Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Has Apple lost their mind? March 8th Event Disappointment
- Thread starter NightOne
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Apple already does more than most. The Al in the new Macs is actually recycled, not just recyclable. Several rare earth elements are also recycled as well.
Everyone likes to think that everyone else has the same use case they do. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of users never crack open the cases on their machines. In my own experience, about the only component I've found worth upgrading is the GPU. CPU upgrades also tend to require a new mainboard, and often new RAM if you want to get the most performance out of your new CPU. Moving to an SoC does make the machines less upgradeable, but there are other benefits that they provide as well. It isn't a lose-lose situation.
Most Macs haven't been upgradeable for some time. If this were really a problem, sales would plummet and Apple would change course, as they did wit the butterfly keyboard fiasco, and bringing back MagSafe and HDMI. Instead, YoY sales keep going up.
Everyone likes to think that everyone else has the same use case they do. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of users never crack open the cases on their machines. In my own experience, about the only component I've found worth upgrading is the GPU. CPU upgrades also tend to require a new mainboard, and often new RAM if you want to get the most performance out of your new CPU. Moving to an SoC does make the machines less upgradeable, but there are other benefits that they provide as well. It isn't a lose-lose situation.
Most Macs haven't been upgradeable for some time. If this were really a problem, sales would plummet and Apple would change course, as they did wit the butterfly keyboard fiasco, and bringing back MagSafe and HDMI. Instead, YoY sales keep going up.
Not when you compare to same specs 16”MBP? “just” more≈1k US$ for a really great display and added benefit of portability?
AppleCare+ is $59 per year and is available for 10yrs per the website.
Of course. 80% of personal computers are tablets or laptops. That doesn’t mean some people don’t want desktops.
Yes. Apple really should have introduced an M1 laptop at the start of the transition. Oh, wait… they did!
Yeah, I’m aware of that. Eliminating connectors helps: Nothing to shake loose, no debris to collect or chemistry changes to happen between conductors, etc. That’s robustness in the finished product. What about manufacturing?
Parts are so small; tolerances in manufacturing are very low. We have read of Apple rejecting parts manufacturers due to low yields of defect-free parts, like high-PPI displays. What becomes of the rejected materials? How much failure is tolerated at that level just so we can have these compact devices with no moving parts?
There is apparently enough regular failure in manufacturing that companies have decided to sell defective product or risk making less profit (or is it so bad that they risk not making profit at all??). They demand we accept dead pixels in displays as “normal”; screens with multiple dead pixels are deemed “non-defective”.
What about flash storage? How many cells are defective on day one and are otherwise invisible due to over-provisioning? How rapidly do they fail in normal use? How much over-provisioning is there before functionality is impacted? (My iPhone 4 has MP3 files suddenly corrupted, and that device is only 12 years old; is it the flash storage?) What’s considered “normal” use? Does lots of VM paging affect this? By how much?
In the case of integrated flash storage, we can’t replace parts we KNOW for a fact will wear out before other parts.
We‘re being pushed to throw things away after three years of use. What if you WANT to make use of one of these devices with flash storage for more than 5 years? 10? Longer?
It may sound ridiculous to the bleeding-edge ethos of tech geeks, but (as I said elsewhere), I wonder if SoC computers will ever even make it to “classic computer” status.
On the end-user (non-content-creator) end, processors and storage don’t need to be “better” anywhere near as rapidly as companies want to push repeat sales. Software always obsoletes devices faster than they physically wear out, and that should be an actively controversial issue. The hardware can’t wear out in that artificially short period of use, so we act like longevity doesn’t matter.
Eventually it will.
We are going to turn our world into a Max Headroom dystopia (where almost nothing is made new anymore) because we’re going to exhaust easily-utilized materials.
Our culture has been conditioned by tech capitalism to act like this is all a silly joke. It’s pretty bizarre to me how far this bleeding-edge ideology goes. There’s a guy on the forum complaining that the Mac Studio will be a useless boat anchor in a few years because Apple didn’t make it bleeding-edge enough. ? ??♂️
I remember $99 per year or more. I’ll have to give it a look.
I also didn’t see that “ten years” data point. I HAVE read an important caveat about the term length: they will let you pay for this insurance for as long as they have the parts to do “repairs”.
When it comes to devices with monolithic, integrated, and non-repairable boards with SoC ... I wonder how many years this actually goes.
My MacBook Pro 3,1 was under a known manufacturing defect replacement program, but that ended when they stopped having motherboards to offer as replacements. Because the defect was in every single one, and nothing was ever changed at manufacturing level, once they stopped making them, ALL were going to become useless.
Thank you very much for this info. I hope that trend is reliable.(Emphasis mine)
It's a perfectly valid concern, but I think it might be one that would matter a lot more 10 years ago than today if current trends continue. I'm almost certain I've posted this plot in here before, but here's the base RAM sizes (in MB) in all Mac SKUs released since 1984 (Y-axis is log-scaled). Note the plateau in growth that starts in the early 2010s:
View attachment 1971619
If that earlier rate of year-over-year growth had continued, Macs would have hit an average base RAM size of 32 GB in ~2018! Since OEM PCs have kept with this curve more-or-less over the same timeframe, I'd say that the "more RAM -> hungrier apps -> more need to upgrade RAM" cycle isn't what it used to be, either due to slowing in the development of cheaper high-density RAM, reduced need for more capacity, the influence of low-RAM smartphones on website/software design, or a combination of all three.
Unless something dramatic changes, 16 GB RAM in 10 years is going to be a much healthier than 4 GB RAM (the average base RAM in 2012) is today.
EDIT: Here's base storage over the same timeframe:
Of course, that doesn't help if you unexpectedly find yourself with a workload that requires more RAM or storage, but at least we don't have Moore's Law working against us the same way it used to. Plus, with Mac SSD speeds having DDR2-comparable bandwidth (not sure about the latency), swap is much less painful than it used to be.
Not to dispute anything, but here’s my reaction to “websites being made with consideration for less RAM on mobile devices”:
My iPhone 6s is a nightmare on infinite-scrolling and heavily-scripted websites like twitter. Safari tabs crash constantly on sites like those. It’s extremely irritating (I despise infinite scrolling for this and other reasons).
I suspect the crashing tabs problem is due to insufficient RAM on the device, which is really all about the bloated websites.
The only reason I replaced my iPhone 4 with the iPhone 6s was because the internet was unusable on my iPhone 4. I’d have gone on longer with it otherwise (it’s now my “iPod”, but the flash storage might be developing corruption issues).
Web browsers consume an astounding amount of RAM, and they are displaying seemingly innocuous & passive media much of that time.
You also mentioned how this trend doesn’t help when users suddenly need lots of RAM for something. Last night I had to restart Finder on my iMac because it was, for no known reason, using 6.7GB of memory. I have heard that Mac OS on M1 systems have memory leaks... oh, MORE memory leaks than High Sierra?? ?
I was referring to the specs, not the form factor.
WTF are you talking about? What does an M1 Pro in a Mac Mini have to do with laptops?
Oh thank you very much for pointing this out to me. I hadn’t seen those posts yet. I really do hope that’s user-serviceable storage!
I was just wondering last night where the screws are to open this machine, ha ha...
I’m not even sure myself. Discussions of RAM usage?
I saw people saying their M1 Macs have memory leaks. Those aren’t people running High Sierra.
Frankly, Apple have demonstrated an unwillingness to address existing bugs. I’ve dealt with such things across five major revisions of iOS (reported bugs going unfixed for YEARS). I don’t see why the same thing can’t be happening with Mac OS.
Marginalizing my memory leak issue just because I’m using an older version of Mac OS is not exactly logical from this context.
Actually it's exceptionally logical.
You're not just running an older version of Mac OS, you're running a version from over 4 years ago on a machine discontinued nearly 10 years ago.
Problems you may experience with that configuration are night and day different from ones experienced on Big Sur and Monterey, yet alone on Arm architecture over Intel.
For instance, High Sierra still used Kexts which were well know for causing random sporadic issues with anything - including Finder.
Now I'm not saying that Monterey is perfect - far from it - it absolutely has issues.
But you simply cannot compare issues from an OS that old on a computer even older and on a different architecture, to issues today.
I'm not marginalizing your issues either - I'm sure you do have them.
I just do not see how they're pertinent to this discussion.
You're welcome! I had a gut sense this sort of trend was happening, but it's cool to see it actually laid out in the data.
Ah, someone else who likes to make the most of older hardware
I got a 3GS when they first came out, and squeezed every ounce of usefulness out of it until they released the original SE, which I bought immediately after launch and use to this day.Yeah, Twitter often requires reloads for me too, but I think that has less to do with them not optimizing their web app because they target newer hardware and more to do with them wanting the web experience to be as unpleasant as possible so people make an account and use the official app. Pretty much every other website loads fine and responsively for me, despite a 6 year old CPU and 2 GB RAM! Regardless, the large amount of older iPhones and cheaper Android phones in active use with < 4GB RAM seems to broadly put a cap on how awful web designers can be with RAM usage.
On my 14" MBP I thankfully haven't had any issues with memory leaks yet, though to be fair I haven't pushed it particularly hard yet. On my 2013 iMac (which was actually running High Sierra until recently), the only time I had major memory leak issues was running heavy data processing scripts with big 3D arrays (~300-400 MB each). For whatever reason, WindowServer and/or kernel_task could eat up 5-10 GB of my 24 total when running those pipelines. Maybe they had to work overtime moving around smaller things in RAM to make room for all the large continuous chunks the scripts were creating.
In agreement with whom you were replying. Seriously though, even high end studio developers are saying "I dont know how I am going to use all this power, this is a significant jump forward", its obvious the average joe isnt supposed to be buying this product - it would just be extreme overkill in a truly stupid way.
Unfortunately AppleCare+ subscriptions are not available globally yet.
Darth Tulhu
macrumors 68020
THIS.
It could also be said that for the average user these new Studio machines could be an amazing investment that should last well over ten years (going by the fact that my previous Mac purchase was in 2011 and died last December).
I just don't see these going obsolete for a LONG time.
When Apple's lowest end model trounces outgoing Pro models like the iMac Pro, the conversation needs to change.
This escapes most people, because it just sounds to good to be true. That is until they actually see the live benchmarks and real-world testing videos out there.
It's not hyperbole. The M1 series is AMAZING.
If you are in the apple ecosystem and are intending to stay in the Apple eco system then yes, its amazing. If you are open to shopping around though, then you need to start qualifying that statement. Its still good and it still has AMAZING efficiency but in terms of just raw performance it starts getting beat by some of the competition, unless you are only comparing m1 ultra and only concerned with MT, then yes it is in theory potentially unmatched for the moment.
Apple not replacing the popular 27” iMac is crazy and quietly taking it out of the Apple store
Is a little sneaky. There’s a reason for all this and it will be evident in the future. Hopefully it’s for an iMac Pro
Is a little sneaky. There’s a reason for all this and it will be evident in the future. Hopefully it’s for an iMac Pro
Agree, however when compared to M1Max offer I’m having a hard time to justify the doubled price.
LG Ultrafine 27”@5k=1.300€. Comes with height adjustment stand😉
PS: HDR?
Last edited:
16” M1Max 10/32 64RAM 2TB is “only” ≈1k US$ more expensive than equivalent Studio, and you get a truly outstanding display and added benefit of portability. IMHO sweet spot of Studio is the Ultra 10/64@800GB/s and 128 RAM. Nothing to compare at that price, possibly why it’s priced around double the M1 max offer.
Display price is not great. I was expecting better visual specs rather than better speakers and cam. I want a Display to look at not to be seen from or ear from😒. LG comes with height adjustment, so equivalent Apple is 2259€ vs 1399€ LG. Price not bad not great. For 2259€ should have had 120hz Promotion. Apparently it’s coming later but price may be “stratospheric”.
First we thought that this was a joke from Apple.
We can easily use 40 TB SSD. It should have at least 16 TB SSD. The 128 GB RAM are good enough but of course 256 GB RAM would be better. But nothing of this and not even the M1 Ultra chip is inside the 16-inch MacBook Pro. This is very bad. We have expected that Apple will do it better.
Who is this "we" you keep referring to?