Technology
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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With Apple's new iBits™ the 0s are so much rounder and the 1s are so smooth and shiny that they're worth at least twice as much as regular bits.
Just upgrade the RAM yourself.
Oh wait, you can't because it's 2023 and it's become inexplicably acceptable to solder it to the motherboard.
It's not "inexplicable".
DIMM mounting brackets introduce significant limitations to maximum bandwidth. SOC RAM offers huge benefits in bandwidth improvement and latency reduction. Memory bandwidth on the M2 Max is 400GB/second, compared to a max of 64GB/sec for DDR5 DIMMs.
It may not be optimizing for the compute problem that you have, and that's fine. But it's definitely optimizing for compute problems that Apple believes to be high priority for its customers.
8GB for this price in 2023 is a SCAM. All Apple devices are a SCAM. Many pay small fortunes for luxurious devices full of spyware and which they have absolutely no control over. It's insane. They like to be chained in their golden shackles.
That’s too simplistic. For example, the entry level M1 MacBook Air is hands down one of the best value laptops. It’s very hard to find anything nearly as good for the price.
On the high end, yeah you can save $250-400 buying a similarly specced HP Envy or Acer Swift or something. These are totally respectable with more ports, but they have 2/3rd the battery life, worse displays, and tons of bloatware. Does that make them “not a scam”?
(I’m actually not sure what “spyware” you’re referring to, especially compared to Windows and Chromebooks.)
The bloatware really isn't an arguement because it takes all of 30 seconds to uninstall it all with a script that you get off GitHub. Yeah it's annoying and it shouldn't be there but it's not exactly going to alter my purchase decision.
The M1's ok value for money, but the problem is invariably you'll want to do more and more complex things over the lifetime of the device, (if only because basic software has become more demanding), while it might be fine at first it tends to get in the way 4 or 5 years down the line. You can pay ever so slightly more money and future proof your device.
But I suppose if you're buying Apple you're probably going to buy a new device every year anyway. Never understood the mentality personally.
My cousin gets the new iPhone every single year, and he was up for it at midnight as well, I don't understand why because it's not better in any noticeable sense then it was last year, it's got a good screen and a nice camera but so did the model 3 years ago. Apple customers are just weird.
When compared to other professional level laptops the macbooks do put up a good fight. They have really high quality displays which accounts for some of the cost and of course compared to a commercial grade laptop like a thinkpad the prices get a lot closer(when they arent on sale like thinkpads frequently do).
That said even then the m1 macbook is over a thousand dollars after tax and that gets you just 256GB of storage and 8GB of ram. Theyre annoyingly not as easy to find as intel offerings but you can find modern ryzen laptops that can still give you into the teens of screen on time for less with way more ram and storage space. The m1 is still the better chip in terms of power per watt and battery life overall, but then getting the ram and storage up to spec can make it $700 more than a consumer grade ryzen.
I bought a PC the other day and it only had 6 gigabytes of RAM which is pathetic for what I paid for it but there you go. The thing is for a fraction of the price Apple are asking to upgrade it to 16, I upgraded it to 32 gig.
I honestly think I could upgrade it to 64 and still come in under the Apple price. They're charging something like a 300% markup on commercially available RAM, it's ridiculous.
On storage, the markup is about 2000%.
And on RAM if we compare to DDR5 (not totally fair because of how Apple's unified memory works), it's about 800% marked up.
All Apple devices are a SCAM.
True. Sometimes I look the specs and prices of Apple devices while visiting large electronic stores. I don't understand how people who aren't rich can rationalize buying an Apple device. While it's true that Windows has become increasingly plagued by invasive ads recently, and macOS seems like the only alternative for many, this issue is relatively recent. On the other hand, MacBooks have been overpriced for years.
Pairing a chip this capable with just 8GB of shared memory is also just a waste of good silicon. Which makes the price all the more insulting to me.
Like, this is the equivalent of Usain Bolt losing one of his legs
"His one leg is still more capable than regular person's two legs"
That is exactly what Apple would say, isn't it
The thing is even if that were true, which it isn't, I'd still prefer him with two legs. Especially if I'm paying the amount of money I would normally pay for 50 legs.
Somewhat stretching the analogy there
Seems fair, you pay 1000 for the logo and 600 for the hardware.
It's a very nice logo. And it lights up. Hard to argue with their pricing, really.
It actually doesn't light up anymore...
Instead I feel it's the opposite because that memory is shared with the GPU. So if you're gaming even with some old game, it's like having 4gb for the system and 4gb to the GPU. They might claim that their scheduler is magic and can predict memory usage with perfect accuracy but still, it would be like 6+2 GB. If a game has heavy textures they will steal memory from the system. Maybe you want to have a browser for watching a tutorial on YouTube during gaming, or a chat. That's another 1-2 gb stolen from the CPU and GPU.
Their pricing for the ram is ridiculous, they're charging $300 for just 8gb of additional memory! We're not in the 2010s anymore!
The most expensive 8GB DDR5 stick I can find on Amazon is about us$35. There are 64GB sets that are under us$200!
Apple should be ashamed.
Apple exec doesn't actually understand how computers work and think that that actually might be a reasonable arguement.
It doesn't matter how good your processor is if you can only bank 8 GB of something into memory it's going to be slow. The only way an 8 GB device would beat a 16 GB device would be if the 16 GB device had the world's slowest processor. Like something from 2005. Taking stuff out of RAM is the single slowest operation you can perform other than loading from a hard drive.
Tell that to Google Chrome
Do they store 32-bit integers as 16-bit internally or how does macOS magically only use half the RAM? Hint: it doesn't.
Even if macOS was more lightweight than Windows - which might well be true will all the bs processes running in Windows 11 especially - third party multiplatform apps will use similar amounts of memory no matter the platform they run on. Even for simple use cases, 8 GB is on the limit (though it'll likely still be fine) as Electron apps tend to eat RAM for breakfast. Love it or hate it Apple, people often (need to) use these memory-hogging apps like Teams or even Spotify, they are not native Swift apps.
I love my M1 Max MacBook Pro, but fuck right off with that bullshit, it's straight up lying.
Pied Piper middle out compression for your RAM
But seriously it's so ridiculous especially since he said it in an interview with a machine learning guy. Exactly the type of guy who needs a lot of RAM for his own processes working on his own data using his own programs. Where the OS has no control over precision, access patterns or the data streaming architecture.
16 gb optiplexes on sale for 85 dollars on eBay. Dont come with windows, but neither do macs :P
I looked at a few Lenovo and MS laptops to see what they are charging to jumps from 8 to 16 GB.
They are very close to what Apple charges.
So, they are ALL ripping us off!
I switched back to Apple recently, but used to sell them.
1 week before Bootcamp was released, I was selling Apple gear, and I showed a sales manager who was visiting how we got Windows running on the new Intel Mac Mini, and explained how this was great, because it was a great transition technology
In front of customers, as I was explaining, he basically called me an idiot, and said "why would anyone want to run windows on a mac".
A week or so later, bootcamp was released, and he was back.. He was now using the arguments I made a week early as a template for bragging about bootcamp to us and explaining the benefits. No apologies for any of the previous discussion.
They make decent products otherwise, and management doesn't even need to act like wankers or be deceptive either
I only now using Apple again because Microsoft has finally pushed me over the edge with windows (literally, when they started hijacking my chrome tabs EVERY bootup, and opening Edge automatically), and the fact my Xbox Series X wouldn't even play remote on Windows (their own OS)
Lol. My personal iMac has 32GB, and I'm happy with it. My POS work MBP has only 8GB, and I wanna frisbee the fucken thing out the window pretty much every day.
My research disproves this clown's hypothesis.
Emulators disagree.
My 16GB XPS running Linux almost fills up entirely when running several docker containers, IDEA, Firefox, Teams, Postman and a few other, smaller apps, but it fits still, and I can work with it (tho I can't wait to get my 32GB framework laptop)
Now gimme a 8GB MBP and I'll show you that I wouldn't get shit done on that configuration. And at 1600 it's just crazy.
11 gigabytes of that is probably being used up by Teams, it's a memory hog.
The best part is people complaining to them for pointing out that 8gb is laughable little. Ah, the sweet fanboys.
But it's $1600 Apple. Not the cheapest Mac book air.