I have a minimum of 64GB on my all my main developer machines (home, work, laptop), but I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM for lightweight travel.
Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine.
And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.
But why did you configure 3 machines with 64+ GB, if 8 GB RAM are "100% perfectly fine" for typical work tasks?
For me personally 16 or 32 GB are perfectly fine, 8 GB was too little (even without VMs) and I've never needed 64 or more. So it's curious to see you are pretty much exactly the opposite.
I have the base M2 air with 8gb ram, and it's really been perfect for working on. The only time things have become an issue is dual user accounts being logged in at the same time. Which is very preventable.
Half my organisation runs on 8GB Chromebooks. We were testing one of our app changes the other day and it performed better on the Chromebook than it did on my i7 machine with 32GB.
> 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.
This argument is self defeating in the context of the M4 announcement. "Average consumers" who don't need 16 GB of RAM don't need an M4 either. But people who do need an M4 chip probably also need 16 GB of RAM.
I think actually more people need 16 GB of RAM rather than a top M4 chip. Having only 8 GB can be a serious limitation in some memory heavy circumstances, while having (say) an M2 SoC rather than an M4 SoC probably doesn't break any workflow at all, it just makes it somewhat slower.
For me personally, it’s not an issue of being out of touch. I did, in fact, use a 2014 Macbook with an i5 CPU and 16 GB of RAM for nearly a decade and know how often I hit swap and/or OOM on it even without attempting multicore shenanigans which its processor couldn’t have managed anyway.
It’s rather an issue of selling deliberately underpowered hardware for no good reason other than to sell actually up-to-date versions for a difference in price that has no relation to the actual availability or price of the components. The sheer disconnect from any kind of reality offends me as a person whose job and alleged primary competency is to recognize reality then bend it to one’s will.
I don't think we ever were at a point in computing were you could buy a high-end (even entry level macbooks have high-end pricing) laptop with the same amount of ram as you could 10 years earlier.
Hmm, unexpected. I was quite sure my partner's 2015 mbp was sitting at 4gb, but you win this one! ;)
Edit: I confirmed that I was indeed wrong, but the payoff isn't great anyway because that just means that yes in fact they've kept the exact same ram floor for 10 years. Insane.
Fine just doesn't cut it for a premium machine you expect to last a few years at least. It's honestly just marketed so you want to spend extra and upgrade. Let's be real.
I bought a second-hand office-grade PC recently, about a year ago. It was about $10 to $15, had no disks (obviously) and just 2 GB of DDR3 RAM. Also, an integrated GPU with some low-grade Intel CPU (Pentium, if I’m not wrong). Even the generation isn’t current, it’s about a decade old, a bit more.
I put a spare 120 GB SSD, a cheap no-name brand that was just lying around for some testing purposes. Found the similar off-the-shelf DDR3 2 GB RAM stick. I thought the RAM was faulty, turned out it’s in a working condition, so I put it there.
I need the computer for basic so-called office work (a browser, some messengers, email client and a couple of other utilities). I thought I’d buy at least two 4GB RAM sticks after I test it, so you know, 8 GB is just the bare imaginable minimum! I have my 16 GBs everywhere since, idk, maybe 2012 or something.
And you know what?! It works very well with 4 GB of RAM and default Fedora (it’s 40 now, but I started with 38, iirc). It has the default Gnome (also, 46 now, started with 44, iirc). And it works very well!
It doesn’t allow me to open a gazillion of browser tabs, but my workflow is designed to avoid it, so I have like 5 to 10 open simultaneously.
Before throwing Fedora at the PC, I thought I would just install a minimal Arch Linux with swaywm and be good. But I decided I don’t want to bother, and I’ll just buy 8 GB later on, and be done with it.
And here I am, having full-blown Gnome and just 4 GB of RAM. I don’t restrict myself too much, the only time I notice it’s not my main PC is when I want to do some heavy web-browsing (e.g. shopping on some different heavy websites with many tabs opened). Then it slows down significantly, till I close the unnecessary tabs or apps. All the software is updated and current, so it’s not like it’s some ancient PC from 00’s.
Also, I have my iPad Pro 12,9 1st Gen with just 4 GB of RAM too, and I never feel it’s slow for me.
I understand that some tasks would require a lot of RAM, and it’s not for everyone. Having a lot of RAM everywhere, I’m quite used to not thinking of it at all for a significant part of my career (for over a decade now), so I may have something opened for weeks that I don’t have any need for.
So, it’s 2024, and I’m surprised to say that 4 GB of RAM is plenty when you’re focused on some tasks and don’t multitask heavily. Which never productive for me at least. I even noticed that I enjoy my low-memory PC even more, as it reminds me with its slowdowns that I’m entering the multitasking state.
I use swaywm on my Arch Linux laptop, and most of the time it’s less than 3–4 Gb (I have 16 Gb).
This comes up frequently. 8GB is sufficient for most casual and light productivity use cases. Not everyone is a power user, in fact, most people aren’t.
At this point I don't think the frustration has much to do with the performance but rather RAM is so cheap that intentionally creating a bottleneck to extract another $150 from a customer comes across as greedy, and I am inclined to agree. Maybe the shared memory makes things more expensive but the upgrade cost has always been around the same amount.
It's not quite in the same ballpark as showing apartment or airfare listings without mandatory fees but it is at the ticket booth outside of the stadium.
The bigger problem is when you need a new machine fast, the apple store doesn't have anything but the base models in stock. In my org we bought a machine for a new developer who was leaving town, and were forced to buy an 8gb machine because the store didn't have other options (it was going to be a 2 week wait). As you can imagine, the machine sucked for running Docker etc and we had to sell it on facebook marketplace for a loss.
I've never encountered an actual Apple Store not having specced up machines on hand (maybe not EVERY possible configuration, but a decent selection). If you go to a non-Apple retailer, afaik, they are limited to the base spec machines (RAM wise), it's not even a matter of them being out of stock. If you want anything other than 8GB (or whatever the base amount is for that model) of RAM you need to go through Apple directly. This was the case, at least in Canada a few years ago, correct me if I'm wrong/things have changed.
Mine is 8GB M1 and it is not fine. But the actual issue for me isn't RAM as much as it is disk space, I'm pretty confident if it wasn't also the 128 GB SSD model it would handle the small memory just fine.
I'm still getting at least 16 GB on my next one though.
Yeah personally I find cheaping out on the storage far more egregious than cheaping out on the RAM. Even if you have most things offloaded onto the cloud, 128 GB was not even enough for that, and the 256 GB is still going to be a pain point even for many casual home users, and at the price point of Apple machines it's inexcusable to not add another $25 of flash
Both are disgusting for the price asked. It would be a lot easier to excuse all the other compromises if the base was 16/512, which would cost Apple like 50 bucks tops per machine.
But greed is unlimited, I guess.
> What’s the price difference between 8 and 16? Like $3 in wholesale prices.
Your estimates are not even close. You can't honestly think that LPDDR5 at leading edge speeds is only $3 per 64 Gb (aka 8GB), right?
Your estimate is off my an order of magnitude. The memory Apple is using is closer to $40 for that increment, not $3.
And yes, they include a markup, because nobody is integrating hardware parts and selling them at cost. But if you think the fastest LPDDR5 around only costs $3 for 8GB, that's completely out of touch with reality.
GP said "LPDDR5" and that Apple won't sell at component prices.
You mention DIMMs and component prices instead. This is unhelpful.
See https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/memory/774... for LPDDR5 prices. You can get a price of $48/chip at a volume of 2000 chips. Assuming that Apple got a deal of $30-40-ish at a few orders of magnitude larger order is quite fair. Though it certainly would be nicer if Apple priced 8GB increments not much above $80-120.
I am aware that there are differences, I just took RAM DIMMs as a reference because there is a >0% chance that anyone reading this has actually ever bought a comparable product themselves.
As for prices, the prices you cited are not at all comparable. Apple is absolutely certainly buying directly from manufacturers without a middleman since we're talking about millions of units delivered each quarter. Based on those quantities, unit prices are guaranteed to be substantially lower than what DigiKey offers.
Based on what little public information I was able to find, spot market prices for LPDDR4 RAM seem to be somewhere in the 3 to 5$ range for 16GB modules. Let's be generous and put LPDDR5 at tripe the price with 15$ a 16GB module. Given the upgrade price for going from 8 to 16GB is 230 EUR Apple is surely making a huge profit on those upgrades alone by selling an essentially unusable base configuration for a supposed "Pro" product.
DDR5 DIMMs and LPDDR chips as in the MacBooks are not the same beasts at all.
A DIMM is 8 or 16 chips (9/18 is ECC), while the LPDDR is a single chip for the same storage. The wild density difference in chip capacity (512MB or 1GB vs 8GB) makes a huge difference, and how a stick can be sold at retail for cheaper than the bare LPDDR chip in volume.
Programming has a wierd way of requirering basically nothing some times, but other times you need to build the latest version of your toolchain, or you are working on some similarly huge project that takes ages to compile.
I was using my 4gb ram pinebook pro in public transport yesterday, and decided to turn of all cores except for a single Cortex-A53, to safe some battery. I had no problems for my usecase of a text editor + shell to compile for doing some SIMD programming.
The number of tabs you have doesn’t correlate to the number of active web views you have, if you use any browser that unloads background tabs while still saving their state.
Those are the type of "I'll go back later to it", The workflow on modern browser is broken. Instead of leveraging the bookmark functionality to improve the UX, we have this situation of user having 50+ tabs open, because they can. It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs to a more manageable numbers.
It's really not weird. The more you charge for the base product and upgrades, serving the bare minimum becomes less acceptable. It also doesn't help that the 4GB base models from years past aged super quickly compared to it's higher end cousins.
The point you're missing is that it's about the future. I generally agree, but it's obvious everything becomes more RAM intensive as time goes on. Hell, even games can take more than 8 GB of purely VRam these days.
MacBook Air starts at 1,199 euro. For insane battery life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the lightest chassis. Find me comparable laptop, I’ll wait.
The screen is the killer. you can have a nice-ish 2nd corporate laptop with decent and swappable battery on which you can install a decent OS (non Windows) and get good milage but the screen is something else.
Asking for a machine with "insane battery life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the lightest chassis" and oh, it must be completely silent is a loaded set of demands. Apple in the current market is essentially the only player that can actually make a laptop that can meet your demands, at least without doing a bunch of research into something that's equivalent and hoping the goal posts don't move again.
this is extremely funny in the context of the protracted argument up-thread about what you could reasonably be comparing the macbook air against.
like, the $359 acer shitbox probably doesn't do all the exact same thing as the MBA either, but that's actually ok and really only demonstrates the MBA is an unaffordable luxury product, basically the same as a gold-plated diamond-encrusted flip-phone.
Not your circus, not your clowns, but this is sort of the duality of apple: "it's all marketing and glitz, a luxury product, there's no reason to buy it, and the fact that they have a better product only PROVES it" vs "of course no PC manufacturer could possibly be expected to offer a top-notch 120hz mini-LED screen, a good keyboard, great trackpad, good speakers, and good SOC performance in a thin-n-light..."
Race car drivers. They are pros. Professional drivers. They definitely know how to drive a car much more efficiently than I do, or anyone that’s just into cars. I assume the race car engineers are the pros at rebuilding engines.
And as for the parent comment’s point, being into cars doesn’t mean you’re as good as a professional race car driver.
If the iPad could run Mac apps when docked to Magic Keyboard like the Mac can run iPad apps then there may be a worthwhile middle ground that mostly achieves what people want.
The multitasking will still be poor but perhaps Apple can do something about that when in docked mode.
That said, development likely remains a non-starter given the lack of unix tooling.
iOS has become such a waste of great hardware, especially in the larger form factor of the iPad.
M1 chips, great screens, precise pencil input and keyboard support, but we still aren't permitted a serious OS on it, to protect the monopolistic store.
App Stores have beeen around long enough to prove that they're little more than laboratories in which to carry out accelerated enshittification experimentation. Everything so dumbed down and feature-light, yet demanding subscriptions or pushing endless scammy ads. And games that are a shameless introduction to gambling addiction, targeted at kids.
Most of the 'apps' that people actually use shouldn't need to be native apps anyway, they should be websites. And now we get the further enshittification of trying to force people out of the browser and into apps, not for a better experience, but for a worse one, where more data can be harvested and ads can't so easily be blocked...
I feel sorry you got downvoted so much. But it looks like nowadays people don't like to hear the truth, at least when it comes to Apple stuff.
I feel bad about all this because I advised my mother to buy an iPad Pro as it was sold as a laptop replacement but it never materialized anywhere near expectations and ended being an expensive mistake that can only offer compromised workflows with limitations that do not even come close to a MacBook she was used to (even in Apple own apps, even something like the Page app, yes).
I think the iPad would be a fine device, if only they didn't try to upsell it and stopped pretending it is a "Pro" thing.
If the whole lineup would get OLED displays, more RAM across the board and decent base storage for media at a more honest price it would be an easy recommendation.
As it is, the entry level is lackluster because of the display (if you only buy for content consumption it is better to go with an Android OLED options) and the high-end variant are just stupid expensive for what they will actually allow you to do.
But too many Apple customers have drunk the Kool-Aid so they don't have to care much about the reality and we just get expensive bullshit.
These specific model of tablets won't ever get MacOS support. Apple will tell you when you're allowed to run MacOS on a tablet, and they'll make you buy a new tablet specifically for that.
You haven't seen the size of my music, TV, or movie collection then. We have the technology to put it all on my phone and it should be cheaper, but it's not because of an absurd, money-and-design-only consumerist monoculture from the head bean counter who drifted far afield of the cool practicality and leadership of SJ.
Couldn't agree more. Cook deserves so much hate for what he did to Apple. I'm astounded people still worship Apple like nothing has changed at all.
All the changes under the Cook leadership are appalling and reveal what is definitely one of the worse character you can get as a leader. At this point even Bill Gates looks like a good guy in comparison.
The fundamental problem is TC and most of his immediate subordinates lack creative vision and the boldness to experiment and move beyond past wins that SJ shepherded. Apple needs a new leader who is both cool and interested in daring to take greater leaps of enriching the lives of users. First steps should be to give access to PCB circuit diagrams like computers of the 1970's, access to individual components for purchase by anyone through an "Amazon"-like supply chain, and access to security chip purchase and "recalibration" for verified owners. The works of art used as workhorses should be like an old Mercedes: able to keep going for years and treasured rather than fragile and disposable.
To be fair the ipod classic used a platter drive and ipads are high speed SSD storage. That being said, it's been years of the same storage options and at those prices it should be much higher, along with their iCloud storage offerings.
I can do it without even trying. I can't fit all of just any one of all of my music, shows, documentaries, books, or movies on any {i,iPad,tv,watch,vision}OS device ever made.
If 15 years of technological progress can’t find it cost effective to fit more than 256gb of solid state storage in a $1000 device, then what are we even doing here?
A 1 TB consumer-oriented SSD is about $50 today. At Apple’s manufacturing scale, do you have any doubt that the cost to them is nearly negligible?
I don't think it's strictly for price gouging/segmentation purposes.
On the Macbooks (running MacOS), RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes. It makes sense for Apple to account for with higher RAM spec for the 1TB/2TB configurations.
I'm writing this from memory, so some details may be wrong but: most high end ssds have dram caches on board, with a capacitor that maintains enough charge to flush the cache to flash in case of power failure. This operates below the system page cache that is standard for all disks and oses.
Apple doesn't do this, and use their tight integration to perform a similar function using system memory. So there is some technical justification, I think. They are 100% price gougers though.
Even on the Atari ST you would use a "RAM disk" when working with "large" data before manually flushing it to a floppy. Some people would use the trashcan icon to emphasise the need to manually flush... Not quite a cache, but the concept was there.
With hardware where power-off is only controlled by software, battery life is predictable, and large amounts of data like raw video are being persisted, they might have a very aggressive version of page caching, and a large amount of storage may imply that a scale-up of RAM would be necessary to keep all the data juggling on a happy path. That said, there’s no non-business reasons why they couldn’t extend that large RAM to smaller storage systems as well.
People without the "large amount of storage model" need to record video from the camera too.
The justifications I see are to reduce the number of models needed to stock and to keep the purchasing decision simple for customers. These are very good reasons.
Shouldn't the required cache size be dependent on throughput more so than disk size? It does not necessarily seem like you'd need a bigger write cache if the disk is bigger, people who have a 2TB drive don't read/write 2x as much in a given time as those with a 1TB drive. Or am I missing something?
IIRC SSD manufacturers are likely to store a mapping table of LBAs (logical block addresses) to PBAs (physical block addresses) in the DRAM or Host Memory Buffer.
Some calculation like:
total storage size / page size per LBA (512B or 4KiB usually) * mapping data structure size
> SSD manufacturers are likely to store a mapping table of LBAs (logical block addresses) to PBAs (physical block addresses) in the DRAM or Host Memory Buffer.
Are LBA's a thing on SSD's nowadays? I thought it was the legacy of the spinning rust.
SSD's operate on memory pages of the flash memory, and the page management is a complicated affair that is also entirely opaque to the host operating system due to the behind the scenes page remapping. Since flash memory is less durable (in the long term), the SSD's come overprovisioned and the true SSD capacity is always more (up to a double if my memory serves me well). The SSD controller also runs an embedded RTOS that monitors failures in flash chips and proactively evacuates and remaps ailing flash memory pages onto the healthy ones. Owing to this behaviour, the memory pages that the SSD controller reports back to the operating system have another, entirely hidden, layer of indirection.
Yep, LBAs are the primary addressing scheme in the NVMe spec, written into every single IO command. I would imagine there could be a better way, but NVMe & OS support still carries some baggage from SATA HDDs -> SATA SSDs -> NVMe SSDs.
As you mentioned, over-provisioning and other NAND flash memory health management techniques like garbage collection and wear leveling are needed for usable modern SSDs. Modern SSD controllers are complex beasts having 3-7 microprocessor cores (probably double digit core counts now with PCIe 5.0), encryption engines, power & thermal management, error correction, multiple hardware PHYs, etc.
If I'm understanding your point correctly that wouldn't prevent them from offering higher ram specs for the lower storage eg. 512 gig macs. So it seems like it is just price gouging
If that were the case why do they bother with an iPad, iPad Air, iPad Pro, iPhone SE, iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max, ... each with their own number of colors and storage variations.
iPad Air was created to make a new price category.
The iPhone SE exists because there is a market for this form factor. If you look at the specs, you would notice it uses hardware previously used by more expensive models.
> iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max
Again, different customers for different form-factors. These phones differ more than just SoC in them.
You understand that having N different colors of iPads is different from having N different SoCs for the same model of an iPad.
Do people not understand that Apple's 'price gouging' is about UX? A person who has the money to buy a 1TB iPad is worth more than average customer. A 16GB RAM doubtlessly results in a faster UX and that person is more likely to continue purchasing.
> Do people not understand that Apple's 'price gouging' is about UX? A person who has the money to buy a 1TB iPad is worth more than average customer. A 16GB RAM doubtlessly results in a faster UX and that person is more likely to continue purchasing.
And that decision somehow turns into making budget conscious people's UX shittier? How is that a reason not to make 16gb RAM, which is almost a bare minimum in 2024, available to everyone?
It's fairly absurd that they're still selling a 256gb "Pro" machine in the first place.
That said, Apple's policy toward SKUs is pretty consistent: you pay more money and you get more machine, and vice versa. The MacBooks are the only product which has separately configurable memory / storage / chip, and even there some combinations aren't manufactured.
I have a 256G iPhone. I think I’m using like 160G. Most stuff is just in the cloud. For an iPad it wouldn’t be any different, modulo media cached for flights. I could see some cases like people working on audio to want a bunch stored locally, but it’s probably in some kind of compressed format such that it wouldn’t matter too much.
I don't know about 'concern' necessarily, but it seems to me that 512GB for the base Pro model is a more realistic minimum. There are plenty of use cases where that amount of storage is overkill, but they're all served better by the Air, which come in the same sizes and as little as 128GB storage.
I would expect most actual users of the Pro model, now that 13 inch is available at the lower tier, would be working with photos and video. Even shooting ProRes off a pro iPhone is going to eat into 256 pretty fast.
Seems like that model exists mainly so they can charge $1500 for the one people are actually likely to get, and still say "starts at $1299".
Then again, it's Apple, and they can get away with it, so they do. My main point here is that the 256GB model is bad value compared to the equivalent Air model, because if you have any work where the extra beef is going to matter, it's going to eat right through that amount of storage pretty quick.
I think you're underestimating the number of people who go in to buy an iPad and gravitate to the Pro because it looks the coolest and sounds like a luxury thing. For those people, who are likely just going to use it for web browsing and streaming videos, the cheapest configuration is the only one they care about.
That type of buyer is a very significant % of sales for iPad pros. Despite the marketing, there are really not that many people (as a % of sales) that will be pushing these iPad's anywhere even remotely close to their computational/storage/spec limits.
If that were the goal (I don't think it is), they'd be better off shipping enough storage to push people into the 2TB tier, which is $11 vs. $3 a month for 200GB.
I said this in a sibling comment already, but I think it's just price anchoring so that people find the $1500 they're actually going to pay a bit easier to swallow.
Real creative pros will likely be using a 10G Thunderbolt NIC to a SAN; local video editing is not advised unless it’s only a single project at a time.
Because before you know it you're Dell and you're stocking 18 different variants of "Laptop, 15 inch screen, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD" and users are scratching their heads trying to figure out WTF the difference is between a "Latitude 3540" a "Latitude 5540" and a "New Latitude 3550"
Yes, the additional $600 they make off of users who just want extra RAM is just an unfortunate side effect of the unavoidable process of not being Dell. Couldn't be any other reason.
Apple already fixed this with the Mac: they stock a handful of configurations most likely to sell, and then everything else is a custom order shipped direct from China. The reason why Apple has to sell specific RAM/storage pairs for iPads is that they don't have a custom order program for their other devices, so everything has to be an SKU, and has to sell in enough quantity to justify being an SKU.
I can't tell whether this is serious or not. Surely adding independently configurable memory/storage combinations won't confuse the user, any more than having configurable storage options don't make the user confused about what iphone to get?
Configuring your iPhone storage is something every consumer has a concept of, it's some function of "how many pictures can I store on it"? When it comes to CPU/GPU/RAM and you're having to configure all three, the average person is absolutely more likely to be confused.
It's anecdotal, but 8/10 people that I know over the age of 40 would have no idea what RAM or CPU configurations even theoretically do for them. This is probably the case for most iPad purchasers, and Apple knows this - so why would they provide expensive/confusing configurability options just for the handful of tech-y people who may care? There are still high/med/low performant variations that those people can choose from, any the number of people for whom that would sour them away from a sale is vanishingly small, and they would be likely to not even be looking at Apple in the first place
Margins and profit. Less variations in production makes for higher efficiency. Segmenting the product line can push consumers to purchase higher tiers of product. It's iOS anyways, and the people who know enough to care how much RAM they are getting are self-selecting for those higher product tiers.
They push you to buy the more expensive model with higher margins.
This is what they did when I was buying iPad Air - it starts with actually problematically low 64GB of Storage... and the 256GB model is the next one with massive price jump.
It's the same kind of "anchoring" (marketing term) that car dealers use to lure you into deciding for their car based on the cheapest 29.999$ model which with "useful" equipment will end you costing like 45.000$
Honest question: What data do you store on an iPad Air? On a phone you might have some photos and videos but isn't a tablet just a media consumption device? Especially on iOS where they try to hide the filesystem as much as possible.
No data, but iOS apps have gotten massive, caches have gotten massive and install a game or two and 64GB is gone.
Not to mention that occasionally is nice to have a set of downloaded media available for vacation/travel and 64GB isn't enough to download week worth of content from Netflix.
This is why this is so annoying - you're right, I don't need 512GB or 256GB. But I'd still like to have more than "You're out of space!!" amount.
I've had the original iPad Pro with 64gb since it first released and have somehow never run out of storage. Maybe my problem is that I don't download games. I'd suggest using a USB drive for downloaded media though if you're planning to travel. All of the media apps I use (Netflix, YouTube, Crunchyroll, etc.) support them. That's worked well for me and is one reason I was comfortable buying the 64gb model.
Sorry, I thought I had done this with Netflix but I tried it just now and couldn't find the option. Then I googled it and it looks like it was never supported, I must've misremembered Netflix being an option.
Yes. However, applications have to be specifically written to use external storage, which requires popping open the same file picker you use to interact with non-Apple cloud storage. If they store data in their own container, then that can only ever go on the internal storage, iCloud, or device backups. You aren't allowed to rugpull an app and move its storage somewhere else.
I mean, what would happen if you yanked out the drive while an app was running on it?
As he said, you buy excess storage so that you don't have to think about how much storage you are using. Meanwhile if you barely have enough, you're going to have to play data tetris. You can find 256GB SSDs that sell for as low as 20€. How much money is it worth to not worry about running out of data? Probably more than the cost of the SSD at these prices.
We use PLEX for long trips in the car for the kids. Like 24 hour drives. We drive to Florida in the winter and the iPads easily run out of space after we’ve downloaded a season or two of Adventure Time and Daniel Tiger.
I could fit more if I didn’t insist on downloading everything 1080p I guess.
> but isn't a tablet just a media consumption device
In my sphere, everyone with an iPad uses it for the Apple Pencil and/or video editing. Raw files for drawings get surprisingly big, once you get up into the many tens of layers, considering an artist can draw a few a day.
Games. You can put maybe three or four significant games on an iPad Air before it maxes out. (MTG Arena is almost 20GB all on it's own, Genshin Impact is like 40+ GB)
1. Having more SKUs is expensive, for everything from planning to inventory management to making sure you have enough shelf space at Best Buy (which you have to negotiate for). Chances are good that stores like Best Buy and Costco would only want 2 SKUs anyway, so the additional configs would be a special-order item for a small number of consumers.
2. After a certain point, adding more options actually decreases your sales. This is confusing to people who think they'd be more likely to buy if they could get exactly what they wanted, but what you're not seeing is the legions of casual consumers who are thinking about maybe getting an iPad, but would get overwhelmed by the number of options. They might spend days or weeks asking friends which model to get, debating about whether to spend extra on this upgrade or that, and eventually not buying it or getting an alternative. If you simplify the lineup to the "cheap one" and the "high end one" then people abandon most of that overhead and just decide what they want to pay.
The biggest thing tech people miss is that they're not the core consumers of these devices. The majority go to casual consumers who don't care about specifying every little thing. They just want to get the one that fits their budget and move on. Tech people are secondary.
> What do they lose by allowing slightly more freedom in configurations?
More costs everywhere in the chain; limiting SKUs is a big efficiency from manufacturing to distribution to retail to support, and it is an easy way (for the same reason) to improve the customer experience, because it makes it a lot easier to not be out of or have delays for a customer’s preferred model, as well as making the UI (online) or physical presentation (brick and mortar) for options much cleaner.
Of course, it can feel worse if you you are a power user with detailed knowledge of your particular needs in multiple dimensions and you feel like you are paying extra for features you don't want, but the efficiencies may make that feeling an illusion — with more freedom, you would being paying for the additional costs that created, so a higher cost for the same options and possibly just as much or more for the particular combination option you would prefer with multidimensional freedom as for the one with extra features without it. Though that counterfactual is impossible to test.
Logistical efficiencies mostly. It ends up being a lot of additional SKUs to manage, and it would probably discourage people from moving up a price tier if they would have otherwise. So from Apple’s perspective they’re undergoing more hassle (which costs) for the benefit of selling you lower margin products. No upside for them besides maybe higher customer satisfaction, but I doubt it would have moved the needle on that very much.
It's not obvious to me that Apple does make a significant amount of money by selling upgrades. Almost everyone buys the base model. The other models are probably little more than a logistical pain in the butt from Apple's perspective. Apple has to offer more powerful systems to be credible as a platform, but I wouldn't be surprised if the apparently exorbitant price of the upgrades reflects the overall costs associated with complicating the production and distribution lines.
It’s not about the price of upgrades though, it’s about their bundling together and the ridiculously stingy base specs that often make the upgrade non-optional. People who buy a base MacBook Air probably aren’t thinking about keeping it for 8 years or using it for heavy workloads.
Sure, but bundling them together reduces the supply chain complexity and reduces Apple's costs. If the options were more fine grained, Apple would sell even less of each model and it would be even less worth their while.
Also, I have seen lots of people on HN complain about the price itself, even if it's not what you yourself object to.
The GP comment can be misleading because it suggests Apple is tying storage to ram. That is not the case (at least not directly).
The RAM and system-on-chip are tied together as part of the system-on-package. The SoP is what enables M chips to hit their incredible memory bandwidth numbers.
This is not an easy thing to allow configuration. They can’t just plug a different memory chip as a final assembly step before shipping.
They only have two SoPs as part of this launch: 9-core CPU with 8gb, and 10-core CPU with 16gb. The RAM is unified for cpu/gpu (and I would assume neural engine too).
Each new SoP is going to reduce economies of scale and increase supply chain complexity. The 256/512gb models are tied to the first package, the 1/2tb models are tied to the second. Again, these are all part of the PCB, so production decisions have to be made way ahead of consumer orders.
Maybe it’s not perfect for each individual’s needs, but it seems reasonable to assume that those with greater storage needs also would benefit from more compute and RAM. That is, you need more storage to handle more video production so you are probably more likely to use more advanced features which make better use of increased compute and RAM.
I'm not defending Apple's absurd stinginess with RAM (though I don't think it's much of an issue on an iPad given how gimped the OS is), but I've never understood why high-end Android phones have 12/16+ GB RAM.
What needs that amount on a phone? 8GB on a desktop is...well it's not great, but it's usable, and usable for a damn sight more multi-tasking than you would ever do on a smartphone. Is it just because you need to look better on the spec sheet, like the silly camera megapixel wars of the 2010s?
I think that is very obvious. You have a browser window and a few apps open -- messaging, youtube, email, podcast etc. When you switch between apps and eventually back to your browser, you don't want the page to reload due to other apps eating up the memory. As simple as that. It's about having a good experience.
I don't know how they didn't realize that. Maybe they just don't use their phone as much as they think.
I freaking hate my iPhone Mini for that, load a YouTube video, a few tabs and a note and boom you are in for a reload every 3-context switch. It's disgusting for a phone that launched at a price too close to 1Keur for my liking.
And no, I'm not going to drop over 1keur on a stupid smartphone just to be able to load more than 5 tabs and a note without constant reloading when I'm just trying to do research in a shop to inform a purchasing decision.
I bought it solely for the form factor in the first place, but I really regret considering all the shortcomings that came with the price.
But if Apple think they are smartass, I'll have the last laugh by not buying their hardware again. My next smartphone is definitely going to have over 8Gb of RAM, just not from Apple.
We've reached a point where their chips has become so amazing they have to introduce "fake scarcity" and "fake limits" to sell their pro lines, while dividing their customers into haves and havenots, while actively stalling the entire field for the masses.
You could, alternatively, read less malice into the situation and realize that the majority of people buying an iPad pro don't even need 8gb of RAM to do what they want to do with the device (web browsing + video streaming).
Phones and tablets are effectively single-tasking. They don’t need much more ram than that in practice.
I use my iPad Pro constantly for heavy stuff and I don’t know how much ram is in it; it has never been something I needed to think about. The OS doesn’t even expose it.
Is a Pixel 8 a mid-range Android phone? Mine shipped with 8GB of RAM, and even with my frankly insane Chrome habits (I'm currently sitting at around 200 tabs) I'm only using about five and half gigabytes, and it runs a hell of a lot smoother than other phones with more RAM that I've used.
There's absolutely nothing a mobile device does that should require that much memory. That shitty OEMs bloat the hell out of their ROMs and slap on more memory to match isn't a good thing or something to emulate in my opinion.
Honestly though, that's basically every tablet you cant change the ram, you get what you get and thats it. Maybe they should call them by different names like Pro Max for the ones with 16GB in order to make it more palatable? Small psychological hack.
The Samsung tablets at least still retain the SD card slot, so you can focus more on the desired amount of RAM and not worry too much about the built-in storage size.
Just like I don't want an umbilical cord hanging out of me just to perform the full extent of my bodily functions, I also wouldn't want a dongle hanging off my tablet for it to be deemed usable.
It would be cool if regulators mandated that companies like Apple are obligated to provide models of devices with SD card slots and a seamless way to integrate this storage into the OS/applications.
That combined with replaceable batteries would go a long way to reduce the amount of ewaste.
And then people would stick alphabet-soup SD cards into their devices and complain about performance and data integrity, it's enough of a headache in the Android world already (or has been before Samsung and others finally decided to put in enough storage for people to not rely on SD cards any more).
In contrast, Apple's internal storage to my knowledge always is very durable NVMe, attached logically and physically directly to the CPU, which makes their shenanigans with low RAM size possible in the first place - they swap like hell but as a user you barely notice it because it's so blazing fast.
Yeah jackasses are always gonna jackass. There's still a public interest in making devices upgradable for the purpose of minimizing e-waste.
I'd just love to buy a device with a moderate amount of unupgreadable SSD and an SD slot so that I can put a more memory in it later so the device can last longer.
Agreed but please with something other than microSD cards. Yes, microSD Express is a thing, but both cards and hosts supporting it are rare, the size format doesn't exactly lend itself to durable flash chips, thermals are questionable, and even the most modern microSD Express cards barely hit 800 MB/sec speed, whereas Apple's stuff has hit twice or more that for years [2].
https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/specs/