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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

I really want to spend my (rather than my employer's) money on a personal macbook, but the fact that they have 8GB of ram as a starter and upgrading it costs hundreds of $ (an amount that can easily buy you 64GBs of high performing ram) is what keeps me off it.

I would feel genuinely fooled to pay such an absurd amount of money for more ram when I had a MBP with 16GB of memory 10 years ago.

Hell, even my 2 years old OnePlus 11 smartphone has 16GB of rams and the cost of the phone was pretty much equal to the cost of upgrading from 8 to 16gb a macbook air.

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Does it really matter how much upgrades cost? Just spec the machine you want and see if it's within your budget/willing to pay for it.

I'm on year 3 of my M1 Air 8gb and it's still perfect. My previous two personal Macbook pros were all 8 gig models.

Knuckling under to onerous pricing undermines consumers' ability to vote with their wallets.

That's correct. I think we should celebrate consumers that refuse to fork out high prices. They put pricing pressures that benefits everyone.

Even tho I can afford something I'm unwilling to support such practices.

Every Apple product post reliably brings this same tiresome comment. Most people don’t need more than 8GB for browsing and office work. The memory upgrade prices are competitive with high-end Lenovo and Surface laptops. However, if you don’t like it then just ~buy another computer~. What is the point of this constant complaining?

> Every Apple product post reliably brings this same tiresome comment. Most people don’t need (...)

Why are you trying to argue that the baseline specs from 10 years ago are somehow still acceptable today in supposedly high-end product lines?

I can buy a miniPC for 300€ and stick 32GB of RAM in it. Why are you arguing that this is absurd in MacBooks?

This takes corporate worship to another level.

> The memory upgrade prices are competitive with high-end Lenovo and Surface laptops.

Bullshit. They even solder components just to prevent people from actually avoiding price gouging.

You're being willfuly obtuse. Lenovo X1 charges $170 to go from 8GB to 16GB. Surface Pro 9 charges $200. Apple M2 charges $200. All of these laptops use soldered memory. They all start at 8GB. Apple only has 15% market share in the US. So what's the problem? Enjoy using your loaded miniPC at a coffee shop.

The only models in the X1 lineup that even offer 8GB RAM are the previous generation. The latest X1 Carbon starts at 16.

> Lenovo X1 charges $170 to go from 8GB to 16GB.

I have a Beelink miniPC that takes $70 to upgrade to 32BG of RAM, and that involves buying 2*16GB of RAM.

That's 1/3 the cost to get twice the memory you mention in your case.

There is no way around it.

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