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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

I hope, this could mean Apple will push the baseline of ALL Macs to have higher than 8GB of Memory. While I wish we all get 16GB M4 as baseline. Apple being Apple may only give us 12GB, and charges extra $100 for the 16GB option.

It will still be a lot better than 8GB though.

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The Steam Deck ships with 16 gigs of quad-channel LPDDR5 and it costs $400. Apple knows exaaaactly what they're doing with this sort of pricing.

Can't forget about that cozy 256gb SSD either. An AI computer will need more than that, right?

Is steamdeck sold at cost? From what I know Apple has a rule that everything must be sold at 40% margins. That is prob the main reason.

> From what I know Apple has a rule that everything must be sold at 40% margins.

As for all rules, it's a rule except when it's not. On the top of my head Apple TV [0] had a 20% predicted margin presumably because they wanted to actually sell them.

Otherwise 40% margin is usually calculated against the BOM, which doesn't mean 40% of actual profit when the product is sold.

In that respect we have no idea of the actual margin on a macbook air for instance, it could be 10% when including their operating costs and marketing, or it could 60% if they negociated prices way below the estimated BOM for instance.

It's just to say: Apple sells at 8Gb because they want to, at the end of the day nothing is stopping them to play with their margin or the product price.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN06424767/

As a consumer I really cannot be made to care why it's the case. This artificial price tiering is stupid and everyone has been calling it a scam for years. Apple clearly knows they're in the wrong, but continues because they know nobody can stop them.

Yes they can, buy something else.

I've been doing that for six fucking years and not a single thing has changed. The base memory and storage has not changed in that time. During that same amount of time:

- Macs transitioned to Apple Silicon, got rid of dGPU memory

- Baseline Macbook Air models increased in price by $100

- AI became a realistic and usable technology

- Gaming is slightly feasible with GPTK

Of course we shouldn't be starting at 8 gigs of memory. This is highway robbery and the only thing you can say in defense is "buy something else then"

When I know I will get robbed in the highway, I take another safer road instead, instead of playing lucky and complaining afterwards.

From a business perspective it's not _stupid_. It sucks for us customers, but it's "smart" from a business point of view.

Until they get serious competition, I doubt they'll change their practices.

And while I hate the overpriced memory upgrades, I still prefer paying extra, rather than Apple switching to a Ad-based business model like Google (and potentially OpenAI in the future)

> From a business perspective it's not _stupid_. It sucks for us customers, but it's "smart" from a business point of view.

Well, I'm not a business. I appreciate smart consumer choices and I applaud any company that doesn't have to be forced into doing the right thing.

> I still prefer paying extra, rather than Apple switching to a Ad-based business model like Google (and potentially OpenAI in the future)

Oh you sweet summer child. You think Apple doesn't also have an ad-based business model on top of that?

I switched to Linux after MacOS Mojave, and I do not miss any of this brouhaha one bit. It's almost rich hearing people talk about how few ads MacOS has, when it's constantly begging you to try or pay for Apple software services. Even Android isn't as ad-ridden as MacOS, the only victory Apple can claim is relative to Windows (which is a grim reflection of MacOS's eventual service-dominated fate).

You should try out Linux, though. It's a culture shock, trying to get work done with no inbuilt advertisement whatsoever. I could never go back to Mac or Windows and be this productive.

Business and consumers both benefit from not using a cost-plus pricing model in a marketspace heavily dependent on R&D. Sure, the profit margins are hard to agree upon since it's an infinite scale and they change heavily day to day, but do not trust anyone who thinks all product pricings should be based solely on cost of materials.

40% margin on parts that cost tens of dollars isn't going to have a huge impact on the sticker price of devices costing hundreds to thousands.

It's been speculated that base config macbooks essentially act as loss leaders for higher end configs, so overall, probably sales across the line net somewhere around that. The cost of the upgrades themselves can get to multiple times the actual market cost.

I feel like this is very obviously what they are doing: they have a small margin on the entry config where people are a lot more price-aware, and jack up the upgrade costs to get a fat margin on configs bought by orgs and power users who generally care less about how much it costs. Frankly, I'd do the same thing.

I always thought the products like the $700 computer wheels[1] and $1,000 monitor stands[2] are made exclusively for the companies who are trying to signal their wealth. For anyone who knows how much these accessories cost, walking into an office where all the workstations have these components puts out a message of wealth (much like standing desks, Herman Miller chairs, expensive art, super espresso machines, etc).

I don't think it tarnishes their reputation as long as the products are both actually good quality and there are inexpensive alternatives. Why not get some easy cash while letting your customers display their vanity? It reminds me of the "I am rich" app[3].

[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w... [2] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWUG2LL/A/pro-stand [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

> Why not get some easy cash while letting your customers display their vanity?

Because computer wheels and monitor stands are high-demand utilities, not jewelry or makeup.

RAM is literally the cheapest primary component in a laptop at going rate of 1-4usd/GB. I'd say that shipping 8GB base model in 2024 is clearly manipulation by Apple, i.e. planned obsolescence or a way to moat Apple software. Anyone who doesn't see this is just being delusional.

Same way Apple and Samsung ship 128GB of storage when the production price between 128gb and 1tb is like 10$ (on a 1000$ device). Samsung even got rid of micro sd slot. It's so blatant it's actually depressing.

> RAM is literally the cheapest primary component

Is that still true for Apple's integrated memory? It might be - I just don't know.

For the LPDDR4 and LPDDR5 that goes into the M1 and M2/M3 systems, yes. You might need to spend more money on memory controllers (since M1 and up is 8-channel) but the physical memory component itself is highly availible and relatively cheap. Same goes for SSD storage, nowadays.

> integrated memory

Yes. The cost of bonding memory to their chip is mostly the same for 8G / 16G / 32G / practically any number.

The memory used by Apple isn't anything magical or special - it's bog standard LPDDR5, essentially same as phone - and in a laptop it's way less limited by thermal and power constraints to add more (which is how you have the rather large possible set of options).

While going for the top tier of memory sizes Apple offers does cost considerable amounts, making 16, or even 32GB standard is peanuts.

Typing this from a Samsung with SD slot, need to chose your models wisely.

On the number of devices they sell, an extra $64 of cost per device (taking your higher figure and assuming an extra 8GB), across Mac, iPad and iPhone, they'd be looking at a cost of ~$12.8bn a year. If they just did it for Mac, it's still in the region of $2bn/year.

Sure they could pass that onto a mostly price-insensitive audience, but they like round numbers, and it's not the size of decision you take without making sure its necessary: that your customers are going to go elsewhere in either scenario of doing it or not doing it.

I remember hearing that Apple's researching running AI models straight from flash storage (which would make immense amount of sense imo). You could create special, high read bandwidth flash chips (which would probably involve connecting a fast transciever in parallel to the 3D flash stack).

If you could do that, you could easily get hundreds of GB/s read speed out of simple TLC flash.

Obviously this is the future, but I think it's a promising one.

The have insane margin on ram and storage, it would be really surprising to see them move away from their current strategy

It probably will change. Note that, so far, a 16GB apple device has much better usability than the equivalent on windows. This may sound biased, but the memory compression and foreground/background actions by macOS tight integration with the hardware is really good. I've never felt like I couldn't do things on smaller hardware, except (larges) LLMs.

Also when I compare with my co-workers the memory pressure is a lot less running the same software on macOS than Windows. This might have to be due to the UI framework at play.

But that said, I totally agree that Apple is doing daylight robbery with their additional RAM pricing, and the minimum on offer is laughable.

The swapping is indeed faster as the SSD is on the SoC and so fast to access. To the point that an 4 year old 8gb M1 Air is enough for simpler development work, at least for me.

SSD on chip might be a thing one day but I’m pretty sure only the RAM is on the same chip.

I would think any 4 year old 8gh laptop would be enough for simpler development work.

> This may sound biased,

It certainly does, close to irrational even. IIRC memory compression is enabled by default on Windows as well.

Biased and irrational are both things HN readers say to avoid using the word "subjective".

Any apple device has much better usability than a windows machine, regardless of RAM.

Does it matter what the baseline memory is as long as they have 16GB M4 as an option?

Some companies give their employees only base models.

Some companies are stupid, news at 6.

It's not Apple's (or any computer manufacturer's) responsibility to put out products that can solve every problem with the base model.

I'll never understand why companies pay high salaries then give employees sub-optimal computers to do their job.

I understand your frustration, but I don’t appreciate the sarcasm in your response.

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