Technology

Alternate title: Apple charges fortune for underspecced machines, morons still buy them

Please tell me, as someone who has not given Apple money in over a decade, how I am paying for this.

Apple fan here, and I love what they’ve done with hardware the last few years. That said…. I have to agree. Base RAM config is silly low, and higher RAM and SSD configs are stupid expensive. It’s a money maker for sure, I wish it wasn’t so obviously a cash grab. I’d be ok with a bit more padding in the base hardware price if the ram wasn’t so expensive to upgrade.

In the old days this was a moot point because you buy base config and immediately swap for after market big sticks- I did that for decades, but these days with soldered RAM and storage…. Eh, it’s a bit of a kick in the balls.

I am stoked for my new M3 next week though, good thing work pays for it!

The closing sentence of the article....

"as Apple customers, we shouldn’t stand for it"

Apple customers....

"Here's my $200"

"we're all paying for it"

Journalism these days is fucking awful

[...] we're all paying for it

How? How am I paying for Apple's shortcomings?

I absolutely love Apple Silicon—the performance to power ratio is wonderful, and the high-speed memory makes things like LLMs work great—but the RAM upcharge is insane, and shipping anything "Pro" with 8GB of RAM should be criminal in 2023.

I really hope that Qualcomm can make some noise with their new laptop/desktop processors. Anything to light a fire under Apple's ass and make them stop skimping on RAM.

It seemed obvious to me that they do this so that they can say the MBP costs “as low as X”, but in fact everyone needs to pay at least $200 more

I'm not paying for it, I just go to downloadmoreram.com, DUH

Yes. Unfortunately people who buy Apple don't care. This is what happens when you prioritise brand and design over functionality. You end up paying more for the brand (worse shit, but hey you can feel good about buying such a great product!).

*fan bois are paying for it

I can't believe that Apple would do this. It's so not like them to cripple great machines with one horrendous bottleneck. Like could you imagine if they released an iMac in 2020 that they sold until the release of the M1 iMac that had a 1TB hard drive in it as a boot device? That'd be insane.

RAM is boring... THE FINISH IS TITANIUM!!!

THAT'S LITERALLY OUR ENTIRE MARKETING CAMPAIGN!

We are? Pretty sure I ain't.

It's even worse when you consider there's no dedicated video memory, so this is shared between graphics and the rest of the system.

He's paying for it. Many of us don't buy Apple products.

I recently had to replace my Mac and was not at all happy with the ridiculous 8GB default. Ended up getting my first Windows machine in 10+ years. Same for my sis, she really wanted a Mac but work was only going to shell out $1500. You can get a helluva Windows machine for $1500 (64GB of RAM and 2TB HD). Sure it may not be “Retina” or have an insane color profile, but like great TVs, most people can’t tell unless they’re right next to a superior one.

I dont't understand how anyone is skimping on memory.... All the memory fabs (micron, samsung, etc)took huge hits this year because of low prices and low sales

Shouldn't companies be filling their devices to the brim with RAM? Is this just greed? What happened to the saying "cheap as chips"?

Damn. I wish there was some other alternative

Not that I doubt the power of complaining on a niche social media but… https://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html Here’s a feedback form if you want to let Apple know it’s too much…

I doubt the average Apple customer even looks at specs. They just see the Apple badge and are sold.

laughing from my 64gig 1000 eur tuxedo :p

I'll never understand brand loyalty, for the price of a Mac you can get a machine that's 10x more powerful with the same software being available in Windows.

Nah bro, we are all NOT. I would only touch a Apple product if it had tits.

I remember back in the 90's when some Macintosh computers came with resistors making them slower, so that Apple could sell "budget" models of their faster line of computers.

We were savvy and would remove them, but I bet 99% of buyers had no clue and just went along with it.

The person that can somehow manage to successfully fool Scrooge TimCook to download more RAM deserves my absolute respect.

Exactly! I bought the last Mac Mini with upgradeable ram and got it from 8gb to 64gb for less than going to 16gb factory installed would cost me. After this one is done, I'm not sure I can justify buying another one.

I've always been interested in if there were a way to bake more RAM onto these boards. Presumably the pads are there and they're just not populated, so could you make a stencil for the solder balls with a cnc and buy another RAM chip and stick it in to one of those directed heat platforms. Would macos accept that, or would it throw a hissy fit because of miss matched licenses.