8GB vs. 16GB M3 Mac

The complaints about Windows are mostly on low-end machines loading all kind of crappy background software that are always running and eating a lot of ressource for not much (very often antivirus, VPNs, file syncing stuff, "cleaning" software and more).

If you do not overload your Windows install with all kinds of useless crap it will just be better and snappier than macOS on the same amount of ressource. I can tell you that much from building some hackintoshes...

Funnily enough Apple software is notoriously bad on Windows, so I'm pretty sure where the problem is. Almost like making more money by selling more powerful hardware leads to shitty low end specs experience.

To be clear I think macOS is cool and a pretty good OS but the reality is that to make the most of it and the software that can run, you need a powerful machine that is extremely expensive, and even more so since Apple soldered the RAM/storage to control price.

This is precisely why there is outrage, everyone who has had an entry level Apple device knows very well how miserable an experience it is but also how much worse it will get.

On paper an iPhone 6s was "supported" for a long time; in practice it's 16GB of base storage made it almost unusable barely 3 years after launch. You could only install 10 apps at best and not put much music, or other media. The "real" price of an iPhone was effectively 200 more or something like that to access the relevant level of minimum storage that was advisable. But this way Apple gets to advertise a price, and instead of subsidizing better devices by making only a small number of variants and using an average cost for pricing they prefer to individualise the rip-off. The poorer you are the more they steal from you. I truly hate Tim Cook, not only because he raised the prices at a time where Apple needed it the least but also because he made despicable greedy corporate behavior the new norm. I guess he makes a lot of money, because only money matters in life...

I find it funny that there are still some people defending this behavior. The only way it doesn't affect you is if you are rich enough to buy the fully loaded version of their hardware and then it just become blaming peoples for being poor. An occupation a lot of Apple users like to engage in very often in my experience; in fact the meaner, incompetent but luckier they got in life, the better the correlation.

But even more annoyingly, in the physical stores (even Apple ones) you're most likely to find only the base models

Orders for the custom models can take more than a week sometimes

I'd be careful extending one anecdotal experience to an entire class of computers.

Given how much scrutiny Apple goes under, for example the heat-gate fiasco on new iPhones and the many other "gate" events they have endured, I think that if this was widespread we would have heard about it.

There were 26,000,000 macbooks and macs sold in 2022. You are using a sample size n=1 to extend to 26 million devices.

In my anecdotal experience. I have never had a screen die on me or known someone who has had it happen. My family all has macbooks and I have had them for ~15 years. I've purchased about 5 personally over that time, averaging about 3 years per device. I have owned 4 additional macbooks through company device programs. I have watched ~30ish macbooks go through the hands of various family members over the same time period. I have never seen a screen just die randomly. My sister is terribly rough on computers and phones and she destroys computers but has started buying Macbooks because they are the only ones that last with her. So she has an opposite experience.

That's not to say it doesn't happen. It is a tech product. I am sure it happened to you and has happened to others. But it isn't common. As ubiquitous as macbooks are, Apple would be under a lot of scrutiny if this happened to even 1% of their devices.

I'ved spilled a lot of things on my keyboards in the past, even killed one or two on laptops that way. In the past it was a few screws and the keyboard could be removed from the top panel and swapped, rarely was the replacement keyboard more than $50. Even recently on some cheap acer with the keyboard glued to the top of the case the entire case+keyboard was like $20 used from ebay.

So, macs = throwaway for me these days.

But, I think pretty much everyone understands apple tends to have a social signaling aspect tied to it, too. This is why you see plenty of PowerPoint warriors/middle mgmt toting them around too, because "pro" even though their use case for the machine is frequently little more than light office work (ppt/word/excel). So, why not offer it with 8G, they get their social signalling for cheap, and everyone else gets to pay $$$$ for the real configuration.

I bought here an air with 16GB of RAM and all of the complaints have gone away.

1: Though s/Facebook/Pinterest/, and occasionally a non-word office app open.

I know the prices on AirBnB are a lie too, but they still make me unhappy.

I know the unlimited data plans are not unlimited, but I am no happier due to this knowledge when I see their ads.

I know if I buy a perpetual license for a service, it will probably stop functioning in less than 5 years, but I am not more content when it happens because of this knowledge.

People are complaining about the expected tip percentage rising well above 20%. But they feel unhappy about this, instead of mentally adding 30% to the list prices and counting that as the real price and imagining the tip is 0.

At this point, it should be fascinating if we find an instance where human emotions don't work like this, rather than if they do.

For instance, I just saw what was clearly a artificially promoted post in /new with 17 upvotes... and no real responses? It wasn't even flagged. I think it was shadowbanned from the front page, and everyone looking at /new just collectively knew to ignore it.

Another interesting bit is the flagging/vouching system. It would be in a disaster some places, but is very effective here.

But still, there's a lot of insulting and vitriol on Macrumors. Not much "8GB is fine an here's a polite, thought out reason why..." and more "8GB is fine and you are an idiot jerk complainer (insert more unrelated personal attacks) for not even seeing that in the first place," and vice versa.

If there was no 8GB option, the price of the base model would be higher -- going by the comments, apparently $200 higher.

That would kind of screw over the people who don't open 20 Lightroom tabs or similar workloads, who might want that $200 for something else.

I guess people are imagining that if the 8GB option didn't exist then 16GB could be had for the same price, but that isn't rational. I think all Apple customers would quite like their prices to be lower, of course, but it's not like they are suddenly about to change from a publicly traded for-profit company to a charity organization.

Apple clearly generates more revenue than any company I’ve ever worked for, so I should probably shut my mouth, but their entire product naming and positioning of the last several years has seemed inconsistent and childish to me.