Macs would be more "value for money" if Apple doubled RAM & SSD across the board

[redheeler]

Miscommunication is easy in text 🫣

Yes, that it is 😅

 

[HiVolt]

The real issue with Apple is not the base model, but the BTO model. The huge premium for RAM and SSD upgrades and lack of upgradability in desktop devices compared to Windows devices and the fact that BTO devices are virtually never on sale is the real issue.
The $500/600 base Mac Mini is great value, but once you spec it up (personally even 16GB is not enough for me and I wouldn't get any less than 1TB for the SSD) value disappears (you can get a great mini pc with Ryzen 7, very quiet operation, Thunderbolt, 32GB of upgradable RAM and 1 TB of upgradable NVME SSD, slots for more storage etc for quite a bit less, under $800)
While I don't expect upgradability and not even giving double the RAM and storage for free, I would welcome more reasonalby priced upgrades and even the end of the BTO system....

I agree, the upgrades for RAM & Storage are truly next level price gouging.

While Apple charges $200 USD for a 250 to 500gb upgrade on a Mac mini, a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB nvme drive that will run circles around it in terms of performance can be had for $179 on Amazon - not even on a promo sale. regular price. And Apple doesn't even change out a whole ssd module like in the past, they just add a single chip to the logic board in the case of the M2 mini.

Same goes for ram. $200 for 8gb to 16gb. 32gb DDR5 laptop memory is under $200. Apple does not use some fancy memory. I's LPDDR5. They just mount it on the SOC.

Yes, Apple is a business. But for heaven's sake, they're not struggling in the least to make payroll. In a struggling world, toss the customer a bone for once.

 

[1BadManVan]

They would have been heroes of the people if they gave the base M2 Mini 16 GB of RAM and dual-chip 256 GB SSD (hardly costs them anything more) instead of lowering it by $100.

That’s the big one here! It literally costs them cents on the dollar to give these quality of life improvements to these. The margins gained per unit can probably barely even be registered.

It’s a shame they are willing to nickel and dime their consumers this badly for literally a nickel out of their pocket. Why?

 

[sam_dean]

I kept my early Intel Core2 white MacBook for about 6 or 7 years, can’t remember exactly now, but I stopped using it not because of storage speed but because it stopped getting OS updates, I maxed out the ram and it was still pretty usable, I think people today exaggerate the difficulty of using one for a long time. It wasn’t terrible if you had enough ram to avoid hitting the disk swap.

Edit: To be fair it was used most when I was a student so my needs weren’t as high as they are today for work… so for work I would have needed/wanted a new one sooner.

Probably Software Updates (features + patches) and not Security Updates (patches).

Although not sexy the 7 years of Software Updates you received will be supplemented with 3 years of Security Updates so any Mac will still be protected without compromising the security of your data.

After the final Security Update is released, nearing 120 months since it was 1st sold, is when I'd buy any Mac.

So if the Security Update was released more than 5 months ago then I'd buy any M2 Mac as that model started sale days later.

 

[BrightDarkSky]

Apple isn't interested in giving you more value as much as they are interested in making higher profits.

This this this.

When a mac pro trades in for less than a iphone... And tons of good computers are tossed because apple locks our hard drives... yeah thier intensions become a bit more clear...

Aka

💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰

 

[KPOM]

Apple isn't interested in giving you more value as much as they are interested in making higher profits.

That’s every for-profit business. People act as if Dell, HP, etc don’t “de-content” their products. Dell and HP, for example, both sell “premium business class” notebooks with 1080p screens and low color gamut. Their customers (large enterprises) prioritize security features over screen quality.

 

[JoshNori]

It’s 💩🐩 that they’re putting 8 GB of RAM in any machine today. Manufacturing eWaste.

 

[sam_dean]

It’s 💩🐩 that they’re putting 8 GB of RAM in any machine today. Manufacturing eWaste.

8GB RAM & 256GB should only be placed in sub-$700 Macbook 12" and sub-$300 Mac mini.

 

[IconDRT]

Apple should just eliminate all the “entry level” options. Once they started scraping the bottom of the customer barrel this forum filled with a bunch of cost-conscious penny pinching whiners, most who aren’t even the target market for the bare minimum and just looking for a discount. Apple isn’t Applebee’s or JCPenney, and Tim Cook isn’t about providing a “Value Menu.” Either learn to code and pony up the premium for a proper Mac or head over to the Best Buy bargain bin and pick up a free Android on your way out.

I don’t hang out with base modelers, I suggest my fellow well-heeled pros follow suit.

 

[UltimateSyn]

My house would’ve been more “value for money” if they’d just included double the square feet! They get you every time!

 

[ric22]

For many years Apple has utilised the trick of offering base storage that is unacceptably low on all devices, forcing everyone that vaguely cares about such things to pay for the next tier up or higher. They tend to only increase storage when the size they are purchasing falls below the regularly produced size offered by the manufacturers. Fanboys and this forum's devout defenders of all things Apple may think Apple are offering value for money, but as international pricing spikes ever higher, they really aren't.

 

[TechnoMonk]

Leave the unified RAM alone, go buy a PC if upgradeability is important. My M1 Max thrives on Unified RAM for CPU and GPU. I am glad apple is moving on to better technologies than getting stuck in the past.
I have a workstation, custom built for upgrading Ram, GPU and SSD. Value is subjective on what you are doing with your Mac or PC.

 

[TechnoMonk]

For many years Apple has utilised the trick of offering base storage that is unacceptably low on all devices, forcing everyone that vaguely cares about such things to pay for the next tier up or higher. They tend to only increase storage when the size they are purchasing falls below the regularly produced size offered by the manufacturers. Fanboys and this forum's devout defenders of all things Apple may think Apple are offering value for money, but as international pricing spikes ever higher, they really aren't.

Value is what you do with your device. I got my ROI in few months for my 64 GB M1 Max, exceeding many times the purchase price. Unified RAM beats the Nvidia GPU costing thousands of $$. Heck I would be lost with out my M1, if not for unified RAM. If you are not making money, buy a chrome book or a cheap PC.

 

[Jaffa]

people who'd buy base model aren't doing so to edit 4K video

Some of us don't edit video at all

 

[sam_dean]

Some of us don't edit video at all

That's why I scratch my head wondering why all these YouTubers are making this such a big deal then I remember...

YouTubers edit video! But do they do so on a 8/256 Mac in the last 5 years?

 

[Analog Kid]

If there was a better disagree emoji I would use it… we have an angry face and positive options, there is no simple thumbs down available….

Funny, I seem to be able to disagree with you without feeling the need to vote on it, but ok.

I didn’t bring up the MacBook, I was always using iMac or MacBook Air in my posts.

Ah, you're right-- you interjected into my response to someone else in a way that sounded like you agreed with them, but didn't raise it.

I’m not saying Apple didn’t care about gross margins,

You implied that when Jobs was in charge it was all about innovation and moving forward while Cook is stingy and penny pinching. What I showed you is that Jobs drove margins through the roof and Cook brought them down from the Jobs peak and stabilized them (until high margin services took off in the pandemic era).

Edit: it’s as if the bean counters have a note to product to make sure that they can optimize money extracted per purchase (via BTO price gouging). During the jobs era it was just easier to recommend the base model, I don’t recommend the base model any more.

See, like you are here.

my point is this

Given how flash and memory prices have fallen by more than 5x in the 12 years Tim has been in charge we should see more than a doubling in the base models storage and or memory.

You act like differentiating products by storage capacity is a new thing for Apple:

The original iPod was differentiated by storage, the iPhone was differentiated by storage long before there were multiple form factors and camera configurations. Apple has a long history, even under Saint Stephen of segmenting a market by storage and often nothing else.

The Tim era is defined by contradiction. I believe that Apple has never produced such a technically impressive portfolio of products, from Air Pods, to Home Pod to the M2 series, to the iPad Pro, Its all very very impressive. However there is also evidence that he has allowed mercurial interests to infect the product line in some ways. The memory and storage on macs are just one example, the nagging if you don’t sign up for all of apples services is another. Keeping the base storage and ram low encourages users to buy upgraded models that let apple absolutely gouge you on the price of ram and storage.

That's not what's happening. What's happening is that Apple is segmenting their market so that high end pro users and businesses are subsidizing entry level and casual users. I've explained this in other threads, but I'll try again here.

Apple was maintaining a 38% margin before the pandemic, so let's use that as a baseline. It was probably lower on Macs and higher on other things, but whatever, let's keep that.

Let's assume a Mac with 512GB of storage costs $800 to build. To maintain their margin, they need to sell it for $1100.

But that prices important customers out of the market. They want to make a product available to students and entry level users. Someone might say "then they should just drop their margins, they have more money that God", but that person is a socialist and doesn't understand that these margins also feed R&D and maintain the business through lean times. Even hippy dippy Steve was extracting higher margins than bean counter Tim.

So they focus on average selling price. They sell an array of products in the line and aim for a sales mix that averages $1100. If they sell a unit for $900, and another unit for $1300, then they're averaging $1100.

They offer a 256GB system for $900 which is a $200 discount for $20 in flash, or whatever it turns out to be. And they offer a 1TB system for $1300 which is a $200 upcharge for $20 in flash or whatever it turns out to be.

This is what I meant above by different people valuing things differently. If you're buying a machine for your grandmother, or you're racking up dozens of these into a cluster, or using them as point of sale terminals or for museum displays or reception desks or for finance people running web apps you value that machine and the $200 you safe more than you value the extra 256GB of storage. If you're a content creator or data scientist or an individual with a lot data you value the machine and that extra 512GB of storage more than the extra $200 it costs you.

So charging the price of sand for the RAM and SSDs would just make the lower end machines a lot more expensive.

Apple could try to hide this segmentation by creating a bunch of physically different machines with more differentiation in the internal components-- clock the M series chips slower on the lower end machines, make a line of Macbooks with plastic housings and lower quality displays, etc, etc. But they don't. For one thing, it would increase their engineering costs which in turn would increase the product costs just to obfuscate their segmentation strategy and for another this gives really high quality hardware to even the entry level buyers.

Apple has found that storage needs closely align with market segments and rely on that.

So I generally buy higher storage products-- max storage so far on the iPads, I used to do that for the iPhones but no longer need to as they're gotten bigger than I need, and higher than base storage on the Macs. The machine plus the extra storage is worth it to me, so I pay the money for it. Because of me, a grandmother has a Mac. 😇😉

 

[cocoua]

Keep "as is" the

- Apple chip core counts
- screen size
- at respective price points

But double the current

- GB of memory
- GB/TB of storage
- SSD throughput & top off at 7.5GB/s

And all Macs would be "value for money"

Base model Macs with 8GB RAM & 256GB SSD largely stayed stagnant since year model 2012 Macs.

In 2023, 16GB RAM & 512GB SSD should be found in M2 Macs such as

- $599 Mac mini
- $1199 Macbook Air 13"
- $1299 Macbook Pro 13"
- $1299 iMac 24"

While, 32GB RAM & 1TB SSD should be found in M2 Pro Macs such as

- $1299 Mac mini
- $1999 MBP 14"
- $2499 MBP 16"

64GB RAM & 2TB SSD should be found in M2 Max Macs such as

- $3099 MBP 14"
- $3499 MBP 16"

For Mac Studio

- $1999 M1 Max 64GB RAM & 1TB SSD
- $3999 M1 Ultra 128GB RAM & 2TB SSD

The Mac chips included do not need to change at these price points as they're plenty superior to anything Intel/AMD are making based on performance per Watt metrics.

Apple just comes short at RAM & SSD. Improve those points and they're golden.

Only place 8GB RAM & 256GB SSD would be permissible would be Macs based on a 3nm A17 Bionic chip such as

- $699 Macbook 12"
- $299-399 Mac mini that used the smaller enclosure of a 2022 Apple TV 4K
Final macOS Security Update would be released by 2032, a decade later.

Because 8GB memory & 256GB SSD @ 1.5GB/s should be the domain of a $699 2024 Macbook 12" or $299-399 2024 Mac mini that are based on a 3nm A17 Bionic chip from a 2023 iPhone 15 Pro. Mac mini's enclosure would be based on 2022 Apple TV 4K.

But then just pro user would need to buy a new mac in 5/6 years

this is a common marketing strategy, the point is finding a way you can get a very nice product today, but feeling the need to buy a new one in given time space.

This balance makes the industry keep going.

You can see this behaviour also in flagship products of other company's as Sony, Microsoft, Samsung ETC

Indeed, rising base RAM would make Macs cheaper not more valuable.

 

[sam_dean]

But then just pro user would need to buy a new mac in 5/6 years

this is a common marketing strategy, the point is finding a way you can get a very nice product today, but feeling the need to buy a new one in given time space.

This balance makes the industry keep going.

You can see this behaviour also in flagship products of other company's as Sony, Microsoft, Samsung ETC

Indeed, rising base RAM would make Macs cheaper not more valuable.

Replacement cycle...

Per Apple: Every 4 years
Per Intel: Every 5-6 years
Per Me: After final macOS/Windows Security Update (not features but patches only) that occurs nearing its 10th year

 

[Onimusha370]

How is your Page Outs and Render times per minute of 4K video.

No idea but its a hell of a lot faster than my 2014 maxed out retina 27"!

 

[Skoua]

I deeply think that the day ALL games on Steam are available on Mac, you'll see the market share triple easily.
People are not buying macs because of the price and because of gaming, as far as I observed around me.

Regarding the original topic, I do agree that "Pro" models (MBP, iMac Pro, Studio, Mac Pro...) should at least get 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD by default. They just never upgraded the base amount of RAM and SSD for more than 10 years!

 

[Anaxarxes]

If a 599 computer outperforms anything on the market with its current base configuration, why should a company up the specs and lower their margin? Business wise it makes no sense at all.

Mac's unique selling proposition is its performance, ecosystem and build quality. Even with lower specs than PC counterparts it already is outperforming the competition.

 

[lm57400]

It is a well known part of Apples business model to offer you the minimum of RAM and SSD at the entry level machines - even if they are still high priced in general.

It will never happen that you get a reasonable price / RAM+SSD size ratio at Apple.

 

[JoshNori]

Agreed.

Atm the equivalent storage compared to a standard M.2 NVME drive is about 3-4x higher cost on an Apple product. With no 3rd party options and no upgradeability there is no way to do something like "buy smaller size now, upgrade when/if you need more" or you have to resort to external enclosure drives.

Meanwhile making the RAM impossible to update also means you have to sell your whole machine if you need more memory.

All this is borderline acceptable on a laptop where most people never open it, but it's a ridiculous thing on a desktop system. While technically afaik the Mac Studio drives are removable, there is no upgrade option offered afaik and instead of using a standard M.2, they have their proprietary solution.

Apple is at the same time bean counting with the reduced performance baseline drives and then price gouging with the upgrades. All the while advertising "starting from" prices that never end up being what many users need. Especially with no discounts during the year for BTO options.

Spot on. All very intentional as well. If they only realized how much it was backfiring on them. People either wait for more release cycles to upgrade or offload them immediately. Their financial sweet spot is a biannual upgrade, but most appear to forego that.

Apple should just eliminate all the “entry level” options. Once they started scraping the bottom of the customer barrel this forum filled with a bunch of cost-conscious penny pinching whiners, most who aren’t even the target market for the bare minimum and just looking for a discount. Apple isn’t Applebee’s or JCPenney, and Tim Cook isn’t about providing a “Value Menu.” Either learn to code and pony up the premium for a proper Mac or head over to the Best Buy bargain bin and pick up a free Android on your way out.

I don’t hang out with base modelers, I suggest my fellow well-heeled pros follow suit.

I share in your elitism. Most of the trash mentality and lack of appreciation has truly come from trying to appease this ever-miserable segment of the market. As a result, everyone who loves Apple pays more for less. And we get to suffer with stupid nag screens telling us how to swipe and the prioritization of memoji over literally anything else. Stay smug.

 

[maflynn]

Anyone defending Apple over this topic must be drinking some pretty heavy kool-aid.

Yeah, to some, Apple can do no wrong. I don't get people who blindly defend apple to the death, whose stated goal, is to make more money for their shareholders. Apple doesn't give two rat's ***** about you and I.

 

[MBAir2010]

The people paying $599 for a Mac mini aren’t concerned about the speed differences between a 2-module vs. 1-module SSD, or 8 vs 16 GB RAM.

I am one of those eyeing the new m2 mini, and im thinking size rather than speed,
since my MacBook Air m1 is faster than I can "MacBook" without a spinning ball.
Oh, I should check to see if those Minis have fans!
just added:
I scanned and searched for FAN on the mini site page, no evidence of one.
Ifixit?
Yes, there is a Fan! from ifixit: