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Comment by kabacha | Hacker News Reader

I really don't get it. How much difference could 8 to 16gb be in terms of price? Is Apple really doing this to save 20$ per machine?

Even if you somehow could argue that 8 is all you need now, what about in few years? No one should ever buy this device.

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They aren't doing it to save 20$ per machine, they are doing it to make the higher price of a 16GB machine seem more reasonable than if it was the base model.

Yeah this screams classic Apple. Advertise the cost of the Mac as lower, but with a shitty option that most people will have to upgrade. Majority are not going to want to buy a 8gb laptop for that kind of money and not just bump it up to 16gb.

This reminds me of how movie theatres offer a small, medium and large but the large popcorn only costs slightly more than the medium, thus enticing you to go for the large.

Yes, not just classic Apple but classic lots of things. Cars are sold the same way

I’ll add classic Lenovo to the list, whose base level thinkpad are underspeced and have terrible screens. The fact that apple doesnt perpetually claim their machines are on sale is their last bastion of superiority

What do you mean? I scored a sweet ThinkPad deal — $2,000 off using code “SUCKER” at checkout!

You used to be able to replace/extend ThinkPad parts quite easily. We'd buy base models exclusively and just add extra stick of ram and flip the CD rom to another hard drive or battery - those were super cheap high quality laptops.

Only recently Lenovo started to solder their parts so base models lost their power :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoy_effect

It's worth noting that they are charging $200 for the 8GB memory upgrade.

The spot price for 16GB of LPDDR4 looks like it's currently ~$8 per DRAMexchange: https://www.dramexchange.com/

They're also charging $200 for a 256GB storage upgrade - spot price of 3D TLC is $3/256Gb ($24 for 256GB) - you can currently buy a 256GB NVMe SSD (full stick with controller) at retail for <$30 as well.

That is like saying the materials the baker needs to bake bread cost 5¢. Why doesn’t the baker price his bread at 5¢?

That might be a somewhat relevant analogy if you had a choice to go somewhere else to buy bread elsewhere, but since both memory and storage are now soldered, you are forced to upgrade for the lifetime of the product at purchase. The relevance on the parts pricing here is to point out that Apple is being extremely abusive in their pricing to their customers.

Many laptops now have soldered RAM, but other vendors have not chosen to do what Apple has done. In HP's premium laptop (Spectre x360 13t), adding 8GB of RAM is a +$70 option. For reference, an 8GB DDR4 SODIMM at retail pricing is about $30.

Also, AFAIK, no other major laptop or mini-desktop manufacturer uses soldered storage like Apple does, so in this case, the retail cost for storage is even more relevant.

These are commodity parts, so there's not any R&D to recoup - this is just profiteering on Apple's part. Especially for the Mac Mini, where there's not the same space constraints, the lack of storage upgradability is also a rather egregious form of forced obsolescence. Fine from a business perspective, but hypocritical for a company that claims to care about the environment.

Well, no. Apple buys RAM chips at that price, and they just have to swap one chip for another. The differential in price from one to the other including all costs is that much. Labour costs and OpEx are not affected by choosing Chip A or Chip B that are essentially identical.

This is pretty much the reason why I'll never will buy apple devices again. Recently I bought iphone 11 for my girlfriend as a present and the price difference between 64GB model (which honestly might as well be a dead brick in this data age) and 256GB model was around 30% in my country which is beyond absurd.

You can call me bitter but this sort of manipulation is making me extremely salty to the point where I'll be having seething hate for the company for the rest of my life.

> How much difference could 8 to 16gb be in terms of price?

The RAM is embedded into the SoC. Maybe the 8GB are salvaged chips where half of the memory is unusable?

$20 at the volume they sell does add up.

But I think a more important factor is future sales. They will likely sell more laptops as these 8GB owners upgrade earlier (in 2-3 years) as the OS and apps continue to bloat.

So on one side they save $20 per laptop and they likely sell more laptops.

> $20 at the volume they sell does add up.

So charge $50 more per laptop and make $30 more profit while not producing 8 GB junk that'll be e-waste in a few years because that's barely enough RAM to run an average browser session anymore.

>Even if you somehow could argue that 8 is all you need now, what about in few years?

What about it? It's not like someone who mostly browses the web, checks email, works with office documents, and so on, will change what he does in a few years...

The large consumer market that uses mac for common computing activities will not need more soon, perhaps, but many of Apple's bulwark clients - graphic designers, musicians, and even developers - probably will.

Despite the software they demoed, the machines they show (with exception of the mini) were all for the non-demanding users.

I would like to see Photos on those benchmarks, that is one program that would benefit from lots of ram, and would be used by many of the Air’s customers.

Those don't buy the base configuration, and never had.

> will change what he does in a few years...

The fatal flaw in this argument is the failure to realize that web pages are bloating, video is becoming more prevalent, higher resolution images, etc.

So “browses the web” has ever increasing hardware requirements if you want to maintain the experience.

Not to mention they love talking about video editing, Neural Engine, etc. Those things eat RAM as well

8GB is definitely underpowered

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