this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Maybe if they weren’t so expensive…
Honestly the base price of Macbooks has stayed right around $1000 for the past TWENTY YEARS. So the price has kind of gone down if you take inflation into account.....
The cost of the higher end models, however, has gone up.
Simply depends on your use case. They’re definitely not useless and more than enough for probably a vast amount of the population.
Eh, I've been using my 8GB M1 with 256GB storage that I got from work for 3 years now. It has not filled up, slowed down, or become irrelevant.
The base model is fine as a base model. Most people are perfectly fine with 8 gigs of ram and 256 gigs of storage to browse the internet.
It's mostly their upgrades that get stupid expensive.
8 is too small. You load up a browser and a few tabs these days and you're already almost full. Lots of webapps these days chew 400MB easy. Some I load use 1.1GB. For a single tab.
Our office is filled with these base model Macbook Pros, and PCs with 8 gigs of ram. It's plenty.
It's all in your use case. If you work for an office where your job requires you to do word processing and look at a single web page then yes it is. I usually make my browser cry with the amount of tabs I have. I'm frequently switching between different projects and it's not as simple as just closing and reopening tabs. Not to mention the other applications I use..
Sure, for you and I 8 gigs of ram isn't enough. I have 32 gigs of ram and an eGPU for my mac Mini and I make that i5 cry.
But you and I aren't normal people. We're nowhere close.
Memes aside, stop using chrome lawl
I don't use Chrome. It's just the way I work and research. Lots of tabs. I also have data from hundreds of machines where average ram usage is definitely around or above 8 GB.
This would have been true for any other laptop, but macs have a hardware-software symbiosis that fits it like a glove and keeps it competitive 10+ years down the line.
That's the advantage of having everything made in house, I guess.
While true most won't see this benefit. Nobody is going to notice a difference loading Facebook on a Mac, windows, or Linux. Most of the population will not notice.
I disagree, even with the facebook example you used - you can have two browser windows with ten tabs each and still browse comfortably on an OLD mac - any other machine of comparable specs, linux or windows, would be somewhere between annoying and damn impossible to use.
This. I'm already knocking on the limits of 16GB of RAM. Base mac with 8 is not even a contender for my needs.
The key part of that is that it’s not enough for your needs. For many people, 8gb is more than enough. It’s not for me, so I didn’t buy that config. It sounds like you just bought the wrong machine and now you’re looking for someone to pin your mistake on.
I don't even own a mac. My desktop has 64GB. I have no complaints. I frequently go over 32GB. I can definitely tell you from my years in managed IT services and having the data of hundreds of machines in front of me, 8GB was definitely not enough for a majority of the users.
So you’re just complaining that they’re selling a base machine that’s not specced to your needs?
Oh, and yes, 8gugs is plenty for a lot of people. Obviously not everyone, but for a bigger chunk of the population than most people think.
My complaint is that 8GB is not enough for anyone that uses a computer for more than 3 tabs of internet browsing and a few applications these days. And that the cost of 8GB of RAM right now is dirt cheap but apple wants to charge you a premium for it, like triple or quadruple the cost it actually is on the consumer market. And with many macs not having easily serviceable ram compartment, they're steering you towards hundreds of dollars more for a meager 8GB.
You’re definitely exaggerating about how limited an 8GB machine is. Until last year I used an 8GB intel MacBook Pro from 2016 and it handled all sorts of stuff simultaneously. Photoshop, figma, dozens of massive text document and 100+ page pdfs, several browser windows with upwards of 20 tabs each. Was it using swap? Probably, but that’s what it’s there for. The one thing that did bring it to a grinding halt was compiling/running stuff in Xcode, but that’s not exactly the kind of thing that every person needs to be able to do.
I know someone who uses a base M1 Air to record and produce music, do graphic design, and edit 4K video.
These machines are plenty capable. Maybe not for ultra heavy workloads, but for far more than you give them credit for.
And hey, you can always buy more ram if you think you’ll need it. It’s expensive but over the life of the machine it’s worth it. Or just don’t buy a Mac. If it’s really such a deal breaker, buy something that better fits your needs.
But don’t make sweeping statements about how perfectly capable machines are somehow unusable under a workload that wouldn’t have stressed a computer from nearly a decade ago. It’s simply not true.
They aren't. They're premium, for sure, but you'll struggle to find a similarly specced Windows machine beating it by much, if at all (and when I say similarly specced, I don't just mean a shitbox with a big, slow SSD and a ton of budget ram, I mean something with a decent display, good build quality, fast storage and ram, a powerful and efficient CPU, and silent/fanless if comparing to the Air).
I will grant you that Apple has lost their fuckin' minds with ram and storage upgrade pricing, but the machines as a whole are not that expensive relative to the competition.
When they were still on Intel you could literally build one with the same hardware, and the cost was substantially cheaper. Is the OS really worth >1K? Nah.
You could build a laptop? That’s news to me.