So many of these responses: "I could have paid for a Mac, but also I did, so I have no idea why anyone would take my protest seriously."
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Macs would be more "value for money" if Apple doubled RAM & SSD across the board
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So many of these responses: "I could have paid for a Mac, but also I did, so I have no idea why anyone would take my protest seriously."
Yes, for professional work, not every video is a 2-hour movie. I don't know if you've heard of these new-fangled YouTube videos, or TikToks, or Reels, or Shorts, or ads. It may blow your mind to find out how much professionally-made content there is out there that's under 10 minutes long.
It's not that Lenovo has a perpetual sale, they simply engage in manipulative marketing tactics designed to convince the user to make a purchase. Frankly, I am shocked that this is not illegal.
I won't disagree, and from what I've heard lately the quality of their customer support has decreased. I have an older thinkpad X1e (first gen), and it's an excellent laptop. It was faster, similar battery and about 50% cheaper then a then comparable MBP. Not the MSRP, but the so called sale price.
Overall, It was a great laptop, but compared to today's standards, its slow, loud, and heavy. My Razer and M1 MBP run circles around it.
The lightbulb cartel was just to illustrate how sometimes technically superior products that could be sold at a reasonable price never make it to the hands of customers because the industry is structured in such a way as to make that offering unsustainable. As I said, not apples to apples. If anything the computer market is even more complex, because Apple is not only a seller of sophisticated products, but a buyer of sophisticated components that required developed manufacturing in their own right. If Apple has power over their customers, it has perhaps even more power over their suppliers. Have you looked into the terms they impose on suppliers? Apple gets out of their way to make sure that you can't find the parts you need to fix your out-of-warranty device, often cheap parts that should be bog-standard, but aren't, because Apple had them designed so that you can't get them anywhere but from the original suppliers, and those are forbidden, by contract, to sell them to any one else.
As for low-quality PCs, do you see a lot of high-quality devices out there on the market? Apple's the best of the bunch, I'll grant you that, but not without their shenanigans, ask anyone who bought (or had to buy) a Mac with a butterfly keyboard of the 2015-2019 vintage. They replaced the keyboards, but with identical fail-prone parts and only up to 4 years after sale. Thinkpads used to be good machines, but after Lenovo bought them they became mediocre like the rest. Not meaning to be a little to saucy, but it would be nice if companies put "hard" back into "hardware".
Not really man, I don't hate on corps. They are what they are, I just don't pretend they're anything else. It's a matter of, you know, getting things into proper focus. You see the balloon getting into and out of focus, but, no matter what happens, you should not blink...
To be fair to Apple they are not the only hypocrite corp out there. They're just the biggest/most prominent, and so attract more attention.
If you’re gonna try to be cool and use that term, it’s spelled “aughts”. Don’t let it backfire. 💋
4K RAW is - sure - but I’ve plenty 4K videos on my 64 GB iPhone?
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… not uncompressed though
(not that it is that important for consumer stuff of course)
Yeah exactly, as I said. 4K RAW is huge but regular 4K (HEVC) is fine.
As you say, doesn’t matter for consumer stuff but plenty consumers will be editing 4K videos of their kids on base model machines.
Definitely not “720p as the most taxing use case” nonsense when you could edit 4K on the 12” MacBook.
Based on which economical reality? You want them to sell a premium class product at a price of a budget product. As we discussed previously, nobody else sells a premium PC with that config at that price level. I mean, you can always bring up the cheap Inspiron with it's crippled RAM and SSD, but that's a bit like like claiming that free range beef should cost as much as cage chicken because otherwise it's not "good value for the customer".
No, people counter that there is no economical sense in selling a premium product for $700 if everyone else asks $1000 for something similar (numbers just arbitrary). You are asking a company to deliberately cripple their revenue stream just because you don't like the price. And yes, it's a simplistic account. There is also a certain component of extortion in the entire system — if you want a shiny Mac you don't have much choice but to pay Apple's very high price, which creates the spiral of price inflation. But this problem won't be solved at discussing things at the current level.
If Mac SKUs would have double the RAM & SSD at the same price, chip, CPU cores & GPU cores.
| Mac model | MSRP | Chip | CPU (Core) | GPU (Core) | RAM (GB) | SSD (TB) |
| iMac 24" | $1,699 | M1 | 8 | 8 | 16 | 1 |
| iMac 24" | $1,499 | M1 | 8 | 8 | 16 | 0.5 |
| iMac 24" | $1,299 | M1 | 8 | 7 | 16 | 0.5 |
| Mac mini* | $1,299 | M2 Pro | 10 | 16 | 32 | 1 |
| Mac mini | $799 | M2 | 8 | 10 | 16 | 1 |
| Mac mini | $599 | M2 | 8 | 10 | 16 | 0.5 |
| Mac Studio | $3,999 | M1 Ultra | 20 | 48 | 128 | 2 |
| Mac Studio | $1,999 | M1 Max | 10 | 24 | 64 | 1 |
| Mac Studio** | $3,999 | M2 Ultra | 24 | 60 | 128 | 2 |
| Mac Studio** | $1,999 | M2 Max | 12 | 30 | 64 | 1 |
| MBA | $1,499 | M2 | 8 | 10 | 16 | 1 |
| MBA | $1,199 | M2 | 8 | 8 | 16 | 0.5 |
| MBA | $999 | M1 | 8 | 7 | 16 | 0.5 |
| MBP 13" | $1,499 | M2 | 8 | 10 | 16 | 1 |
| MBP 13" | $1,299 | M2 | 8 | 10 | 16 | 0.5 |
| MBP 14" | $3,099 | M2 Max | 12 | 30 | 64 | 2 |
| MBP 14" | $2,499 | M2 Pro | 12 | 19 | 32 | 2 |
| MBP 14" | $1,999 | M2 Pro | 10 | 16 | 32 | 1 |
| MBP 16" | $3,499 | M2 Max | 12 | 38 | 64 | 2 |
| MBP 16" | $2,699 | M2 Pro | 12 | 19 | 32 | 2 |
| MBP 16"* | $2,499 | M2 Pro | 12 | 19 | 32 | 1 |
| MB 12"*** | $699 | A16 Bionic | 6 | 5 | 8 | 256GB |
| Mac nano*** | $299 | A16 Bionic | 6 | 5 | 8 | 256GB |
Note:
*If RAM & SSD were increased my choice would be the $1299 Mac mini M2 Pro if there was no iMac 27" replacement & the $2499 MBP 16" M2 Pro. Both of which would have 32GB RAM & 1TB SSD.
**My guess on the CPU core & GPU core count of the future 2023 Mac Studio M2 Max & M2 Ultra SKUs.
***iPhone chip-based Mac. If M1 & M2 can be used in an iPad Pro & iPad Air why not use iPhone chip in a cheap laptop & desktop? "Mac nano" uses the 2022 Apple TV 4K enclosure as to make it 0.27L instead of 1.39L of the Mac mini. This reduces shipping cost as you can pack in more "Mac nano" per shipping pallet.
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I am not asking for a premium product at a budget price.
I am asking for a premium product at a reasonable price.
Apple charges $200 for 256GB of additional storage, a price that off the shelf retail will get you 2TB of additional storage.
Apple charges $200 for 8GB of memory, the LPDDR5 Apple uses would have to cost 20 times what LPDDR4 costs for this to make sense. See: https://www.dramexchange.com/
Given the prices for these components I would guess that Apple could easily start the Mac mini at $799 with 16/512 and have similar or better margins than the current $599 Mac mini.
Apple is one of the companies that defines what the pricing for these things should cost, my point is that for the last 12 years Apple has stopped moving the baseline forward. Oh sure, there are ever more options at the top, up to 8TB now, but the bottom of the stack doesn't move any more and that is frustrating.
I said $799, not $699, because I wanted Apple to maintain the margin on the base model . If this would cripple their revenue stream then they have already screwed up the base model's margins.
I am asking the company to actually focus on moving the base forward again.
Edit: And people did counter that people buying the base model don't need more storage. There was a whole back and forth over like 3 pages with AnalogueKid and boss.king saying the base model already met the needs of the people buying it.
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You’ve hit the nail on the head.
Apple needs to offer either reasonably priced upgrades or allow users to upgrade ram and storage themselves. Anything else is greed and doesn’t leave a good taste in the mouth.
Yes, I could go with another manufacturer but Apple won’t let them run macOS because they are anti-competitive gatekeepers.
Yes, I could run Windows / Linux but I like macOS.
For example,
A 2TB WD BLACK SN850X NVMe from framework costs the same as what apple charges for 256GB of storage and is at least twice the speed in sequential write. Especially given apple crippling the performance of the base unit machines.
Not only is Apple still releasing computers with too little RAM and drive capacity which has been more or less the same for over a decade, they're also overcharging for RAM and SSD upgrades that should be standard in 2023, but on top of that the speed of the entry level model has half the SSD speeds of the previous generation. How can we not be offended? Apple tries to appear as a premium brand but their entry level models have half the RAM and SSD capacity of other brands in the same price range and unlike their competitors, the RAM and SSD in Macs cannot be upgraded, so you can't even buy the entry level model and upgrade it later.
Can anyone provide numbers for Apple's gross profit (as opposed to net profit) on these upgrades?
On the M3, Apple charges $1,200 to upgrade from 36 GB to 128 GB LPDDR5-6400 RAM (=> $13/GB), and $2,400 to upgrade to from 0.5 TB to 8 TB storage (=> $0.32/GB).
By comparison, approximately what would be the OEM prices for those, in the quantities Apple orders?
[I suppose to answer that reasonably accurately for the storage, you'd need an idea of what proportion of Apple's NAND is SLC vs MLC vs TLC vs QLC; or barring that, you could estimate what the OEM price/GB would be for a top-end PCIEe 4.0 NVMe SSD (e.g., Samsung 990 Pro). The retail price for the 4 TB 990 Pro is currently $320 on AZ => $0.08/GB]
I do understand why Apple has not reduced what they what they charge for SSD and RAM upgrades. They do charge a lot, and it's well above the industry average, but there's no deceptive or predatory business practices here. Thus it's perfectly reasonable for them not to change until they decide doing so will increase, or help maintain, profitability. Since they've not done that yet, their analysis must have indicated it won't, at least not currently.
If the M-series chips' performance could be significantly increased by using HBM RAM, I'd rather see them switch to that rather than reduce RAM upgrade costs.
On the M3, Apple charges $1,200 to upgrade from 36 GB to 128 GB LPDDR5-6400 RAM (=> $13/GB), and $2,400 to upgrade to from 0.5 TB to 8 TB storage (=> $0.32/GB).
By comparison, approximately what would be the OEM prices for those, in the quantities Apple orders?
[I suppose to answer that reasonably accurately for the storage, you'd need an idea of what proportion of Apple's NAND is SLC vs MLC vs TLC vs QLC; or barring that, you could estimate what the OEM price/GB would be for a top-end PCIEe 4.0 NVMe SSD (e.g., Samsung 990 Pro). The retail price for the 4 TB 990 Pro is currently $320 on AZ => $0.08/GB]
I do understand why Apple has not reduced what they what they charge for SSD and RAM upgrades. They do charge a lot, and it's well above the industry average, but there's no deceptive or predatory business practices here. Thus it's perfectly reasonable for them not to change until they decide doing so will increase, or help maintain, profitability. Since they've not done that yet, their analysis must have indicated it won't, at least not currently.
If the M-series chips' performance could be significantly increased by using HBM RAM, I'd rather see them switch to that rather than reduce RAM upgrade costs.
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Curious what would be, in your opinion, "predatory" or "deceptive" business practices.... In theory these words should not make sense, since it's the client that ultimate decides whether to buy or not, right?
I guess that for every company it's "perfectly reasonable" to milk their client as much as they can get away with, isn't it? They are not forcing anyone to buy. Assuming for instance that a 8GB RAM upgrade cost them $20 (probably less, but let's assume) and they charge $200, while buying a 8GB RAM module is $30 (current prices) and a Windows laptop OEM charges let's say $50 for the same upgrade. In the end it's up to the consumer to decide....
What could be "deceptive" might be if they "inflated" the base price, so that those much "above average" upgrades were actually even larger when the base price goes regularly on sale while the upgrade does not, becoming a $300-400 or even larger "upgrade" to get those additional 8GB.
Nope, these words make perfect sense, such that I'm surprised you're challenging me on them. I would define deceptive as any practice in which the business lies to, or attempts to deliberately mislead, the consumer. Here are examples. All of these are illegal in the US:
Selling counterfeit goods as real.
Selling refurbished goods as new.
Rolling back odometers.
Claiming a product is made with titanium when it's instead made with brass.
Telling a customer they need new brake pads when they don't.
Telling a customer a charge is require by law when it's not.
Fake sales.
Bait & switch.
The fact that a sufficiently sharp customer can see through all of these doesn't change the fact that they are deceptive practices.
Does Apple sometimes engage in deceptive pratices? Yes. But Apple is very clear on what its upgrade prices are for RAM and storage, so those charges are not deceptive.
I would define predatory as practices that a business engages in to overcharge the consumer once they are effectively locked into their product. For instance, it's hard for the poor to obtain bank accounts, so once they have them banks know it can be hard to switch banks. Thus, according to this article from Business Insider, "Mainstream financial institutions have created a host of fees and penalties over the past few decades designed specifically to target and profit from their poorest customers."
Predatory banks rake in billions of dollars in overdraft fees from their poorest customers every year. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is trying to put a stop to it.
Over the years, banks have layered a number of financial complexities on top of their overdraft policies, further rigging the system in their favor.
www.businessinsider.com
As Apple's upgrade fees they are a not a surprise charge you incur after purchasing the product, they are not predatory.
I think the more legitimate complaint is not about what they charge, but rather about the fact that they don't give you a choice, by preventing you from upgrading the storage on your own. Unlike with the RAM, which needs to be soldered, there's no technical reason their NAND can't be slotted and replaceable with aftermarket parts.
But at least if you don't like the upgrade fees, you do have another possible choice: You can instead buy a used Mac (I'd recommend finding something in pristine condition that still has AppleCare), thus saving yourself money and denying Apple the new sale.
Apple is best seen as a quasi-luxury product. Complaining about Apple's upgrade pricing is like saying "I really like the look and feel of a Mercedes, but I think they charge too much for the options I want, so they should reduce their profit margins so I can afford one".
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How about just don’t solder the ram etc onto the board so I can upgrade my own computer
Apple does nothing illegal as far as I know (despite some people writing article for instance about illegal and abusive cuts of 30% of app store revenue for instance, something I disagree with, they price things as they see fit).Nope, these words make perfect sense, such that I'm surprised you're challenging me on them. I would define deceptive as any practice in which the business lies to, or attempts to deliberately mislead, the consumer. Here are examples. All of these are illegal in the US:
Selling counterfeit goods as real.
Selling refurbished goods as new.
Rolling back odometers.
Claiming a product is made with titanium when it's instead made with brass.
Telling a customer they need new brake pads when they don't.
Telling a customer a charge is require by law when it's not.
Fake sales.
Bait & switch.
The fact that a sufficiently sharp customer can see through all of these doesn't change the fact that they are deceptive practices.
Does Apple sometimes engage in deceptive pratices? Yes. But Apple is very clear on what its upgrade prices are for RAM and storage, so those charges are not deceptive.
I would define predatory as practices that a business engages in to overcharge the consumer once they are effectively locked into their product. For instance, it's hard for the poor to obtain bank accounts, so once they have them banks know it can be hard to switch banks. Thus, according to this article from Business Insider, "Mainstream financial institutions have created a host of fees and penalties over the past few decades designed specifically to target and profit from their poorest customers."
Predatory banks rake in billions of dollars in overdraft fees from their poorest customers every year. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is trying to put a stop to it.
Over the years, banks have layered a number of financial complexities on top of their overdraft policies, further rigging the system in their favor.
As Apple's upgrade fees they are a not a surprise charge you incur after purchasing the product, they are not predatory.
I think the more legitimate complaint is not about what they charge, but rather about the fact that they don't give you a choice, by preventing you from upgrading the storage on your own. Unlike with the RAM, which needs to be soldered, there's no technical reason their NAND can't be slotted and replaceable with aftermarket parts.
But at least if you don't like the upgrade fees, you do have another possible choice: You can instead buy a used Mac (I'd recommend finding something in pristine condition that still has AppleCare), thus saving yourself money and denying Apple the new sale.
Apple is best seen as a quasi-luxury product. Complaining about Apple's upgrade pricing is like saying "I really like the look and feel of a Mercedes, but I think they charge too much for the options I want, so they should reduce their profit margins so I can afford one".
What I find boderline deceptive is their BTO model, but I don't want to open this can of worms again. People are free to find it perfectily fine and justify it in 1000 ways.
Personnally I have never complained about prices. Apple can price things as they want, and that's what I meant in my post. I don't like some of their practices as I said, but they are legal, so it's fine. And they have any right to maximixe profit.
What I don't like is Apple's fanboys, the cult of Apple etc. People that blindly adore the company, with no critical judgement ever (and you are definitely not one of them by the way, just to be clear, I appreciate your insights in this forum) but again we have freedom of cult, so they are free to love Apple and I am free to not like them.
I like some of Apple's products a lot, but I always try to give them as little money as possible by buying used or on deep sales. Just as I am not afraid to say some of their products have terrible value for money (some don't).
Fortunately enough I have little interest in iPhone so I am also not really tempted to enter their ecosystem, despite liking iPads and to some extent Macs.
Digital distribution cut a lot of costs related to physical distribution. As such the 30% margin is fair considering it improved efficiencies.
I think Apple's having difficulty increasing shipments of Macs in a significantly way as they ceased disclosing units sold regionally/quarterly/annually 10 years ago.
So instead they decided to increase their margins.
I'd say that the client should have more freedom to choose, before the client can truly decide.
Apple could offer models with expandable RAM & storage and let the client choose.
At least Tim Cooke does not talk about "sugared water" or "hp makes its profits from ink", when Apple makes it's profits from cables and bulk RAM & ssd.
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Contrary to many Apple lawyers here, I'd be all in for Apple (and anyone else) being legally obligated to use upgradable RAM and storage by the UE or any other government (I couldn't care less about those who say it would slow down innovation, and by the way it wouldn't)
But let's be realistic, that's good for the consumer, not for Apple's bottom line, so it's defintely not going to come from Apple unless it has no choice
Unfortunately, upgradeable RAM wouldn't be good for Apple's laptops, because it would mean they couldn't use low-powered LPDDR RAM, since such RAM needs to be soldered. [It's technically possible to have slotted LPDDR, but probably not a good idea, which is why everyone that sells devices with LPDDR solders it.]
OTOH, there's no reason they couldn't have upgradeable storage in all their devices, especially their desktops. But specifying that it has to be upgradeable would do the consumer no good unless Apple were also legally obligated to make the NAND chips non-proprietary. For instance, the storage in the Mac Pro is upgradeable, but you need to buy special chips from Apple, and they cost more than upgrading it at the time of sale.
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