Lenovo charges $149 (regularly $170) for the same upgrade in the X1
Microsoft charges $200 for the same upgrade in the Surface Pro 7
It sucks that they raised the price (and I'd love to hear the story behind it), but it's on par with everyone else.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/coronavirus-update-ram-res...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nand-ssd-prices-2020-going...
The Surface line is Microsoft's best chance at their own hardware, and I kept buying Surface after Surface, hoping it would get better. Unfortunately, they have all had build quality issues, hardware problems, or just some kind of strangeness that pushed me over the edge to buy an iPad Pro, and when that happened, I was dumbstruck how Apple entered the market much later than Microsoft and yet Apple still nailed the handwriting feel much better. Windows 10 is a real operating system, which is great and makes the Surface feel like a real computer, but the pen quality differences are too great to ignore, and the notetaking PDF apps for iOS are in a different league (Goodnotes 5, Notability). OneNote is not as good.
If you have, how does it compare with the iPad Pro?
MacBook Pro 2019, MacBook Air 2020, and and previous MacBook has always charged $200 for 16GB or 512GB upgrade.
And the original $100 dollar upgrade was very non-Apple.
Which makes me think it was an error from their part and they decide to fix it at start of the month due to whatever accounting / operation reason.
Why is in 2020 a "Pro" laptop coming with only 8 GB of RAM?
I have now switched to Windows on my Macbook Pro and I'm liking it. It's not as polished as macOS still, but I think (and hope) it's getting there. I don't think I'll ever buy another Apple machine. Windows has turned around since those times, I recommend you give it a try if you're thinking about it or you're unhappy with how Apple has become nowadays.
I almost feel free to choose whatever machine I want next and not pay a hefty price for it. Or pay it, if I want to, but it will be my choice, not imposed.
I personally just purchased a maxed-out MBA. I went with the MBA because I prefer the form-factor and don't want the touch bar. If I'd been willing to accept those, I would've gone with the four-port MBP. At no point did the two-port MBP make any sense to me.
Edit: it's $200 to upgrade the RAM in the MBA as well. I wonder why the MBP was only $100 in the first place.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro was refreshed last month. Though the entry-level design remains largely unchanged, it now includes Apple’s Magic Keyboard, which replaces the maligned butterfly keys found on previous MacBook models. i also purchase a used mackbook pro 15 inch https://www.asan.com.pk/ad/79849/macbook-pro-15-inch-early-2... 4gb ram, with installed graphic card AMD Radeon HD 6490M 256 MB, 2 GHz Intel Core i7
Try looking for an equivalent to this:
Apple MacBook Pro 16" silber, Core i7-9750H, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB, 3500€
Similarly specced models are either not available at all or be priced around 3000€ (eg HP ZBook Studio G5). So yes the MBP will cost a little more, but not outrageously so, and some of it can be explained by better components.
I do wonder why so many manufacturers are moving away from user-upgradable RAM. Perhaps the failure rate is lower or it is easier from a manufacturing standpoint. It can't all just be to save space or to make more money by selling marked up RAM, can it?
Size: SODIMM slots are huge. That space can be much more efficiently utilized when put onto the main circuit board. This potentially leaves more space for the battery, or making the laptop thinner/more aesthetic.
Cost: Supply chain optimizations drive down cost. The DDR chips they are using are likely similar to the ones they use in other hardware (think phones). This increases total volume, and decreases cost. Also chips aren't a finished good, so they are saving on the cost incurred in making RAM DIMMs in the first place.
Integration: They only have to make sure their hardware, firmware, and software works with the RAM they supply. Decreases the testing burden. No lookup tables to see what is compatible, and no guessing when you buy RAM that causes the BIOS to panic. It just works, and is highly optimized for the use case.
I think I had previously noticed it was already $200 to go from 8 to 16 on entry level new MacBook Air -- at any rate, it is now too.
I've actually upgraded my desktop to 64GB when I had the need (data analysis and compilers).
what a huge surprise!
Some PC laptop vendor could do a whole TV campaign based around the idea of turtle-necked folk setting fire to money and smiling, because it makes them feel better, and that's really all that matters[.. right?]
This limits the spaces available to RAM so they're probably swapping out higher density (i.e. more expensive) chips. They also can't just pull a Macbook off the shelf, slap an extra DIMM in it, box it up, and ship it.
It's their own fault but... yeah.
But isn't this the most important thing?
Yes this RAM is expensive... but it's just a few hundred dollars for something I use every day for all my income and most of my hobbies and the alternative is something hobbled.
Whether the polish is worth the significant premium is up to each individual buyer.
Also, I only recommend that people TRY it, not make the jump.
A single stick of ddr3 is $20-30.
Apple is charging $200 for that same stick of RAM.
It likely costs them $10 or less since they buy in bulk.
Their UI isn't work paying them a 10x margin. That's fucking ridiculous.
For my money maker I need it to work reliably 100% of the time. I don’t want to ever tinker with drivers. I just want it to work in a polished way.
Windows is pure garbage and the only time I ever touch it is in a VM running on my MacBook, and even then I strictly require it to be Enterprise version so that I never have to deal with the adware bloat or forced updates. On regular Windows 10, you can disable updates, but never permanently. It always comes back like a specter.
My MacBook has never forced me to restart or install an update. The UI for updates can get a little annoying, but there are Terminal tricks to disable it, and I still have choice.
The shell library is not as good on Windows. I cannot muster the motivation to learn PowerShell.
I never feel safe installing anything on Windows. What I mean is I never understand what is actually changing on my computer if something installs on Windows. On a MacBook, I can drag and drop to Applications. If I need to uninstall it, I delete it. It's that simple. For anything that forces me to install via pkg file, I am happy that most of the time, homebrew cask has a formula for it, so uninstallation is handled for me cleanly.
The only good thing I can think of for Windows is that GUI automation is much better due to AutoHotKey. MacOS GUI automation is basically deprecated at this point (AppleScript) on most apps, so you are forced to find third-party options.
AirDrop between my iPad Pro and MacBook is so fast, it allows me to copy my iPad's handwritten notes into a pdf in an instant.
One good thing I can say for Windows is backwards compatibility for compiled apps. Most open source projects I see with a MacOS binary have a high chance of not working relative to Windows. On Windows, if I see a compiled binary, I already know it will probably work.
The OS is what keeps me to my MacBook, and if no other competitor can produce the equivalent experience, I can't move away.
Look at all the software engineers in the Bay Area, and you will see waves upon waves of MacBooks. This "standardization" of hardware has also somewhat reduced the instances of coworkers using the excuse of "Oh it works on my computer, must be a hardware issue." If both of us are using MacBooks, I know it's a software issue, and so it's something we can probably figure out and fix.
I'm desperate to move away from the dark, abuse direction Apple is taking macOS, and I love the software so-much-so that I made a desktop Hackintosh, but getting it to run was more work than getting hardware to work on Linux (still was worth it). I only wonder when the final time will come where Hackintosh doesn't work and my 2015 MacBook Pro stops working. 2015 MBP was the last year for selling MBPs with removable storage. 2015 MBP will be remembered as the best laptop for its replaceable SSD and laptop keyboard.
It's not perfect but here's the thing, Microsoft are iterating on it with two major versions a year and they're fixing the old bad parts of it bit by bit while Apple ignores Mac OS in favor of pushing iPads as the future.
For a software developer like me, who has to jump through so many hoops in order to do any work, or just flat out can't run some compilers that are windows only, this is different.
And as far as usability is concerned, I think Apple lost their, "it just works" values years back. Nowadays it's just a case of whichever OS you use first is the one you're used to
The top option on a MBA is a 1.1GHz quad-core 10th-generation Intel Core i5 processor.
I love the MacBook touchpad, no other laptop really compares in that regard. The screen is also amazing on the MacBook Pro.
I don't like Windows, and Linux is hard to get completely stable on a laptop (battery life, standby, webcam, touchpad gestures, etc.). Thus, macOS is the best alternative for me.
Not everything is about price to performance ratios for me. It's about the overall experience I have when interacting with the device. Plus, the 15" MacBook pro I have is more than powerful enough.
One of the standard things to mention in this area is that Macbook trackpads are nice. This doesn't show up in a spec comparison, but if you get used to having a really good trackpad then you might not want to switch to a laptop where the experience is worse. (I've heard positive things about the XPS and Surface trackpads -- not that they're better, but that they're maybe in the same hardware ballpark, with software just not being quite as polished.)
As other comments have pointed out, a comparably specced PC is not that much cheaper and would be much more of a hassle.
During those six and a half years I knew I could count on this machine and I never had any annoyances with it. If I had gotten a PC which was unlikely to last as long, I would have had to change it at least once, which means going through a period of not quite broken but not quite hassle-free either. And two PCs with the specs of my MBP would have cost more. I'm also OK with paying a premium to not have to deal with those issues (noise, screen sometimes not working, ports failing, keyboards dying, etc — all issues I've had with "pro-level" computers, mostly HP).
There's also the fact that at the time a similar PC was extremely rare (maybe the X1?). I'm talking about a computer with thunderbolt, high resolution display, the ability to run a 4K display at 60Hz, fast SSD. Granted, all those are much more common today.
I'll refer you to the other thread trending today about a blogger who upgraded from the Macbook Air I have to a new Macbook Pro and doesn't like it.
I also have Dell and HP equipment, and most of them have weird driver issues with the basic hardware after about 2 years. I don't want to live like that... I currently have an i7 Dell laptop that randomly disables the keyboard based on which WiFi network it's connected to. The other Dell I have spent its first two years of life re-installing the wrong SSD driver with every Windows update (when it crashed, I'd have to boot into safe mode and re-install the correct SSD driver that I kept on a thumb drive).
So, yeah: Dell is out. Looking at other brands, and desktops.
A lot of manufacturers offer aluminum bodied laptops, though I'm kinda biased towards the feel of HP laptops
No unfortunately this isn't a user-replaceable part in most modern MacBooks.
> In the end it's a "Pro" machine no ?
Not sure what that has to do with it? Most professionals don't want to be changing their RAM.
Unscrewing a cover and popping up some ram is not a “professional” task. It’s something anyone with passing familiarity could achieve.
Shove your ram in some obscure place so the owner can’t access it, now you need a professional if simply to offset the risk something goes wrong while you’re fiddling.
User serviceable parts are just not an Apple priority.
I thought everything was soldered to the main board for years now.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/upgrading-2013-2014-mac...
Edit: The Mac Mini does as well, but apple doesn't consider it 'user-upgradable'.
It's not as trivial as people think to switch to removable RAM. See e.g. this informative reddit comment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2dyuxa/can_any_engin...
The rest of the thread is also worth a read.
Reduce and Reuse is the best way to help pollution, yet Apple is known, famous for Planned Obsolescence and non-repairability
you can not be Environmentally Friendly and maintain the only solution to any problem is to just toss it and buy a new one
Except LPDDR3 is not a custom low yield part since they're present in phones, game consoles, SSDs, cameras, VR headsets, etc. They're as off the shelf as they get.
So, at a minimum your flashing new ram parms to a SPD, or hacking the device model number somewhere. AKA, even with a rework station its likely a lot more than just swapping the chips, if there is sufficient PC/etc linage you might be able to swap the SPD chip as well, otherwise its going to be more than a mechanical heat it up, clean the pads, and drop/heat the new chip.
I'm writingh this on a 2010 mbp on it's third battery, second ram upgrade and new-ish SSD and i'don't know if my next machine will hold up ~10 years when nothing is easily replacable.
Is the difference between a Toyota and a Mercedes one of being "hobbled"?
1. "MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports)"
2. "MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)"
The two-port version comes only with the 8th gen CPU[2] and the four-port only with the 10th gen[3]. So you ordered the four-port version. That's not the model I was commenting about, nor is it the model this article is about.
1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201300
"Huh? The 13" MBP has 4 ports, not 2."
My current 2013 model does have its share of scratches and two small dents but it works as well as 6 years ago. I'd much rather have a dented metal case that stays together than a cracked plastic one.
Depends on the field and location.
Between his computer repair business and video productions, he financially benefits from Apple products being relatively difficult to repair.
How do you figure? A large % of the population is now work from home and seeking to equip their home offices.
We're in the process of moving our entire data center into the cloud before the end of July. I'm anticipating an announcement that our office will not be reopening and that we're all now remote staff.
I have to schedule an appointment to go into the office to retrieve my personal belongings from my desk as well as any equipment I'd like for my home office.
If anything many people are investing in new computers, or cameras or video games than ever before.
At least in my country, lockdown is just starting and I got a new laptop last week.
As to 'times as fast' vs 'times faster' vs 'times slower': I don't see how there could be any confusion.
Possibly you gloss over the words as you're used to them, but don't stop to think what each paper really means? I didn't either until one day I stopped and did.
I wrote a blog post about this, but unfortunately never got around to posting it because I think it came across as rather pedantic. I surveyed the language used to express speedup in systems papers using benchmarking in top conferences and produced this table:
https://twitter.com/ChrisGSeaton/status/1253654667579531265/...
Each row is a different way to talk about the same thing, then the English way to say it, then each column is what this looks like for a different example value, then the actual mathematical expression.
Just to emphasise this - each column is the same empirical result, and then each row in the column is a different way to express that same result, that I've seen in a paper.
> The latter is obvious, the former is not.
I'm afraid it isn't as obvious to everyone, and other people may think it's obviously something different to you. You'll notice that some English phrases can be interpreted in multiple reasonable ways. Is running in half the time '1 times faster' or '2 times faster'? You'll see both in the wild.
> As to 'times as fast' vs 'times faster' vs 'times slower': I don't see how there could be any confusion.
Is '2 times as fast' the same as '2 times faster'? Some papers think so, others not.
Have you read the root comment of this thread... that's an example of real-world confusion right there! Just with markup not speedup. It's the same maths and the same confusion.
Besides, why shouldn’t they charge for a RAM upgrade? It costs them money to add more (RAM chips aren’t cheap), so they pass that cost on to the customer with a markup that the customer is willing to pay.
I'd be fine with just an "Apple tax" added on top of the bill. The average consumer might not have the same reaction, so maybe this is the only way of adding the tax.
I can't understand this point of view - why do you care how the person you're buying from is breaking down their charges?
If you're a rational person all that should matter to you is are you getting the value that you want from the transaction. If you are and you can't get better value elsewhere then go for it. How the price came to be determined is completely irrelevant. Either it works for you or it doesn't.
All I care about is is it worth it to pay $200 more for a MacBook with 16 GB rather than 8 GB. Yes it is to me, because I can get that money back and more from the value it gives me.
I don't care how much you can buy the RAM for elsewhere, because what can I do with that? It's not of any use to me when it's not inside a MacBook, is it? It's irrelevant.
Only Macs and the PC ultra portables tend to forgo them.
We replaced most of MacBooks last year when we got sick of waiting for a non-defective keyboard and maintaining a spare pool of $3000 laptops. The thin models use soldered memory, but are priced at a much lower margin. The slightly thicker models are still thinner and lighter than the MacBook Pros they replaced, and have user replaceable memory as well. In most cases, we just ordered more memory because HP doesn't gouge you, and our budget was built around MacBooks.
There was some grousing initially about leaving MacOS for Windows 10, but it went away fairly quickly, as Catalina really fubared stuff that our Mac users cared about around the same time, running MacOS in a business sucks anyway, and the Windows 10 linux stuff is good enough for our folks who were using a Mac for Unixy reasons.
Apple's thin and light principles make sense and are ultimately correct from a technical POV, but the business side uses it as a margin mining operation. 2020 isn't 2010 from a competitive POV, where Apple blew everyone away -- they lost focus in the 2014-15 timeframe and now focus on the ARM transition. Today, competitive forces drive thin & light among other vendors and ultimately result in a better outcome for most scenarios.
1) RAM slots take up more space.
2) There is not a standard socket for all kinds of RAM (particularly some kinds of energy efficient RAM).
Which thin non-Apple laptop are you referring to?
I seriously doubt Apple gives a crap about whether or not people can upgrade their RAM. Hardly anyone does it even when they can, so it can't make much difference to their business model. Do you really think Apple are doing this so that a tiny fraction of people who would have just upgraded their RAM buy a new laptop instead?
I’m sure Apple doesn’t care at all — they removed the iMac memory slots and made storage replacement impossible for no real good reason at all as well. That combined with the gouging for additional capacity and the borderline fraud of shipping the defective keyboard for years was enough for me.
I liked MacOS a lot, but the companies behavior is a textbook example of why you need competitive forces in hardware.
Soldering on ultrafast SSDs does make sense for a number of reasons beyond just saving space. The higher the bandwidth, the more difficult it is to get data transfer working reliably when part of the electrical connection is made via a connector cable. Apple have some of the fastest SSD speeds out there.
There are similar issues with RAM. There's lots of crappy RAM on the market. If people started putting third party RAM in modern MacBooks, you'd get lots of issues with e.g. reliable suspend/resume. Some good discussion here: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-valid-technical-reason-for-....
The laptop options that are hyped up as being better than Apple almost always turn out to have a mythical element, on further investigation. If you want removable RAM and SSDs you can get them (yay free market!), but there's a real downside.
Unsolicited coaching tip: don't spend many cycles on stuff like this at work.
And it‘s easily recycled afterwards. The RAM is rarely the issue and I know few non-technical people who ever changed their RAM in a notebook.
Sustainability is really important, but I don‘t think upgradable notebooks make a significant difference at all.
Hardware can be both long-lasting as well as upgradable.
There is a popular myth among the lazy-minded about this, but the fact is that Apple's hardware lasts a lot longer, and is intentionally supported for a lot longer, than competing hardware. This is true for Macs as well as iOS devices. If Apple is "planning" for anything, it's for their stuff to last a lot longer than others' stuff, not the opposite.
This is not planned obsolescence - this is going out of your way to make the repairs harder. I can understand when certain decisions are made for engineering reasons(like say, having the ram soldered on), but this kind of thing when Apple goes to the manufacturer and asks for a version specific only to them so that no one else can buy it, ever - that's just anti-consumer, and I hope the hand of the law will come on them super hard due to this.
As someone who has bounced in and out of Apple products for ~10 years at a time (1985-1995 and 2005-2014), I have a couple of nits.
The last two Mac laptops I had (2009 plastic Macbook, Early 2011 MBP with known heat issues) - both can still run the latest version of Windows 10 adequately for what they are hardware-wise. Every "modern" (as in OSX capable) Mac I have had at some point lost support from the latest version of OSX (which means you lose the ability to upgrade some apps). In some cases, like the 2011 MBP, for seemingly no reason, as it is still a decent computer even now.
While I know a lot of people here like to change their computer every couple of years like it's nothing, I still like to use things I buy for as long as possible before recycling them.
In terms of "hardware lasts a lot longer", I generally agree with that statement, but there have been notable instances of bad designs combined with bad support (and I generally think Apple's support is a notch better than everyone else).
The most notable (in recent times) being the Early 2011 15" MBPs with overheating issues. That thing was a lemon that was poorly handled by Apple. There's still a good chance that I'd still be using a Mac right now had that experience not left a sour taste in my mouth. I've never had a laptop die on me in 20+ years of having laptops (my very first was a Powerbook 170, and I've had a pile of PC and Mac laptops since) outside of that early 2011 MBP, which lasted just over 3 years before it died. It died again after the recall service was performed on it, because they basically just replaced the logic board with the same board having the same design defect. (FWIW, someone else I know who bought the same model had the exact thing happen).
Yes... pure garbage. Very objective vision.
> On a MacBook, I can drag and drop to Applications. If I need to uninstall it, I delete it. It's that simple.
This is a lie. Applications in macOS save files outside of Applications, sometime you don't know where, and you need other apps if you want to completely delete the data. There are also installers for macOS and portable apps for Windows (where you put it where you want, and to uninstall it just delete it). There are also package managers like homebrew for windows (chocolatey for example) but all of these are not made or endorsed by Apple or Microsoft.
> AirDrop between my iPad Pro and MacBook is so fast
It's fast when it works and many many time it doesn't at first, you need to fiddle around with it. And if any excuse is somethin like "it works with newer machines" they're not valid.
----
With this, I don't want to convince you to switch, but I think Windows can be valid for many people that are not considering it right now, as I wasn't. And it is only getting better, whereas you can't really say the same for macOS.
I try to use Scoop whenever I can exactly for this reason: I want to use portable apps every time it's possible, they're just cleaner
I just wanted to explain to anyone who was wondering why people would be willing to pay $200 for more RAM unnecessarily. It is be because we are trapped in macOS and there is no good alternative (again, an opinion, not objective). Many people have commented confusion on why we subject ourselves to pricing like this.
Windows UI and Linux Subsystem is a whole other set of things which I disagree with, but I don't want to get into it. All I want to say is that I grew up with Windows, I used it for decades, and it took leaving it for me to realize how much more fun software development could be without Windows.
For gaming purposes, I can be found using Windows, no problem. Either way, this is a very subjective discussion that has been beaten to death by different sides over the decades, so we should temper our expectations on whatever productive discussions can be had over such topics, and the best I can say is that I am happy that we, as users, ultimately have freedom to choose, rather than be forced into a monopoly.
I personally think Linux (smartphone, desktop, laptop) has the biggest delta and promise as of recent, so we should all cross our fingers and hope for the best for an open-source, generally usable OS for everyone.
Didn't use Mac for some time. Is CMD+K behavior different in some way?
People complain about the new thinner macbooks all the time. The keyboard is atrocious, the touchbar, the dongles... Seems to me they would've totally bought a modernized 2015 model if it existed.