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sam_dean

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Sep 9, 2022
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I thought we were looking at base models and not at how many different configurations they sell?
Retailers and even the OEMs like Apple already forecasted the demand of each SKU. So what is filtered out what the market of that dealer with bare out.

At $999 there is a market for 16GB RAM & 512GB SSD for a year Nov 2020 & Jul 2022 chip.
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,682
43,740
I don't get Microsoft, they bill the Surface products as premium but almost always unveil new models with CPUs that are at least 2 generations old.

When they unveiled the surface studio some years back, they marketed it as a high end professional desktop for creatives, yet plopped a 5400rpm spinning drive.

I've owned Surface laptops and tablets and they're well made, but I'll largely never buy another one simply because there is no value imo
 

gpat

macrumors 68000
Mar 1, 2011
1,931
5,341
Italy
I don't get Microsoft, they bill the Surface products as premium but almost always unveil new models with CPUs that are at least 2 generations old.

When they unveiled the surface studio some years back, they marketed it as a high end professional desktop for creatives, yet plopped a 5400rpm spinning drive.

I've owned Surface laptops and tablets and they're well made, but I'll largely never buy another one simply because there is no value imo

They're just happy selling their niche product which will never menace their fellow PC OEM friends, that will continue ruling the mass market. Nothing wrong with that.

Of course Apple could never do that or the macOS platform would perish in a very short time. But surely they have made their share of bad design decisions in the Butterfly/Touch bar era.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,521
19,674
I've been saying PC market in general. The PC market in general has moved on to 16GB as the base amount. Outside of 400 dollar laptops and some other outliers like the 13" Dell you posted.

Its not an outlier, it’s the current status quo.

Look, the current laptop market can be roughly broken down into the next four segments. Budget, premium business (uktrabook), gaming, and prosumer/multimedia. Premium business usually start at 8GB RAM, prosumer start at 16GB regardless of the manufacturer. Lenovo Carbon, MacBook Air, Dell XPS are examples of premium business. MacBook Pro (not counting 13”), XPS 15“ etc. Are examples of prosumer.

And that’s exactly my point. If you are in the market for a premium quality laptop with good balance of performance and battery and a good display, those start at 8GB and you’ll have to pay extra to get 16GB.

Desktop market is obviously different since RAM there is almost always user-replaceable. One could argue that Apple doesn’t currently offer anything resembling a usual PC desktop. These are rather low-power computing appliances and it’s a fairly niche market almost completely dominated by Apple.
 
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leifp

macrumors 6502a
Feb 8, 2008
522
501
Canada
what for? Of the following eight buyers (myself, my mom, dad, brother, his wife, my wife, parents-in-law [one shared computer], and brother-in-law) exactly one needs more than 8GB of RAM. Me...
 
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gpat

macrumors 68000
Mar 1, 2011
1,931
5,341
Italy
I have difficulty finding Windows laptops below €700. PCs simply stopped being cheaper without getting any better.

I found HP laptops with Intel 1235u chip and 512GB SSD under 500€ in a matter of seconds.
Sure they won't have the display / battery runtime / build quality of a Mac, but terrific deals for just getting work done all around.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,521
19,674
It would be more accurate to say that Walmart midrange laptops have moved on to 16GB, while premium designs like Surface and XPS keep offering 8GB models to upsell the most expensive configurations and increase profitability.
A business model which was inspired by Apple obviously.

Yep, that's exactly how it is. To be fair, premium laptops use the more expensive LPDDR RAM while the midrange usually has slotted DDR4, which also accounts for some difference in both the price and the capacity. But it's also likely that "premium" devices have higher margins, especially if you look at the aggregates across the entire configuration spectrum.
 
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sam_dean

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Sep 9, 2022
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You could hope for those kind of specs on maybe a $1499 Macbook Air in a year from now.
Anything less would be pure wishful thinking.
Unacceptable! It has to be $999 so I can edit my student movie about love not being skin deep!
 
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MauiPa

macrumors 68040
Apr 18, 2018
3,438
5,084
Performance wise it might be the biggest leap yet since the M1. Perhaps 50-60% which is not unsubstantial. To that you should also add a significant boost in battery life when doing the same tasks.
did you just make that up? 50-60% performance boost by going from 8GB to 16GB. That is not valid. I have 8GB on my M1 MBP and have no performance degradation issues, I almost never see any memory pressure, so extra ram would be 0 benefit. Now if you are running applications that need it (what are they by the way?), then yes, but you probably already have a more souped up version than the one I use, and do more souped up things than I do.
 

dmccloud

macrumors 68040
Sep 7, 2009
3,142
1,899
Anchorage, AK
I've been saying PC market in general. The PC market in general has moved on to 16GB as the base amount. Outside of 400 dollar laptops and some other outliers like the 13" Dell you posted.
There are over 400 models of laptops on Best Buy's website with 8GB of RAM, just over 500 with 16GB. Hard to say 16GB has become the new minimum without artificially filtering out models by price. The reason Best Buy, Office Max, etc. sell so many laptops with 8GB or less of RAM is because people will buy them.
 

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ApplesAreSweet&Sour

macrumors 68020
Sep 18, 2018
2,288
4,235
For the first half of the MacBook Pro's history, from 2006 until 2014, the base memory on Apple's premier laptop doubled five times, from an introductory 512 megabytes to a whopping eight gigabytes. In the second half of the MacBook Pro's history, from 2015 until today, the base memory has doubled...zero times. Even today, the base 13" MacBook Pro comes with the same 8 GB of memory that has been standard since 2014. Way back in April 2016, the last 4GB Mac notebook was discontinued. And yet, all these years later, the next big doubling of memory has never come.

That's not to say there haven't been improvements, Apple Silicon is a revelation, with those 8 GB of memory now integrated onto the chip and complemented by speedy SSDs. Nonetheless, this base RAM has grown too long in the tooth. Later this year, the iPhone 15 Pro is rumored to receive 8 GB of RAM, and its Mac siblings should take the hint that this standard is no longer acceptable in a full-fledged computer.

Apple should use the opportunity presented by M3 to increase their base memory to 16 GB. The M1 Pro, unveiled in late 2021, came alongside 16 GB of RAM as standard, in addition to a base storage of 512 GB. Two years and an innovative three-nanometer process later, the M3 will likely be competitive with the M1 Pro, if not running laps around it. These necessary upgrades will solidify Apple's standing in the computing space.

With the M3 Air launching later this year, Apple will have the choice as to whether keep the $999 M1 Air in their lineup or to discontinue it. If they let the M2 Air take its price, few will spend two or three hundred dollars extra simply to upgrade the specs of their chip. However, if this upgrade comes alongside an included increase in base RAM (and perhaps even more storage), the upgrade would be a no-brainer. Apple is all about price-ladders, and this one would make sense, pushing consumers towards the newest, greatest, and more-expensive model.

The earnings for the Mac sector this previous quarter were a jarring decline, and Apple is counting on a big Fall release of M3 to flip the script for the Mac in the year ahead. Though the M3 will undoubtedly be faster and more efficient, this overdue upgrade to RAM will push it from good to great. Let's see if we'll finally have the doubling we've been waiting for.
There's never any real winning when configuring a Mac or really any Apple product: Whatever you gain in saving money by getting the cheapest baseline configuration of a new product, Apple always "takes away" something equivalent like less internal storage, less RAM, and often times lower quality of some other components, or through software blocked features(like we see in 128GB iPhones Pro).

Whatever Apple does with Macs in the next 1-3 years -You're most definitely not getting any kind of M3, M4, or M5 Mac with 16GB RAM or higher + 1TB SSD for less than $999-$1199.

And if we do see <$999-$1199 Macs with those specs in the near future then it's because Apple is stepping up the cost cutting measures for the lower-end configurations in new ways (think even slower SSDs and lower quality of other components than even the M2 generation for the baseline configurations).

Producers of high-demand products don't need to impress consumers by drastically increasing value/$ to make sales.

Only a drastic downturn in M2 sales would get Apple to bump up value/$ like you are suggesting they should.
 

ApplesAreSweet&Sour

macrumors 68020
Sep 18, 2018
2,288
4,235
Yes, but you were making the point that its so cheap for them, they should be doubling it
But this is capitalism:

Apple will only change value/$ when sales go drastically down.

If Apple's cost cutting for baseline M2 Macs results in a huge downturn in total M2 Mac sales then we might see better value/$ for M3 or M4.

But most Macs are sold to unknowing, casual consumers who just want the "sequel" to the version 1 of the Mac that everybody loved (the M1 Macs).

You can do a lot less than what you "should" when you have a brand as strong as Apple does.
 
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Gudi

Suspended
May 3, 2013
4,590
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Berlin, Berlin
I found HP laptops with Intel 1235U chip and 512GB SSD under 500€ in a matter of seconds.
I didn’t. I checked on Idealo for Intel Core i5-1235U laptops and it starts with the Lenovo V15 G3 for 539€ and ends with another Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga G7 for 3,331€.

The later one at that price point offers a 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM and a 1920×1200 WUXGA display. But it is foldable in every direction!

199 offerings with this CPU were above €1000 and 191 offerings below €1000. Only 25 laptops under €650. I consider these Apple prices.

PS: And let’s not forget that Intel x86 CPUs suck and we all upgrade to M-series ARM CPUs to get away from them.
 

FlyingTexan

macrumors 6502a
Jul 13, 2015
941
783
8GB RAM & 256GB SSD for base models started in 2012. It's time for an upgrade 11 years later.

Below is the specs of standard Mac SKUs. I doubled the RAM & SSD but kept the same price, SoC, CPU cores & GPU cores.

I hope it does change in 2024 with the 3nm M3.

Mac modelMSRPChipCPU (Core)GPU (Core)RAM (GB)SSD (TB)
iMac 24"$1,699M188161
iMac 24"$1,499M188160.5
iMac 24"$1,299M187160.5
Mac mini*$1,299M2 Pro1016321
Mac mini$799M2810161
Mac mini$599M2810160.5
Mac Studio$3,999M1 Ultra20481282
Mac Studio$1,999M1 Max1024641
Mac Studio**$3,999M2 Ultra24601282
Mac Studio**$1,999M2 Max1230641
MBA$1,499M2810161
MBA$1,199M288160.5
MBA$999M187160.5
MBP 13"$1,499M2810161
MBP 13"$1,299M2810160.5
MBP 14"$3,099M2 Max1230642
MBP 14"$2,499M2 Pro1219322
MBP 14"$1,999M2 Pro1016321
MBP 16"$3,499M2 Max1238642
MBP 16"$2,699M2 Pro1219322
MBP 16"*$2,499M2 Pro1219321
MB 12"***$699A16 Bionic658256GB
Mac nano***$299A16 Bionic658256GB

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.
If you want an upgrade you can buy one. I have the base MacBook Pro m1 and as a daily driver it’s more than enough. I can still do 20 tabs of chrome. If you’re doing something with video production then you probably shouldn’t be buying the base but for people like me that just want a solid machine that does 100% of what he wants I’d rather have the cheaper price tag.
 
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