hardly a surprise considering the 3570k is over 10 years old at this point! Saying that very impressive thats its lasted this long in the first place
Upcoming M3 chips
- Thread starter Capitano
- Start date
hardly a surprise considering the 3570k is over 10 years old at this point! Saying that very impressive thats its lasted this long in the first place
I have the 8GB M1 Air and it is surprisingly good and handles much more than I thought it would. Web browsing, eBook reading and note-taking are great on it.
Associate
MBP 13" comes with 8 and 256 at £1349 but even a MacBook air should come with a base spec of 16gigs of RAM and 512gigs of storage.
Like, OSX is better at using less than ideal amounts of RAM when compared to Windows but I still think that when you spend £1000 on a laptop device such as the air these days, 16gigs of RAM and 512gigs of storage is to be expected.
I also hate that a lot of Windows laptops come with 8gigs of soldered RAM these days (some are degradable) and they are much cheaper but you're still buying soon to be ewaste so it's still unacceptable and the general public don't know that they are essentially buying a device that won't last them very long.
You can still buy devices with 4gigs of RAM with no option to update later on!!!! That's pathetic and actual ewaste.
If I could get a MBA for £600 then 8gigs is fine given the length of time Apple supports the device over a lot of other Windows based laptop companies and I can work around 256gigs of storage at that price point. I'd not expect it to be amazing but I'm spending a lot less so it's ok.
Associate
Yes, that's fine and for my mom who just wants a trouble free experience with that use case and the price isn't too much of an issue, I'm cool spending the money in that situation.
I just think that a lot of people would like their device to last longer and not have to push data from the memory to the SSD when it fills up because they did a mildly demanding task.
It's not unreasonable to expect your £1000 device to cope with medium quality video editing without running out of RAM. I do accept that if you wanted to do professional quality video editing at a very high resolution, you should be looking at more RAM but even then, Apple rips off their most dedicated professional users with the pricing.
You can get a dedicated rendering rig with a 4090 and core i7 and tons of RAM for less than the high end M2 Mac Pro machines.
Soldato
when the M1 Air first came out there were plenty of people testing the 16gb version vs 8gb version. The 8gb version was still fine editing something like 72 audio tracks simultaneously in Logic Pro, but lagged a tiny bit behind the 16gb versions when doing 96 tracks. Video editing was similar i.e. not much better with 16 gb, and same with compiling.
Associate
Yeah that’s fine it’s still not ok for a modern computer to cost £1000 minimum and only come with 8gigs of RAM.
Apple are making hand over fist profit with these devices and are a huge company who couple easily give up a relatively tiny amount of profit per machine to give you the extra storage and ram so they don’t need you to stand up for them.
They have billions of US$ in Ireland that they don’t want to move to the USA because they will have to pay tax on.
I like their products (largely) and they aren’t beyond reproach.
That's not their lineup strategy. Apple doesn't seek flat margin rate across the entire spec models. Their profits per machine very much depends on other products in their lineup. This is in contrast to a lot of PC laptops which do have a flat margin % across the entire upgrade options. Although more PC laptops are following this strategy after Apple's success.
The amount they'd be saving on 8 vs 16GB of ram is tiny per machine, but the reality is that Apple would have offered 8GB even if 8GB was costing them more than 16GB. Same with storage.
Apple prices the base model to bring people in, that is a low margin product and is deliberately handicapped. They want this to be a poor laptop. Every tiny upgrade after that will cost a fortune so that by the time you've turned it into a reasonable machine it's quite expensive, and is has now become a very high margin product.
E.g. base 13" Macbook Air with M2 is £1150. This allows Apple to market the MBA as a ~£1000 machine. But as soon as you go to 512GB storage it's £1450 now and a high margin product. Want 16GB? That's £1650 now. If the base model was already 16GB/512GB then people wouldn't buy higher margin products because after 16GB/512GB there really isn't much point upgrading for most people. This would cause their profit margins to completely collapse.
They pick that base spec very carefully to make that next upgrade seem so important and they make it very expensive. It's never about the cost of 8GB vs 16GB chips of DRAM or another 256GB of NAND.
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External storage should be easy with the Studio.
Yeah. I have 2TB and 512GB external drives.
Soldato
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- 30 Jul 2012
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People spend over £1000 for web browsing or writing an essay or whatever? Dumbest purchase ever.
Associate
There are other perks.
For some people they prefer OSX and money isn’t an issue for them.
I’ve known customers to order a top of the range PC with water-cooling and so on and all they use it for is email and web browsing.
Apple also doesn’t have the bug where Windows machines run out of battery if you close the laptop before removing the power chord and a lot of the LMG staff switched to MacBooks for that reason.
I’d also happily get my mom a Mac as they are known to be so locked down that users can’t change things and break it.
It’s not as simple as just money being the only factor.
And.....then you look at the price of an iPhone and what the alternatives can do.
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Associate
Saw a piece suggesting base model M3s would come with 12gb. I’ve been weary of 8gb and have upgraded to 16gb on all my Macs. However, my computing needs are fairly simplistic, so will take a punt on a 12gb beast if true.
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To be fair while I don’t disagree to some extent, I had a MacBook Air from new in 2015 up until last year. It was expensive, but it was also probably the ‘best’ computer I’ve ever owned. Never had a problem with it, worked well for years. In that respect it more than paid for itself.
Soldato
i spent over 4k on mine to post on ocuk
Commissario
Hehehe, yeah, this rings true.
Studio Ultra and two Studio displays.
But at least I can post really, really quickly
Realistically most people with M1 machines don't need to upgrade until M5 or M6 series.
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