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The base models (the air's, not pro's), should have shipped with 12-16GB standard, and the pro's should have shipped with 16-24GB standard. I'd argue that a minimum of 24-32GB should really be the standard on something named a "pro" model.
Apple's M-based laptops are really great - excellent display, best-in-class speakers, good keyboard, industry-leading trackpad...But 8GB of RAM for $1600? Get out of here.
Do they still solder the SSD?
Of course
Well that's not very "green" coming from a company who stopped supplying customers with chargers "because of the environment." When a hard drive craps out the only solution is to replace the entire board rather than a single part with an industry standard connector?
Technically they don’t even have an SSD anymore. They just have a bunch of NAND chips.
The drive controller is in the CPU. Which is great for performance… especially when you’re reading data that is already cached by the drive controller you’re limited by RAM speed instead of PCIe - but it’s a bit of a headache when it comes to upgrades.
The band chips are on a daughter board on their larger desktops. And soldered on laptops and the tiny Mac Mini.
Yes. There is no internal upgradable parts. I believe you can only replace the battery cells, the fans, and the mainboard (motherboard with soldered CPU/RAM(VRAM)/SSD, and all connected modules like the USB chipsets, audio chipset, etc.).
32gb might have been "pro" 5 years ago but not anymore, not when a run of the mill 32gb DDR5 kit can be had for $100
I meant as a base spec for a "pro" system.
yes, my opinion is that 32gb was the minimum spec for a "pro" system 5 years ago. Nowadays, if 32gb is actually enough as a minimum spec then you're in "enthusiast" territory in my opinion, not "pro". Perhaps that's more telling about my standards as a PC enthusiast though, and about how far PC hardware has come
Apple won't even offer that for the 8GB models, the best you can do for those is pay $400 to get them with 24GB included.
And obviously everything is soldered and nothing is upgradeable.
Then stop buying it.
I have the feeling that a big chunk of apple consumers (I know there are many professionals and developers that love apple) don't even know what RAM is used for and will just buy it because it's the "cheapest version of the newest thing" without much critical consideration
Wish I could. I hate working on Macs, but it seems like half of my mission-critical programs at work are Mac exclusive for some reason. Apple really pushed the “we’re built for art and artists” thing, so there are a lot of programs in the fine arts world that are Mac exclusive. Digital art, music, live entertainment, etc are all wholly dependent on Macs, purely because the programs needed to make those things are Mac exclusive.
People could rage about the memory cost all they want but as long as people keep buying the expensive upgrade, Apple wouldn't give a fuck. Why would they voluntarily shut down the money hose?
Raging about it can stop people from buying it, so I say carry on.
I mean, I get why people don’t like it but at the same time, no one forces you to buy one. I like Macs, I enjoy using OS X and would use it as my primary OS. I don’t because I don’t find the value proposition of their hardware worth it.
Their loss, they have a market, they just aren’t interested in it.
I'm kinda of in the same boat.
My "main" computer is a M1 iPad at this point. It's fast, and I can do all my day to day things on it. If I want to play games I do have a PC for that, but Windows isn't that "pleasant" to use so I don't spend much time with it beyond games.
I was reminded how much MacOS is just a pleasant experience a couple months ago when I found a sale for old mac minis. They had a 2014 model for $60. I put a new SSD in it, and I'm typing on that machine right now. It can get Monterey, but nothing newer. But that still lets me send texts, and the machine unlocks with my watch when I wake it up.
All that to say is: I've now been looking at buying a brand new Mac Mini, but the memory and hard drive charges are insane. They always have been, but it's just ridiculous at this point.
You can look into this if you want to upgrade to a newer macOS.
Thanks!
I feel like I remember seeing this project right when I got this computer, but I didn't look too far into it. I'll have to check it out.
I do have a little worry that running the newest MacOS would make this little, old mini run pretty slow. I need to do some research.
No if anything newer OS is faster. Apple works extremely hard to improve battery life and has been gradually reducing the size of the batteries in their laptops to get the weight down. My latest Mac has a 50Wh battery that lasts 18 hours in real world use. Years ago I used to get 5 hours from a 100Wh battery.
Those battery improvements aren’t just from efficient hardware - it also comes from more efficient software.
If you still had a HDD that’d be a problem, the software assumes a fast drive now and leaves memory on the disk that, years ago, would have been pulled into RAM, but you won’t have that problem since you have an SSD (also… that’s a big part of why Macs don’t need much RAM compared to Linux or Windows).
Apple drops support for old Macs when the cheapest configuration of that Mac is no-longer fast enough. With upgrades, like yours has, it’s often fine.
… but seriously when you can afford it an M1 processor will be an order of magnitude faster. I’ve got a 2014 Mac Mini at home and also an M1 laptop. The speed difference is astronomical. Mostly I just keep the Mac Mini around for backups/etc since connecting a laptop into an external backup drive is annoying.
Their loss, they have a market, they just aren’t interested in it.
They are very interested in your money and parting your money from you.
The whole thing boggles my mind. Keep in mind that a good number of “Pro” users are corporate types running PowerPoint and Excel but certainly wouldn’t stoop to using a consumer model.
Yeah. I use a MacBook for its build quality and being UNIX (cough Windows cough), plus some niceties like iCloud, but the RAM cost is insane.
Laughs in ThinkPad running Linux.
Cries in soldered RAM
Yeah I’m a fan boy but I agree with this 100%. In the old days I’d just buy lowest ram config and then replace with after market but obviously we dont have the option anymore. It sucks because I could use at least 64 in my m3 but it was cost prohibitive.
Gonna have to try pricing up a laptop for next year. Want to get a MacBook next year for Final Cut after having tried it on a Hackintosh. Not looking forward to pricing up the memory lol
Ram price aside, the m3 MacBook pros are fucking monsters. My handbrake encodes went from 35fps to about 200fps (from an 8core i9), stable diffusion tasks that took 70 seconds now take 5, LLMs are spitting results out at 30+ tokens a second, even baulders gate 3 runs great. Battery life is SICK. Handbrake and BG3 are about the only things that even turned on the fans which are normally totally off, just passive cooling. The whole thing is cool on my lap. The i9 was a leg burner pretty much all the time. Bringing MagSafe back with 140watts was a real win. The screen is beautiful. The speakers… shit I dont remember the last time I was impressed by laptop speakers- this is one of those times. It’s worth it, even if your wallet cries buying ram.
I think what Apple has done with their M series of chips is actually incredible and very interesting. However actually purchasing their hardware is just out of the question when I'm just going to run a Linux distro on whatever I purchase.
I recently had the need for some apple hardware due to customer projects - and ended up buying an air with 16GB of RAM when it was available relatively cheaply.
The keyboard is shit - but keyboards are shit on pretty much any notebook nowadays unfortunately.
Both memory and storage are a problem - the rest is surprisingly nice. I also have a Windows arm notebook from HP, same 16 GB storage issue, but at least the SSD is user replacable.
We should get rid of 8GB base models in general - that's pretty much what you'd expect in a phone nowadays, but not in a computer.
If you think the keyboard is shitty now, the keyboard is even shittier during the butterfly keyboard era. If you get a mac 5 years ago you'll probably curse the keyboard daily. Their current keyboard is basically the best mac users can get in the past 8 years.
What don't you like about the keyboard? It's quiet, low profile, easy to type on quickly, lights up... not sure what else you'd want.
low profile
that is a problem
easy to type on quickly
not really, doesn't have a clear pressure point, so leads to keys not registering surprisingly often. I also get pain in my hands if I'm working on it for several hours.
I only can do something like 70-80 WPM on that, on a proper keyboard I'm doing slightly above 100.
lights up
Don't care about that.
Additionally half the useful keys (pgup/pgdown/end/home/insert/delete/...) are hidden behind FN combinations.
doesn’t have a clear pressure point, so leads to keys not registering surprisingly often.
Are you trying to press the keys as lightly as possible or something? Just hit them until they bottom out, it's like 0.1mm more travel than their actuation point.
Are you trying to press the keys as lightly as possible or something?
Pretty much the opposite, I'm usually either typing on a buckling spring keyboard, or on one with Kailh Box Navy switches - which requires quite a bit of force, and both have quite a bit of travel.
The base model isn’t really the base model. If you are buying a Mac you just have to accept you are spending $2k on it
11GB idling?? Maybe not as optimized as it seems…
That's just cached memory. Pretty common practice for any modern OS to retain memory until 60% usage or so. Costs nothing and is snappier performance.
11GB idling is only after having done other things. When you launch it'll be less than 2 in my experience.
Ohhh right, I totally forgot about that. Remember reading about it somewhere. In that case, I guess it makes more sense.
Yeah you need to be careful what memory numbers you read - I’ve seen some of them hit terabytes on my Mac, and I only have a 256GB SSD so there’s no way that’s physically possible. Just because a memory address is tracked by the kernel doesn’t mean it’s actually being used. You can have a single region of memory counted multiple times (in my case, probably millions of times… I don’t think I was using much swap at all).
I’m positive the minimum went up to 16gb like a generation or two back. It’s sickening that they went back over.
I have a couple of work MacBooks with 8gb for managers and they often complain of them going slow as molasses when having a good few tabs open in chrome. I’m talking less then 10 though, but heavy sites like email and AdWords and other horrible sites.
Don't buy Apple. As simple as that. You know when a company gives you the creeps? That's how I feel about Apple.
