People keep saying this, but this assumes that Apple pays the same amount of money today for 8GB of memory as they did in 2017 when the MacBook Air first went to 8GB or in 2012 when the iMac first went to 8GB... The price of memory has dropped substantially in the last 5 years and there is no reason (except as an upselling tactic) that Apple should be offering 8GB in the bases models.
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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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And why isn't Apple allowed to set the price (and profit margin) for their products themselves? Obviously the market is accepting those prices, otherwise they wouldn't sell anything. While maximizing shareholder value shouldn't be Tim Cook's only concern, he's still an employee of a for-profit company with investors waiting for earnings reports.
Returned my base M3 model and got the base M3 Pro in Space Black. I plan on keeping it for 6-7 years, so I thought the 8GB of RAM wasn't going to age well and figured I may as well pay a bit extra and get the Pro.
Compare prices.
Even recently, Apple has maintained prices for many items, not raising them even though inflation in 2022 was substantial (not much this year though.)
And the Mac Mini dropped in price $100.
During the COVID pandemic there was a chips shortage that sent electronics components into a different market. It's in this last year that memory prices have dropped.
The 8GB arises from a limit of two LpDDR5 chips (in MBA and iMac). The M2 Pro used four such chips, the M3 Pro now uses three (hence the change in memory options.)
LpDDR5 come in a variety of capacities. Apple sources from Micron and Samsung (and perhaps others.)
Whatever the wholesale price, the important thing is that every single object in a product contributes to the final price. Engineers will, consequently, seek ways to eliminate anything they can, down to the last screw.
I remember those times like it was yesterday.
i7 needed DDR3, that just came out and was much more expensive than DDR2.
Having triple channel, the most common choices were 3x1GB and 3x2GB.
Most people didn't even bother getting to 4GB as Windows XP was the OS of choice for most people, Win7 would come out in 2009 and a lot of users stuck with 32-bit versions, so they couldn't even address over 3GB of RAM.
Apple itself shipped the 2009 Mac Pro with default choices of 3GB RAM and 6GB RAM. 13" 2008 Macbooks had 2GB.
Also, I'm not really advocating for Apple here, I despise their penny pinching as much as anybody else, but RAM was massively more important back then, because the swapfile would rely on an HDD and not on an SSD.
You could really feel the heaviness of swapping, the system would slow down to a crawl, there is nothing today that can bring back the feeling of the PC hanging and the HDD trying to make some sense by loudly grinding.
If you upgraded RAM back then you would really feel like you got a whole new PC, even for casual activities. Today you really have to tap into key applications to feel any difference.
It still bothers me because the 8GB are soldered and as soon as they don't suffice you have e-waste on your hands, but if you bring old times into the equation, the argument has to be fair.
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Which I'm not sure is sustainable long term and risks leading them to have to de-content products to maintain a price point. Furthermore, inflation does not usually track based on luxury goods but on housing and essential items, it isn't at all clear that inflation raised prices of the component or manufacturing costs of Macs.
I disagreed with this move as I believe that they should have bumped base specs rather than dropping the price.
There is no 8GB limit, the MBA and the iMac can both go to 24 GB, 8GB is just the default base memory, which I believe is too low. Memory prices have come down, glad we all agree then.
So? The wholesale prices dropping does mean that keeping other things constant we should expect more over time. Yes everything changes all the time and we can never be sure how things balance out but that doesn't mean apple's choices are the best ones.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread, people will defend 8 GB till apple switches away from it when suddenly it will make perfect sense. Apple claims they want more games on Mac, 8 GB of memory for the GPU and CPU is not enough for that. The 8GB of memory limit is fine if the laptop will never ever be used for more than the most basic of use cases but it prevents someone from ever exploring if their Mac can do more. The fact that none of their prebuilt options offer more than 8GB for the MBA, or the iMac is pretty sad.
We should complain when Apple seems content to stagnate on base memory capacities and storage capacities. If you're happy with stagnation, good for you, but I am not.
Apple is allowed to do what they want. But I don't think 8GBx256GB is acceptable in 2023 (I thought they should have bumped the flash at least to 512 last year) and it gets less acceptable every year that passes. As I said above, 8GBx256GB limits the future growth of the use of the machine. It can be used for basic tasks and can never grow beyond that. If that's the kind of machine Apple wants to sell why bother? They should aspire to more. They should aspire to offering products that set the standard that the PC industry should struggle to match. They shouldn't be content to sell a product that requires so many qualifications.
Not everybody uses their laptops for Lightroom and Final Cut Pro. We have to stop obsessing over specs and start looking at what people are actually doing on their computers and then work backwards from there. The reality is that the majority of users do use their devices for "basic" tasks. In my case, mostly google docs, web browsing, apps, office docs. I have also played Diablo 3 on it. 8gb of ram is more than enough for me, and I still have 140gb of available space on my 256gb M1 MBA.
I use office to set exam papers. I plan relief for absent teachers in google docs. I extract YouTube videos using some app called 4Kvideodownloader, plan my schedule with the calendar app, manage my mail, review my teaching material through PDF expert and notability, while debating with people on Macrumours in Safari, just to name a few tasks.
8 gb of ram was enough for me in 2020, it's enough for me now in 2023, and it will likely still be enough for me 2-3 years later when I finally decide to upgrade it.
I also have a windows laptop with 16gb ram issued to me by my school. The performance between it and my M1 MBA is like day and night. For example, I can zoom for hours away from a power point and my MBA stays cool to the touch. That's a standard right there that the PC industry struggles to match, even 3 years later, because Intel is not able to provide the same marriage of performance and power efficiency that Apple chose to focus on.
This is not something that may be readily apparent if you are just comparing spec for spec, and maybe that's the whole problem here. In a sense, it's highly reminiscent of back when android users laughed at iPhone processors for having less ram and cores, until they realised that more cores was actually a liability because it consumed more power and throttled more often, resulting in slower performance compared to Apple's A-series chips.
The problem here is that there is too much focus on specs and not enough on the user experience. If all people see is "Hmm, every other windows laptop has 16gb ram while the entry level Macbook has only 8, so I don't think whatever Apple is doing is going to work", then I think they go down the wrong path.
It was never about the year. Apple would spare no costs and put as much RAM as possible into the machine, if it was an M3 Max not a plain entry-level M3.
Because basic and moderate tasks cover almost everything people do for over 95% of all customers. The faster machines do not primarily exist for the few people who do need them, but for the many people who want them and frankly could and should pay a little more for their dream Mac. A luxury product can't be cheap.
But they do. And as the years go by, their entry-level machines became even too good for people to think about upgrading. Neither the M2 nor the M3 could lure M1 users. In 2023/24 every consumer should be happy to have an M1/8/256 Mac as their main machine. This low-end Mac isn't crippled as it was in the age of spinning disks.
EDIT: Well, except in one way. Halving SSD speeds by using only one 256 GB chip. But this is also more of a psychological reason to upgrade, than a real problem. All these numbers are great: M1/8/256. Nobody needs to get mad about them. But you could, if you want to torture yourself? 🤪
My 2010 MBP has 8GB RAM and Mac OS was much leaner and faster back then.
Now they add a lot of bloat and overhead in comparison to how Mac OS was in 2010.
Snow Leopard and Windows 7 were the last OSs meant as a clean slate to run your applications and nothing more.
It's just the whole industry paradigm that changed. Now you have to keep running in background layers for cloud compatibility, notification support, interaction with other devices, autosave for documents, full disk encryption, so much more going under the hood.
Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.
I have some x86 computers lying around and I use Windows LTSC on them, which is basically a bare stripped version of Windows 10 without store and bloat, much like Snow Leopard / Win7 was.
But they are not my lifestyle devices. A lot of daily tasks are much less immediate due to extra steps.
Also measuring progress via boot and shutdown time really doesn't mean much. I just checked the uptime on my MBP right now and it was 29 days.
If you had such a snappy experience, you were probably an early adopter of SSDs. Any HDD based system was around a minute for boot or more.
Also I stand by my point. Running out of RAM was a NIGHTMARE with the system running on an HDD.
With an SSD is "meh, whatever" if it happens sporadically, and if you really develop that need in your daily workflow, you can just resell/hand down the system to an user that will genuinely enjoy it.
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Well, yes and no! Other than Windows, macOS sometimes becomes leaner, with new OS versions running much better than the old. But of course they are also adding new features, which (only when implemented badly) make things slower. But then again they also developed new silicon with more cores, faster caches and Neural Engines and Security Enclaves running these background tasks independent from the main CPU.
Overall nobody can deny that an M1 Mac with 8 GB RAM runs much-much-much smother than any Intel Mac (with 8 GB or more on Snow Leopard or whichever OS version you consider to be the best). There is undeniable progress over time. Extrapolating this trend into the future, M9 Macs will probably work superb on just 4 GB of RAM. It's a misconception that memory needs only grow. It's only because people want to play games with more and more explosions, higher frame rates and bigger resolution, their graphics needs keep rising. For everything office related, we're well beyond good enough.
Also I feel the need to add something to this discussion.
Apple has always charged a quite constant amount of money for a "True Pro" laptop over the course of years.
That amount of money is between the $1999-$2499 price bracket.
It has been like this for 20 years at least. Before that, it was probably more.
If you want something cheaper, they will give you a good machine but with some specs that will be ridiculous to any PC user, because they have to also sell the high-end of their lineup.
With iBooks (2003), you couldn't extend the screen to an external one, only duplicate it, much like M3s only allowing for 1 extension rather than multiple ones.
With Macbooks (2006), you got a Combo optical drive when even $399 laptops had DVD-RW by then.
Also with Macbooks (2006), you had quite a good CPU for the price but absymal GPU, when you could get a gaming Wintel laptop for less.
With the Macbook (2008) you lost the Firewire port, and the backlash was so harsh that they had to add it back on the following year.
With the whole Retina lineup (2012-2019) you had to spend >$2000 to get any kind of dedicated GPU. Could you get a $700 gaming Wintel laptop instead? Yes you could.
Could they start from 16GB in 2023? Yes, they could also start with 32GB, RAM is so cheap, they wouldn't lose money with that.
But they just roll this way, I'm not endorsing them, but it's just really hard to be pissed at them after witnessing this strategy for so much time.
When we get to 16GB standard, stay assured that they'll think about some other douchery so you'll still spend $2500 rather than $1500 for your "True Pro" needs.
This much, I can promise you.
Apple has always charged a quite constant amount of money for a "True Pro" laptop over the course of years.
That amount of money is between the $1999-$2499 price bracket.
It has been like this for 20 years at least. Before that, it was probably more.
If you want something cheaper, they will give you a good machine but with some specs that will be ridiculous to any PC user, because they have to also sell the high-end of their lineup.
With iBooks (2003), you couldn't extend the screen to an external one, only duplicate it, much like M3s only allowing for 1 extension rather than multiple ones.
With Macbooks (2006), you got a Combo optical drive when even $399 laptops had DVD-RW by then.
Also with Macbooks (2006), you had quite a good CPU for the price but absymal GPU, when you could get a gaming Wintel laptop for less.
With the Macbook (2008) you lost the Firewire port, and the backlash was so harsh that they had to add it back on the following year.
With the whole Retina lineup (2012-2019) you had to spend >$2000 to get any kind of dedicated GPU. Could you get a $700 gaming Wintel laptop instead? Yes you could.
Could they start from 16GB in 2023? Yes, they could also start with 32GB, RAM is so cheap, they wouldn't lose money with that.
But they just roll this way, I'm not endorsing them, but it's just really hard to be pissed at them after witnessing this strategy for so much time.
When we get to 16GB standard, stay assured that they'll think about some other douchery so you'll still spend $2500 rather than $1500 for your "True Pro" needs.
This much, I can promise you.
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Far from an end all example. However, getting a tech YouTuber, one of the die hard PC users to give an “it did so well.” immediately after a comment/statement of “I thought [editing 4K in Adobe Premiere] would be pretty trash on [a 14” M2 MBP] considering this is not only a base model Mac, but also a Mac. It’s an Apple product.” should hold some water.
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if Apple really cares about environment, they need make RAM and SSD upgradable.
then no one minds if the base model too bad.
I believe they also did this with the tiny 24” iMac. Apple and Adobe are a monopoly. They definitely need competitors. Now.
Yeah…. There is a “slight” price difference too
How about if I said how can Apple charge that much money and still have 8GB for the base.
Yeah…. There is a “slight” price difference too
How about if I said how can Apple charge that much money and still have 8GB for the base.
Indeed, there are $600 PC’s with 16GB already.
Heck, for $1300 you can get 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD and a RTX 4070.
Smartphones even come with 16GB RAM.
Apple has been being cheap with their iPhone RAM too. Now they bumped it to 8GB RAM finally.
How can Honda call one of its Accord models a "Sport Hybrid" when it's clearly not a sports car?
I believe it's called "marketing".
I believe it's called "marketing".
Yeah…. There is a “slight” price difference too
How about if I said how can Apple charge that much money and still have 8GB for the base.
I think you should probably just say “why are macs so expensive” because that’s really what the core complaint of this thread is.
As a matter of fact, I use a Samsung S23 Ultra with 8GB RAM and I'm pissed at it because apps are closed in the background too often, and there are phones with more RAM for less.
It's just a curse at this point, I guess.
I find it more interesting how Apple consistently offers differentiating features that allow it to charge a premium and how Apple's marketing can offset that premium.
I find it irritating how once you are tied into the ecosystem, and as your requirements grow (64gb storage may have been fine, now you need 256. 256 may have been fine, now you need 512. etc), every future purchase you make will automatically be at the premium price to at least match what you had with your older devices.
There's more to it than that. That's like saying a a 335 hp Audi A8 should be priced lower than a 402 hp VinFast VF, because it has less hp.