WTF. That's insane. Instant dealbreaker.
Apple obviously knows that a lot of people rely on those power-user features, so I'm sure at some point you'll be able to buy an ARM Mac with 128GB RAM that you can hook 6 monitors up to.
I do think starting at the low end makes sense for Apple though. These machines will sell mostly to everyday folks who just use a handful of common apps - I wouldn't be surprised if Safari is the #1 app used on these machines. That gives Apple a start to this transition, without the reputational hit that might have occurred if they sold a bunch of machines to power users right away. We'll whine a little bit that the machines weren't what we wanted, and then we'll just wait for the M1X machines. But that's better than if we all bought M1X MacBook Pros yesterday and then were disappointed when a couple of crucial apps didn't work yet. This "flattens the curve" of application incompatibility reports if you will.
I am not willing the entertain the idea "more RAM is no longer possible nor necessary", either. Software keeps creeping up as usual (MS Teams _by itself_ uses >2GB, and I have already complained dearly -- Teams is basically a glorified IRC client!). And next year if not this year already it's highly likely my phone will have 16GB of RAM. My phone! On my pocket!
It's just ridiculous that a $1200 laptop has 8 GB, and it is just unbelievable it maxes out at 16GB. Looks designed to be thrown away next year.
Apple still sells 13" Macbook Pros that go up to 32GB RAM, they're just Intel ones. If you need more than 16 GB in a Pro Mac, or a Mini you can still get it. So these options have not been taken off the table. The M1 machines simply offer a new tradeoff of smaller but faster memory if that works for you. Not every machine needs to offer every possible configuration.
Is it? Dell sells a $1499 laptop with 8GB. They also have 16GB models, but once you add specs equivalent to the new MacBook (at least i7, SSD, 13") the prices are $1299 and above (and you get a plastic box, not exactly the same build quality, trackpad, etc - though you do get a probabl better camera and more ports).
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/inte...
But for a few months everything was running rather slow and I put it down to other causes.
One day I looked at the memory usage and saw it was using 10GB swap in addition to about 14.5GB RAM. And when I clicked things that responded slowly, the memory pressure meter was lighting up. Swapping was why it was slow.
It's pretty fast swap, being on SSD, but it was the reason for the slowdowns. Probably not doing the SSD any good either (they wear out if written to constantly).
Turns out Safari was using 8GB by itself. Restarting Safari helped (it's quick to restart which is nice). Safari, like Chrome, uses a lot of memory after opening a bunch of tabs because of using separate processes for each tab.
I also use Firefox, but it uses 6-8GB for me too.
Then there's my VM running my Linux dev environment. Now I only give it 4GB, which is a bit tight but I run some things remotely so it's ok. I had to shrink it from 6GB to get my performance back.
Sometimes I'm foolish enough to have LibreOffice or MS Word open to look at documents. They aren't memory hogs, but when you've lost most of it to the browser(s) and dev VM, little things like office apps push it a few GB over the edge.
I'm also running Emacs with quite a lot loaded into it, and many iTerms, but they use so little RAM compared with the big stuff, it barely registers.
Nowadays I pay more attention to memory use, mostly use only one browser at a time, and restart more often.
Even so, it's hovering around 5GB swap at the moment, and I haven't got much going on at the moment.
Based on this, I know I can live with 16GB but it is restricting what I use and how I work now. 32GB would be let me stop thinking about RAM again, and I expect in a few years it will be nearly full, as usage tends to grow over time (as I found already).
If I could buy a new MBP knowing I could upgrade the RAM I'd be happy to buy at 16GB, but as you can't upgrade, and I want a new laptop to last at least 5 years, I wouldn't be comfortable buying a dev machine at 16GB now.
An entry-level laptop not supporting dual 4K screens (for whatever reason) sounds more tame, especially if the vendor has statistics that show that a tiny minority use theirs with such a setup even in the Intel version that does support it...
The 16GB max memory is another problem, but again mostly not for the kind of users the machine is intended for.
For Apple it is. And for most other companies (Dell, Lenovo, Razer, etc).
When you configure any kind of developer-class or workstation-class machine, it gets way above $2000 soon regardless of vendor.
I wanted to try a Lenovo or Razer with compatible specs to a high end MacBook Pro 16 (to use if as a high end Linux workstation), and it gets into the same ballpark very quickly as you narrow the specs down.
The sub €600 category Apple doesn't cater to.
Dell: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/insp...
Lenovo: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-100-ser...
In a pedantic way yes, but not on the casual axis I was talking about.
Workstations are not merely "different" configurations that can be equally cheap to an entry level consumer machine, they are also typically much more expensive.
For us that remember the era of the actual workstation (HP, Sun, SGI, IBM, Dec, etc), it wasn't just some "completely orthogonal concept", it was "hella high end, hella expensive, 3-10 times your average PC" reality...
And when we talk about machines worthy to be called workstations, for graphics, video, 3D, etc, this remains so...