No it isn't 8GB of RAM costs apple likely less than $10 (LPDDR4X 32 GB is $6.30)
The idea that Apple is eating a $200 loss if they upgrade the base model is fantasy... Apple is making like 190% margin on those upgrades.
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How can Apple sell a Mac with 8GB of RAM in 2023 and call it "Pro"
- Thread starter parseckadet
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The idea that Apple is eating a $200 loss if they upgrade the base model is fantasy... Apple is making like 190% margin on those upgrades.
Why do you think lost margin isn't cost to the business?
People need to stop totaling the cost of sand as though it means something.
An additional 8GB RAM stick from Apple (to upgrade from 8GB RAM to 16GB RAM), which costs $200, buys you 2 of those PC laptops.
Not sure if you realize this, but this again goes against Apple, selling 8GB RAM for the price of 2 whole laptops.
The margins on the base model could easily be maintained by simply increasing price by $50-75 while moving to 16 GB RAM + 512 GB Flash.
That maintains base model margins.
The margins on the higher tier models would likewise be maintained with minor $50-$100 price increases.
If the second model up was 16 GB + 1TB and they raised the price by $50-100 the margins would be maintained.
BUT
Price increases aren't necessary if the following is true:
16 GB of LPDDR5 memory in 2023 costs apple the same as 8 GB did in 2020
(Ditto for flash storage)
If the price of memory has fallen in the last 3 years (it has) then Apple is not maintaining margins on the base models but increasing them (assuming other device costs are equal).
Note: Guessing at the price of the M3 vs M2 or M1 is not relavent here unless you can guarantee that the M3 is more expensive than M2 and M1 were. M3 has more transistors and is on a more expensive process but while wafer costs went up the number of transistors per wafer also went up so per transistor cost is likely to have gone down. It is unclear to me that the M3 will cost Apple more per chip.
If you guys look what Apple did to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, where the 256 GB model became the base model, the price of the base model increased to the price of what the 256 GB model was.
That is why the 8GB RAM model is the base model, to make it more cheap.
If Apple would have made the 16GB/512GB 14" MBP the base model, the base model would be $200 more expensive. That is how Apple does their pricing.
That is why the 8GB RAM model is the base model, to make it more cheap.
If Apple would have made the 16GB/512GB 14" MBP the base model, the base model would be $200 more expensive. That is how Apple does their pricing.
Please. You can buy laptops in the $1300 range with 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD and a RTX 4070 (which could give a M3 Max a headache) along with a 144hz display.
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As I said above, this makes the assumption that 8GB costs Apple the same in 2023 as it did in 2020.
It doesn't matter how much it costs, this is how Apple does their pricing. Look at what Apple did with the iPhone 15 Pro Max where the base model was upgraded.
If you think you are getting an additional 8GB RAM for free from Apple, you will be disappointed.
It’s not like Gatekeeper doesn’t like to look into what you’re running on your Mac
But it is true (surprisingly) that there are 8GB laptops (Lenovos) on the same site that cost almost $2000 ($1920):Please. You can buy laptops in the $1300 range with 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD and a RTX 4070 (which could give a M3 Max a headache) along with a 144hz display.
MSI Katana GF66 11UE-617 Gaming Laptop Intel Core i7-11800H 2.30 GHz 15.6" Windows 11 Home 64-bit - Newegg.com
Buy MSI GF Series - 15.6" 144 Hz IPS - Intel Core i7-11800H - GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU - 16 GB DDR4 - 512 GB NVMe SSD - Windows 11 Home 64-bit - Gaming Laptop (Katana GF66 11UE-617 ) with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!www.newegg.com
MSI Pulse15 15.6" QHD 165Hz Gaming Laptop Intel® Core™ i9-13900H RTX 4070 32GB DDR5 1TB NVMe SSD Win11 64 bit - Newegg.com
Buy MSI Pulse 15 - 15.6" 165 Hz - Intel Core i9 13th Gen 13900H (2.60GHz) - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU - 32 GB DDR5 - 1 TB NVMe SSD - Windows 11 Home 64-bit - Gaming Laptop (Pulse 15 B13VGK-287US ) with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!
MSI GF63 Thin 10UC-440 Gaming Laptop Intel Core i5-10500H 2.50 GHz 15.6" Windows 10 Home 64-bit - Newegg.com
Buy MSI GF Series - 15.6" 144 Hz IPS - Intel Core i5-10500H - GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU - 8 GB DDR4 - 256 GB NVMe SSD - Windows 10 Home 64-bit - Gaming Laptop (GF63 Thin 10UC-440 ) with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!
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Please. You can buy laptops in the $1300 range with 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD and a RTX 4070 (which could give a M3 Max a headache) along with a 144hz display.
MSI Katana GF66 11UE-617 Gaming Laptop Intel Core i7-11800H 2.30 GHz 15.6" Windows 11 Home 64-bit - Newegg.com
Buy MSI GF Series - 15.6" 144 Hz IPS - Intel Core i7-11800H - GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU - 16 GB DDR4 - 512 GB NVMe SSD - Windows 11 Home 64-bit - Gaming Laptop (Katana GF66 11UE-617 ) with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!
MSI Pulse15 15.6" QHD 165Hz Gaming Laptop Intel® Core™ i9-13900H RTX 4070 32GB DDR5 1TB NVMe SSD Win11 64 bit - Newegg.com
Buy MSI Pulse 15 - 15.6" 165 Hz - Intel Core i9 13th Gen 13900H (2.60GHz) - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU - 32 GB DDR5 - 1 TB NVMe SSD - Windows 11 Home 64-bit - Gaming Laptop (Pulse 15 B13VGK-287US ) with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!
MSI GF63 Thin 10UC-440 Gaming Laptop Intel Core i5-10500H 2.50 GHz 15.6" Windows 10 Home 64-bit - Newegg.com
Buy MSI GF Series - 15.6" 144 Hz IPS - Intel Core i5-10500H - GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU - 8 GB DDR4 - 256 GB NVMe SSD - Windows 10 Home 64-bit - Gaming Laptop (GF63 Thin 10UC-440 ) with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!
Sorry, it's been a long time since I was 14. Enjoy your RGB toys.
But it is true (surprisingly) that there are 8GB laptops (Lenovos) on the same site that cost almost $2000 ($1920):
Laptop Finder: How to Choose an Amazing Laptop | Newegg
Finding the best laptop for you can be difficult. Try our Laptop Finder by specs to browse for recommendations based on budget, use & key features.
That is because for these machines, Lenovo will come to your workplace the next working day to fix or replace your machine in order to minimize production time.
And Lenovo are also military grade laptops being able to handle spills, bumps and drops even.
You’re basically saying that no matter what Apple charges it is justified, that’s not an argument.
No one is asking Apple to eat the cost of the extra Ram, instead they are asking Apple to keep the cost they pay for RAM constant and then when ram prices fall they should use that to make the base mode better.
If it costs Apple $10 dollars for the 8GB in the base model in 2020 but in 2023 $10 dollars would buy 16 GB then Apple not putting in 16 GB is them pinching penny’s to encourage people to upgrade to higher models where they are making essentially an extra $200 pure profit.
If prices don’t matter you have no argument to make. We can say Apple should be giving us 64GB in the base model because price doesn’t matter.
If you buy the warranty for onsite repair instead of the depot one. It’s inexpensive for what the service is, but don’t mislead people into thinking this is just a free service offered on all Lenovo machines.
We stick to depot repairs because we’re just en e-commerce company so it’s easy to load up the users profile on a loaner and send it out.
I don’t mislead anyone. The machine he listed includes that service. It is included in the price. You don’t need to buy it extra.
Thanks for the philosophy lesson...
Simple fact is, Apple was built on quality customer experience, but under Tim this is being eroded away in favour of margins to appease shareholders' interests.
Whilst that Wall Street mentality holds in the short term, in the longer arc of time it becomes ultimately very corrosive and counter productive.
In the age of non-upgradeable RAM, 8GB might be ok for a few users in the short term, but the machine will age more quickly than it should.
If we could replace the RAM ourselves after the fact, or RAM upgrade pricing wasn't extortionate at the time of purchase, then 8GB could be forgivable as a starting point. But it's not. It's only there to advertise a lower starting price; it's just marketing BS and nothing more.
Under the current state of things, 8GB is a MBP in 2023 is unacceptable. End of.
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Ok. Let's see what the developer of MacWhisper, currently the best voice transcription software available for Mac, has to say about this. I'm quoting from the product page:
"MacWhisper requires a lot of computer memory to work well. To use the Medium and Large models your Mac should have more than 8GB of RAM."
Also according to OpenAI, the developer of the AI model used by the before mentioned MacWhisper App, the large model (best performance and lowest error rate) needs ~10GB of RAM. This is only for using the the model. You still need RAM to run your regular os/apps and some to drive your graphics card.
Apple pays next to nothing for upgrading from 8–>16gb. You pay 230 euros (~I guess this is like 200-210 euro margin for Apple). Same, or even worse, for their SSD upgrades: non upgradeable yourself, but you pay 460 euro from 256gb to 1tb. For that price you have a ps5 with a faster 0.825tb ssd. Or buy a 2tb for slightly over 100 euros that is as fast as the one in a mbp. Instead for the latter upgrade you pay 920 euros (9 times the price!).
And the market is actually sorting it out: 34% decline…It is not just “post covid syndrome” and m1 being so awesome. As for the latter argument: how many in the intel era upgraded their Mac’s every two to three years (ie the time between the M1 and now)? Not many. But suddenly this explains the 34% drop ? Or could it be that in a tighter economy, people will not pay an arm and a leg for a 8GB MBP or 8/256 SSD MBA or to upgrade to something (16GB or more) that should not be an upgrade at all, or should cost at least 3-4 times less than indicated?
That’s interesting; thanks!
I see that MacWhisperer runs locally, which explains its memory requirement: “All transcription is done on your device, no data leaves your machine. This makes MacWhisper a great app for sensitive audio such as interviews.”
This is certainly a good example of where more RAM would be necessary. That said, I would expect the majority of AI-powered interactions to be processed remotely, like Siri.
Apple has been slowly moving to on device Siri actually. On device processing is both better for privacy and works when you don’t have an internet connection.
This topic certainly generates some strong opinions
The way I see it:
(1) Macs are marketed as premium machines, and priced as such. Whether they are "worth" the price is highly subjective and depends on all sorts of variables, not just the raw specifications and the cost of similar components on other machines
(2) I think we can agree that the component cost difference between 8GB and 16GB costs Apple a lot less the price for end-users. A large part of the anger here is caused by this apparent price gouging, and while Apple's upgrade prices are high, other manufacturers are not much better (e.g. an upgrade to a Dell Inspiron from 8GB/256GB to 16/512GB is also about $400). Unfortunately, this is just the nature of marketing and price segmentation.
(3) MacOS *does* run quite well in 8GB, together with "a few" applications, but anything more than relatively light use (e.g. a dozen browser tabs, music app, chat/messages, simple documents at a time) will likely cause swap memory usage and *eventual* slowdown. Of course, as applications & web-sites become more RAM hungry, this issue will become more marked, which is another cause of dissatisfaction and concern that the machine could become "weaker" in a couple of years.
(4) Apple could increase the base RAM to 16GB and add a small price increase without losing profit they make on the 8GB machine...but they *would lose* the big profit they make from a chunk of people upgrading to 16GB at $200 a pop.
Ultimately, people will vote with their wallets.
If buyers understand that 8GB isn't much these days, and all of Apple's competitors offer more at a cheaper price, then the "premium allure" of Apple will start to diminish. It will be seen as poor value, despite the other advantages the machine may (or may not) have in buyers' eyes.
If technical buyers understand that a RAM upgrade is essential for their intended usage, they have to add that the price to an already expensive machine, knowing that it is a largely artificial cost imposed by Apple, which causes resentment.
At the end of the day, if the overall opinion is formed that a Mac computer represents poor value for money (taking into account specs, functionality, performance, build quality, reliability, TCO, premium status), their market share will decrease and Apple will either take the loss, or adjust prices either up (to compensate for the loss) or down (to attract more market share).
I liken it to eating at an expensive but highly recommended restaurant. I've eaten in a few places that cost a four-figure sum for two people. At that price, the experience has to be exceptional, and even then it's hard to justify. On a couple of those occasions, I didn't think it was that great for the money. The result? I didn't go back to those restaurants, and looked for better value elsewhere. Other people may (literally) dine out on telling their friends that they ate at that exclusive restaurant that cost a fortune, and the actual food wasn't the important thing to them.
That is the risk that Apple is taking.
The way I see it:
(1) Macs are marketed as premium machines, and priced as such. Whether they are "worth" the price is highly subjective and depends on all sorts of variables, not just the raw specifications and the cost of similar components on other machines
(2) I think we can agree that the component cost difference between 8GB and 16GB costs Apple a lot less the price for end-users. A large part of the anger here is caused by this apparent price gouging, and while Apple's upgrade prices are high, other manufacturers are not much better (e.g. an upgrade to a Dell Inspiron from 8GB/256GB to 16/512GB is also about $400). Unfortunately, this is just the nature of marketing and price segmentation.
(3) MacOS *does* run quite well in 8GB, together with "a few" applications, but anything more than relatively light use (e.g. a dozen browser tabs, music app, chat/messages, simple documents at a time) will likely cause swap memory usage and *eventual* slowdown. Of course, as applications & web-sites become more RAM hungry, this issue will become more marked, which is another cause of dissatisfaction and concern that the machine could become "weaker" in a couple of years.
(4) Apple could increase the base RAM to 16GB and add a small price increase without losing profit they make on the 8GB machine...but they *would lose* the big profit they make from a chunk of people upgrading to 16GB at $200 a pop.
Ultimately, people will vote with their wallets.
If buyers understand that 8GB isn't much these days, and all of Apple's competitors offer more at a cheaper price, then the "premium allure" of Apple will start to diminish. It will be seen as poor value, despite the other advantages the machine may (or may not) have in buyers' eyes.
If technical buyers understand that a RAM upgrade is essential for their intended usage, they have to add that the price to an already expensive machine, knowing that it is a largely artificial cost imposed by Apple, which causes resentment.
At the end of the day, if the overall opinion is formed that a Mac computer represents poor value for money (taking into account specs, functionality, performance, build quality, reliability, TCO, premium status), their market share will decrease and Apple will either take the loss, or adjust prices either up (to compensate for the loss) or down (to attract more market share).
I liken it to eating at an expensive but highly recommended restaurant. I've eaten in a few places that cost a four-figure sum for two people. At that price, the experience has to be exceptional, and even then it's hard to justify. On a couple of those occasions, I didn't think it was that great for the money. The result? I didn't go back to those restaurants, and looked for better value elsewhere. Other people may (literally) dine out on telling their friends that they ate at that exclusive restaurant that cost a fortune, and the actual food wasn't the important thing to them.
That is the risk that Apple is taking.
I am still waiting for someone to show me why 8GB RAM is not usable for normal uses of the Mac. No, I don't want to look at Activity Monitor or a benchmark. I want an example of some normal thing you can't do with an 8GB Mac.
My sister just bought a base model M2 with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. I tried it out and it can edit iPhone photos, shop on Amazon, and read emails. Siri can turn her lights on and off, Garage Band seems to work, and so on. I can't seem to find anything that is really slow.
I think Apple got it right.
My Mac Mini has twice the base specs, I use it for engineering work, CAD, and simulation but I've yet to run really complex models on it yet. (pause) OK, I just took few minutes and looks at a CNC mill that I'm designing, there must be 1000+ parts. Fusion 360 runs very well. CPU was at 50% and GPU at 90%, RAM was 11GB but I've also got Chrome browser and a Python development system running. The M2-Pro seems to outperform my old 16-core Xeon-based Linux PC for many things. (The PC with 64GB RAM installed was MUCH better at running a set of virtual machines.)
The base model works for 90% of users and the "doubled spec'd" M2-Pro seems to be a good match for engineering and software development.
Again, what real-world problems are people noticing on their 8GB Macs?