Apple: We'll give you $790 for your Intel MBP!
Me: I was on the fence, let's do this! *SPENDS TWO HOURS CONFIGURING*
Apple: You can only use this towards a future purchase.
Me: Ok, what if I do the trade-in and wait and purchase this later with the 12 month financing?
Apple: Nope, you can't use a gift card with financing
Me: So instead of buying this $3500 computer, I could buy a $2700 computer and you would finance that?
Apple: Yep get wrecked basically.
That's essentially how my chat sales support went down this evening. What a pile of crap. Add this to other frustrations:
8 core, 11 core, 12 core, 14 core, or 16 core CPU? 10 core, 14 core, 18 core, 30 core, or 40 core GPU? 8GB, 16GB, 18GB, 24GB, 36GB, 48GB, 64GB, 96GB, or 128GB RAM? And you can only mix and match certain things. Who the hell can figure this crap out anymore? It's a mess and a disaster trying to figure out what to get anymore. By far the most confused I've been since becoming a Mac user in 2008. And they've blown the die budget on beefing up a GPU that I will barely use unless they finally take Mac gaming seriously.
I want the M3 Pro which would be fine for my intermediate apps. Too bad I can’t get more than 36GB RAM, which I need for multitasking, because I tend to use a lot of apps at a time for my line of work. Right now I'm sitting at 48GB used of 64GB after a heavy multitasking day and probably should reboot soon. Ok then, I guess I'll get the M3 Max? Only 36GB of RAM standard, lol, or if you pay $800 freaking dollars you can get 96GB RAM. WAT. None of this makes sense, and 96 isn't even a multiple of 36. They are nickel and diming the ever living crap out of us right now for real.
BUT WAIT! You can bump it up to the M3 Max with the 16 cores instead of the 14 cores and you get 48GB RAM which also unlocks 64GB and 128GB but you can’t get 96GB. To add confusion to the matter, only some versions of the CPUs have higher memory bandwidth, and sub versions also have lower and higher tiers, which could affect GPU performance because the GPU shares RAM with the CPU over the high speed interconnect. And that’s also another reason I want more RAM is because it’s shared now! I need at least 64GB.
Not to mention this: Apple still starts their “Pro” machines with only 8GB RAM and only 512GB SSD for what is essentially a 2024 model. What a crock. Hell, my 2012 MBP had 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD! And it is nearly 12 years old. That's like getting a computer in 2002 with the same RAM and storage as a computer from 1990. It's wild. And they also didn't include the newly released Thunderbolt 5 (which they used to be on the forefront of supporting) for future proofing. At this point I may as well wait for the M4 and hope that maybe it has OLED but I wouldn't be surprised if you only get OLED with certain chips or probably only the 16" and not the 14". Maybe it will also have a hole punch camera or a Dynamic Island for FaceID as well as Center Stage support and WiFi 7 for future proofing.
Pisses me the hell off. I guess I’m going to wait until 2025 now. I wanted the 0% financing because we suddenly needed a new car this year and new cars are VERY expensive nowadays (always bought used pre-pandemic but they're barely cheaper now and a bad deal), especially for a family sized SUV, so we’re making triple car payments so we can pay that down by the end of next year. When our car is paid off I’ll just buy this outright in 2025 when the M4 should be out and I’ll just go ham with the RAM and storage so I don’t have to mess with this for like 8 freaking years!