Comment on Apple argues in favor of selling Macs with only 8GB of RAM

paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• tal@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’m fine with this.

  I mean, I have no interest in an 8GB machine, but it’s also fair to say that there definitely are people who are fine with it, and who would like to save the money. Say you’ve got four kids and you’re buying them all laptops – I dunno if that’s the thing parents do these days, or whether kids typically just get by on smartphones or what. And sometimes they get broken or whatnot, and you’re paying for the other expenses associated with those kids. That money adds up.

  Apple runs a walled garden, unless things have changed in recent years. They tried opening up to third-party hardware vendors back around 2000 with some third-party PowerPC vendors, found that too many users were buying that hardware instead of theirs, and killed off the clone vendors. That means that if you want to use MacOS, you have to buy Apple hardware. And so there’s good reason to have a broad range of offerings from Apple, even some that are higher-end or lower-end than the typical user might want, because that’s the only option that they have.

  Plus, I assume that these are running some form of solid-state storage, which makes hitting virtual memory a lot less painful than was the case in the past.

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  • proton_lynx@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Save money, buy an Apple computer. Choose one.

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  • lud@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The thing is that Apple charges three kidneys per gigabyte over 8 GB.

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  • dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If you’ve got four kids and you’re buying them all laptops, I don’t think buying them all Macs and “saving money” by getting cut-down machines with too little memory (or whatever other hobbling Apple may cook up now or later) is exactly the smart play. You would need to have a very compelling reason to absolutely have to run MacOS to the exclusion of everything else which if we’re honest, most people don’t.

    A Lenovo IdeaPad Slim, just to pick an example out of a hat that contains many other options, costs half as much as the low spec 2024 Macbook Air the article is spotlighting while having double the RAM, double the SSD, and, you know, ports. For the cost of a 8GB Macbook Pro you could buy a Legion Slim with an i7 and an RTX4060 in it and have change left over, a machine which would blow that Mac out of the water.

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  • ABCDE@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    We both have 8GB Airs in our house, an M1 and an M2. They run just fine.

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  • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I agree. But we still have to listen to all the bitching.

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