and has decreased substantially if inflation is taken into account. Not to say the margins aren’t higher (no idea about that), but it’s interesting.
Why are apple products always so anemic on memory?
Because there are two types of mac users:
- People that are buying them with their own money because they’re trendy and just using them as glorified Internet browsers. 16gb is plenty.
- People using them professionally so their company is paying and Apple can over charge for the necessary memory upgrade
Because a huge part of their business model over the past twenty years has been the upsell.
I bought my first MacBook in 2007. It had 2gb of RAM as standard. I asked about upgrading it, the guy told me to pick some up online as it would be waaaay cheaper, and he was right. Did the same for the MacBook Pro that replaced it a few years later, but in the meantime they moved to the soldered model so had to swallow the cost of the 16gb ‘upgrade’ in my M2 Air.
To be fair, the cost over time of my Macs has been incredible. My 2011 MBP is still trucking along, these days running Linux Mint. With the cost to upgrade the RAM and replace the HDD with an SSD, all in it cost me around £1200. Less than £100 a year for a laptop that still works perfectly fine.
Wait, that’s it? Seriously?
Minimum, the base model chip can also come with 32gb.
And it probably won’t be able to be upgraded by the user, which should be the bare minimum.
And it
probablyabsolutely guaran-fucking-teed won’t be able to be upgraded by the user, which should be the bare minimum.You loose performance by making RAM upgradeable, hope the new RAM design, where you can install ram as if it was soldered in, is coming soon:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/motherboards/what-is-camm2
The amount of performance you lose is negligible compared to the amount of performance you lose in 5 years when the laptop’s processor is out of date and there’s barely enough ram to run a semi-heavy task.
MacBooks have an SoC, so it doesn’t make sense for the ram to be upgradable.
An SOC is a bad idea for laptops in my opinion, it just makes it harder to repair and less modular. I understand that it helps to compact the device, but it should only be used in phones if at all.
I disagree. SoCs allow for lower power consumption and a larger battery. They definitely have disadvantages but I don’t see ARM computers ever using anything but SoCs.
🆗
