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.
The ONLY problem with Macs are price SSD/RAM
- Thread starter SebCohen
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
It's not possible to get a low starting price and also low upgrade costs. Apple decides pricing based on the total revenue/profit across the project. Upgrades are very price inelastic, therefore they will always be of much higher profit margins.
Fully agreed that RAM upgrading is overpriced. But no one should skimp on RAM due to the cost. If you cannot afford the RAM buy a used Mac or whatever, but do not cheap out on RAM, because RAM is used to compute.
Planning your future 3-5 years of new Mac RAM demands to be similar to your previous 4 years is wrong-headed thinking IMO. Macs use RAM to compute, and the OS/apps constantly increase how much RAM they like to have to compute with. The increasing use of AI is likely to further increase demands on RAM.
Agreed except that their GPU's are still weak compared to NVIDIA's offerings (though they do offer more effective VRAM than all except the ~$40k NVIDIA data center GPU's).
And the max available RAM on the Ultra is still low (192 GB for the M2 Ultra; if the M4 Ultra is 2 x M4 Max, then we'd expect to see a max of 256 GB). While high-end AMD and Intel consumer processors are limited to 192 GB, their workstation CPUs can handle ≈1 TB RAM, even those that don't have high core counts.
For instance, the 16-core Threadripper Pro 7955WX, and 24-core Xeon W7-3545, can both accept 1024 GB DDR5-4800 ECC memory. Though of course if you get those processors you're paying a lot of money for CPU's that are significantly slower than the M4 models.
Last edited:
RAM is cheap if you are looking to use it for VRAM. This was the case for one of my Mac Studios where I was either going to buy a $7,000 NVIDIA GPU or just spend an extra $1,600 for a RAM upgrade and get even MORE VRAM compared to the NVIDIA option.
The ONLY problem with Macs are price SSD/RAM
#1 Not a problem and find more cash. #2 Don't buy anything from Apple problem solved.
That is a quite interesting place that Apple positioned itself in. So traditional workstation CPUs have more memory with smaller bandwidth, and GPUs have less memory but higher bandwidth. By putting them in between they limited the potential workloads but can still find good things to do. The local LLM inference speed is much slower than the expensive H100s but Apple is providing cheaper VRAM(yes, compared with nvidia offering, Apple's RAM is actually cheaper) so that the larger models are actually more accessible using Apple devices because it is cheaper.
I do know a guy needs ~800GB RAM for his working dataset and get disappointed by the Apple Silicon's RAM size. But laptops are the most selling computers for Apple and that is understandable that they come up with designs works better for laptops. They are using their own silicon on their AI cluster so probably that could force them to find better solutions.
I can’t fathom paying for apple storage unless it’s on a laptop. For desktops there’s zero reason to not just get a thunderbolt 4 enclosure and buy a crazy fast 4-8 TB NVME drive like the WD Black.
Apple always charged too much for RAM and storage. Back in the day though, I just bought a base or mid-spec and upgraded the RAM and HDD myself. It was never easy with iMacs (the iMac G4 was a really tough HDD upgrade) but I could do it and got more life from the machine.
These days it's not possible and that's what makes their pricing so offensive. You have to anticipate future needs and, well, that is impossible to do! Futureproofing is silly and a waste of money for most. E.g. by the time I start needing 32GB in this 3-year old M1 Pro I'm using, I'll probably just want a new Mac. If I'd dropped the money on it when I bought it, it would have enabled exactly NOTHING in the whole time I've had it. It's never felt slow or underpowered with 16GB RAM no matter what my memory pressure or swap might have said.
I do wish I had more SSD space. I was never going to pay up for more than 1TB in 2021, but now it's feeling tight and I'm juggling things more than I want to. It will force an upgrade sooner than I'd otherwise want.
These days it's not possible and that's what makes their pricing so offensive. You have to anticipate future needs and, well, that is impossible to do! Futureproofing is silly and a waste of money for most. E.g. by the time I start needing 32GB in this 3-year old M1 Pro I'm using, I'll probably just want a new Mac. If I'd dropped the money on it when I bought it, it would have enabled exactly NOTHING in the whole time I've had it. It's never felt slow or underpowered with 16GB RAM no matter what my memory pressure or swap might have said.
I do wish I had more SSD space. I was never going to pay up for more than 1TB in 2021, but now it's feeling tight and I'm juggling things more than I want to. It will force an upgrade sooner than I'd otherwise want.
The amount of RAM my GPU uses on my MBP would cost me 2 MBP if I go with Nvidia workstation. The laptop GPUs max out a 1/4th RAM compared to my MBP.
Apple subsidizes the entry models with upgrade prices. I max out on RAM and use a thunderbolt external storage, if I need more space.
Apple subsidizes the entry models with upgrade prices. I max out on RAM and use a thunderbolt external storage, if I need more space.
2019 Intel Mac Pro with 1.5TB RAM is a total outlier, no other Mac has ever come close to supporting that much maximum RAM; it was purely a byproduct of the Xeon chips Apple was using at the time, and don't forget one needed to also get the higher core count Xeons to be able to support that much RAM...
The most profitable car company in the world is Porsche. A major reason for that is upgrades. Although you could buy a base-spec. Porsche 911 for $120k, you can option it up to $220k! Most buyers add $20-50k worth of upgrades for things that cost Porsche very little (e.g. custom paint colors can be $15k, etc.).
Apple is modeling this, and they have an insidious pricing ladder. Every time I go to the configurator, it seems that for 'just' a couple hundred more, I can get a much better computer, and if I'm getting this, then I may as well get that, etc. Before I know it, I'm spending way more than I planned. It's a thing of evil genius.
Apple has been in a workstation market for a long time and the existence of hardware is important for software developers. Can and cant are a huge difference. Dont forget that Apple used Mac Pro for their own servers before. It's like justifying limited hardware specs and performance just because you dont need it.
But it should be noted (I just edited my post to add this) that, while the top consumer Intel/AMD desktop CPU's are limited to 192 GB, their workstation CPU's take up to 1 TB RAM even with low core counts (16-24). Though they cost a lot and are relatively slow.
When I started reading your post this is what I thought of, then read it and laughed. Good old Oz tax, still in effect today as good as ever. I remember writing to Adobe about this and getting rubbish as an answer. They had the last laugh though when they introduced software as a service to the world. Look where we are now. Honestly surprised a 8tb kit is $4000 and not $499/month….. until you hand it back. Don’t laugh, it’s coming. Then we’ll be here in this forum going, remember when ssd upgrades were $4k once off… those were the days. Ha!
Decked out PC workstations are the same. Try going to Boxx.com, and configuring a Xeon workstation. If I choose the top CPU and RAM options, and add dual-RTX 6000 and a 4 TB SSD, it's $49,966. I could increase the price further by adding more GPUs and more SSDs.
Not really, for my needs Apple is still the cheapest option. Alternatives are more expensive, and that too not really in a laptop. I have base M2 MBA with 8 GB for generic family use. I guess the question is do you really need expensive upgrades.
That is the question at the heart of this.
When you drop $1-2k on a laptop, it's easy to think that 'just a couple hundred more' for more RAM or storage will translate to a longer life for the device. This isn't true a lot of the time, but because we can't upgrade specs after buying, there's a psychology which makes us think, for example that for just $200 extra on my $1k+ laptop I can get 24GB vs 16GB which will mean I get a year or two more before I need to upgrade.
This may or may not be true, but Apple structures the upgrades such as $200 more gets you 24GB, but then 256GB looks small, so $200 more gets you 512GB SSD, but then $200 more gets you and M4 Pro, or a MacBook Pro or an M4Max, etc... It never ends!!
There are also those buying upgrades not to extend the life of the machine, but because they know they need them now.
For instance, I don't like splitting my primary storage between an internal and supplemental external drive, which means I'm currently using a 2 TB drive, on which I have 1.3 TB stored. And I have an additional 0.2 TB reserved for testing new OS's. So 2 TB is what I need today.