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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov

2 days ago

Non upgradeable storage and ram is ridiculous.

Interestingly, when M4 mac mini went on sale, version with 32GB RAM/1TB drive was priced exactly 2x as 16GB RAM / 512GB drive version. This kinda implies that Apple sells only RAM and storage, and gives away the rest for free.

4 comments

Andrew_nenakhov

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dlcarrier  1 day ago

It makes no sense for nonvolatile storage, where the power consumption, bandwidth limit, and latency of socketed interconnects are trivial, compared to the speed, latency, and power consumption of the drive itself.

For RAM, it's an entirely different ball game. The closer you can have it to the processor die, the higher the bandwidth, the lower the latency, and the lower the power consumption.

throwaway31131  1 day ago

On the one hand, I get you. On the other, I’m just not sure we live in that world anymore for most people.

My daily driver is a base config 16” M1 MacBook Pro from 2021 and I have no inclinations to upgrade at all. Even the battery is still good.

I run CAD, compile and run large C++ projects. Do tons of heavy stuff in matlab. Various visualizations of simulations. My laptop just isn’t the slow thing anymore. I’m sure workloads exists that would push this machine but how many people are actually doing that. (Ok fine, chrome exists)

Even the smaller SSD isn’t an issue for me in practice because iCloud Drive and Box automatically move things I don’t often access off disk freeing local space.

Frankly if smaller memory footprints and smaller SSDs translates to lower base config prices and longer battery life it was the right choice, for me anyway.

FireBeyond  2 days ago

There is someone on YT (Doctor Feng, or similar, though I can't find) who literally will have people ship him entry level iPhones/iPads/MBPs, etc, and he'll upgrade them to 4 and 8 TB SSDs. And create ASMR videos of the process.

Even with upgradable memory:

When I bought my "cheesegrater" Mac Pro, I wanted 8TB of SSD.

Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the sticker price came with a baseline of 1TB).

I bought a 4xM.2 card and 4x2TB Samsung Pro SSDs, which cost me $1,300. However, I kept the 1TB "system" SSD, which was faster, at 6.8GBps versus the system drive's 5.5 GBps.

Similar to memory. OWC literally sells the same memory as Apple (same manufacturer, same specifications). Apple also wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (going from 32 to 192). I paid $1,000.