Well yeah, they’re enough to meet the minimum use cases so they can upsell most people on expensive RAM upgrades.
That’s why I don’t buy laptops with soldered RAM. That’s getting harder and harder these days, but my needs for a laptop have also gone down. If they solder RAM, there’s nothing you can (realistically) do if you need more, so you’ll pay extra when buying so they can upcharge a lot. If it’s not soldered, you have a decent option to buy RAM afterward, so there’s less value in upselling too much.
So screw you Apple, I’m not buying your products until they’re more repair friendly.
I had a extra stick of RAM available the other day so I went to open my wife’s Lenovo to see if it’d take it and the damn thing is screwed shut with the smallest torx screws I’ve ever seen, smaller than what I have. I was so annoyed
smallest torx screws I’ve ever seen
Torx is legitimately useful for small screws, because it’s more resistant to stripping than Phillips.
Now, if they start using Torx security bits or some oddball shapes, then they’re just being obnoxious. But there are not-trying-to-obstruct-the-customer reasons not to use Phillips.
IFixit kit is a great toolset from the site that has every type of bit in it.
Got myself an IFixit Mako a while ago, really nice even if I mostly just use the philips head ones
Right? It’s nice to have the occasional reverse tri head metric upside down weird random bit when you need it.
Does it have triangle bits? Nintendo uses some really unusual driver shapes.
I’ve taken apart so so so many things… sometimes for the right reasons and sometimes for the wrong reasons…my ZuneHD still works. I’ll never ever try to open a Surface product.
The real question is why you don’t have a complete precision screwdriver set.
I thought I did! Until I got the smallest one out and it just spun on top of the screw
I bought the E495 because the T495 had soldered RAM and one RAM slot, while the E495 had both RAM slots replacable. Adding more RAM didn’t need any special tools. Newer E-series and T-series both have one RAM slot and some soldered RAM. I’m guessing you’re talking about one of the consumer lines, like the Yoga series or something?
That said, Lenovo (well, Motorola in this case, but Lenovo owns Motorola) puts all kinds of restrictions to your rights if you unlock the bootloader of their phones (PDF version of the agreement). That, plus going down the path of soldering RAM gives me serious concerns about the direction they’re heading, so I can’t really recommend their products anymore.
If I ever need a new laptop, I’ll probably get a Framework.
I keep looking at the Frameworks, because I’m happy with the philosophy, but the problem is that the parts that they went to a lot of trouble to make user-replaceable are the parts that I don’t really care about.
They let you stick a fancy video card on the thing. I’d rather have battery life – I play games on a desktop. If they’d stick a battery there, that might be interesting.
They let you choose the keyboard. I’m pretty happy with current laptop keyboards, don’t really need a numpad, and even if you want one, it’s available elsewhere. I’ve got no use for the LED inserts that you can stick on the thing if you don’t want keyboard there.
They let you choose among sound ports, Ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort, and various types of USB. Maybe I could see putting in more USB-C then some other vendors have. But the stuff I really want is:
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A 100Wh battery. Either built-in, or give me a bay where I can put more internal battery.
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A touchpad with three mechanical buttons, like the Synaptics ones that the Thinkpads have.
The fact that they aren’t soldering in the RAM and NVMe is nice in that they’re committing to not charging much more then market rate, so I guess they should get credit for that, but they are certainly not the only vendor to avoid soldering those.
Yeah, ThinkPad used to allow either a CD drive or an extra battery in their T-series. They stopped offering the extra battery and started soldering RAM, so I got the cheaper E-series (might as well save cash if I can get what I want).
I think there’s a market there. Have an option for a hot-swap battery to bring on trips and use the GPU at home. Serious travelers could even bring a spare battery to keep working for longer.
touchpad with three mechanical buttons
Yes please! And give me the ThinkPad nipple as well. :) If they had those, I’d not bother with even looking at Lenovo. The middle button is so essential to my normal workflow that any other laptop (including my fancy MacBook for work) feels crappy.
I’m guessing the things they made modular are just the low hanging fruit. It’s pretty easy to make a USB-C to whatever port, it’s a bit harder to make a pluggable battery in a slot that can also support a GPU.
I don’t know if I’d recommend it, but if you are absolutely set on having the Thinkpad nipple – I don’t use it, even if I really want the Thinkpad trackpad – the factory that made the original IBM Model M keyboards is still in business somewhere in Kentucky. IIRC the employees bought it or something when IBM stopped making the things. They offer a nipple keyboard, goes by the name of “Endura Pro”. checks Unicomp. That’s the remnants in the US of the IBM business; the Chinese Lenovo purchased the laptops and also do the Trackpoint.
I got one like twenty years back, and while the actual buckling-spring keyswitches on the keyboard are pretty much immune to time, I wore out the switches on the mouse buttons, so I don’t know if I can give a buy recommendation for the mouse-enabled version (though maybe they improved the switches there). But if you really, really like it, that might be worthwhile for you. Last I looked they were still making them.
checks
They’ve got a message up saying that a supplier of a component used in that keyboard went under due to COVID so they suspended production. I don’t know what the status is on that.
https://www.pckeyboard.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=EnduraPro
NOTICE CONCERNING AVAILABILITY – Unfortunately, we have had to temporarily suspend the sale of the Endura Pro keyboards due to another supply chain shortage. The supplier of one of the flex harnesses had to close their doors during the pandemic. We’ve begun the task of sourcing a new supplier but do not have a definite time frame for when these keyboards will be available again. For our customers with orders already placed, we have enough stock to complete all on order.
Keep in mind that this is a very large, heavy keyboard that you could brain someone with; if you’re going to haul it around with a laptop, it’s going to be larger and heavier than the laptop. Mentioning it mostly since I figure that you might use it at some location where you could leave the keyboard.
The thing is, I only like the Trackpoint in a laptop. It’s really nice to scroll while holding the middle mouse button and just shifting my finger. That way, my hand is ready to type, unlike using the trackpad, where I have to move my hands to type, and it works well in my largely keyboard-driven workflow (ViM for text editing, Trackpoint for web browsing).
On a desktop, I have multiple screens and way more real estate, so the Trackpoint isn’t nearly as effective and it’s worth using the mouse instead.
But I honestly don’t use my laptop all that often, so it’s something I’m fine doing without. But all other things being similar, I’ll prefer the Trackpoint since it’s a nice value add.
It’s cool that they’re making those keyboards though. I have and nice mechanical keyboards, so I’m not looking for one, but I would be very interested in a Framework-compatible keyboard with a Trackpoint.
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Yeah, it’s a Yoga
puts all kinds of restrictions to your rights
The document mentions a lot of US laws. I wonder if they try the same over in the EU.
I’m guessing it wouldn’t hold. But I’m in the US, so I’ll just avoid their phones going forward, and will probably avoid their laptops and whatnot as well just due to a lack of trust.
That’s why I don’t buy laptops with soldered RAM.
Oh, that shit is soldered on…
I mean, I did see that on some laptops, but only those cheap things in €150 range (new) which even use eMMC for storage.It became pretty common even on higher end laptops when they switched to DDR5, but some manufacturers are starting to go back to socketed RAM.
Yup, all Apple laptops have soldered RAM for some years now…
These days I don’t realistically expect my RAM requirements to change over the lifetime of the product. And I’m keeping computers longer than ever: 6+ years where it used to be 1 or 2.
People have argued millions of times on the internet that Apple’s products don’t meet people’s needs and are massively overpriced. Meanwhile they just keep selling like crazy and people love them. I think the issue comes from having pricing expectations set over the in race-to-the-bottom world of commoditized Windows/Android trash.
I upgraded my personal laptop a year or so after I got it (started with 8GB, which was fine until I did Docker stuff), and I’m probably going to upgrade my desktop soon (16GB, which has been fine for a few years, but I’m finally running out). My main complaint about my work laptop is RAM (16GB I think; I’d love another 8-16GB), but I cannot upgrade it because it’s soldered, so I have to wait for our normal cycle (4 years; will happen next year). I upgraded my NAS RAM when I upgraded a different PC as well.
I don’t do it very often, but I usually buy what I need when I build/buy the machine and upgrade 3-4 years later. I also often upgrade the CPU before doing a motherboard upgrade, as well as the GPU.
Meanwhile they just keep selling like crazy and people love them. I think the issue comes from having pricing expectations set over the in race-to-the-bottom world of commoditized Windows/Android trash.
I might agree if Apple hardware was actually better than alternatives, but that’s just not the case. Look at Louis Rossmann’s videos, where he routinely goes over common failure cases that are largely due to design defects (e.g. display cable being cut, CPU getting fried due to a common board short, butterfly keyboard issues, etc). As in, defects other laptops in a similar price bracket don’t have.
I’ve had my E-series ThinkPad for 6 years, with no issues whatsoever. The USB-C charge port is getting a little loose, but that’s understandable since it’s been mostly a kids Minecraft device for a couple years now, and kids are hard on computers. I had my T-Mobile series before that for 5-ish years until it finally died due to water damage (a lot of water).
Apple products (at least laptops) are designed for aesthetics first, not longevity. They do generally have pretty good performance though, especially with the new Apple Silicon chips, but they source a lot of their other parts from the same companies that provide parts for the rest of the PC market.
If you stick to the more premium devices, you probably won’t have issues. Buy business class laptops and phones with long software support cycles. For desktops, I recommend buying higher end components (Gold or Platinum power supply, mid-range or better motherboard, etc), or buying from a local DIY shop with a good warranty if buying pre built.
Like anything else, don’t buy the cheapest crap you can, buy something in the middle of the price range for the features you’re looking for.
Tim Apple be like “We’ve tried charging more money. Have we tried charging more money and delivering less stuff in exchange?”
Yes, they do constantly. Yet, people still keep buying. I hate that I have to use Apple for my job because of the software and interface is exclusive.
I really like my macbook for dev work, and I think that now that macos is essentially a linux distro it’s quite nice, but it’s not that much better than the free distros and it’s getting worse while they get better. Right now the only thing keeping me on a mac at work is that they gave it to me and the only thing keeping me on a mac at home is that it’s already paid for.
you wanna expand on why you think it’s basically a linux distro? Last i heard macos was more closely based on BSD than it was linux, and this was ages ago. Unless they rewrote it without my knowledge it really shouldn’t be anything like either one of the two.
because I can pop a terminal into zsh and beyond that I don’t really know the taxonomy
you can do that with WSL though.
All modern terminals are actually terminal emulators, unless you’re sitting in TTY. It’s pretty trivial to implement a proper UNIX/linux like CLI environment.
okay
and for completion sake here, technically windows implements a “terminal” through CMD, it’s not linux/unix like at all, but it is still a CLI interface, so.
Yup, same. I really don’t like macOS, but that’s what we’ve standardized on. I’m a Linux guy and use Linux at home for everything.
Lol, audio jacks come to mind. As well as a physical button. And shipping devices without cords or chargers.
I was using my 2016 (or so) MacBook Air the other day and getting low memory errors. I thought, wow, this thing only has 8 gb, maybe it’s time to upgrade, just to see this 😐
My 2009 Mac mini had 8gb of RAM. And it wasn’t even very expensive to do so when I did it in ~2013. Couple hundred bucks max.
Couple hundred bucks for 8 gigs of ram?
Yeah I didn’t even pay a hundred bucks for the 32GB of RAM in my current desktop, and it’s DDR5.
11 years ago. May very well have been less. Apples still probably charging more than that to go from 8 to 16 and I had to buy all 8 and replace both DIMMS.
Part of the difference is that the Apple silicon Macs aggressively use SSD swap to make up for limited memory. But that’s at expense of the SSD lifespan, which of course isn’t replaceable.
I’d never recommend a Mac, but the prices they charge to get a little more RAM or SSD over base are crazy. The only configurations offering any “value” are the base models with 8gb RAM.
Why tf can’t they sell mac with upgradable parts?? They are “so” into renewable and recycling stuff and saving planet and stuff. Then they should start selling shits with upgradable parts. Even cpu’s if possible. Now apple fan boys argue with that. And don’t bullshit me with soc should be near cpu for faster optimisation they can redesign the mobo.
There are legitimate advantages of the RAM being soldered right next to the SoC. However, if anyone could figure out how to create a proprietary RAM module, that slots in right next to the SoC (or even just an SoC module including RAM) that can be swapped out and that doesn‘t have any meaningful performance impact, it would be Apple. Just that it never could be Apple…
The problem is the electrical resistance of the socket. Most of the performance on apple silicon is achieved through extremely high bandwidth, low latency memory. Unfortunately that necessitates a socketless design at the moment, and you can see that happening on the snapdragon X too.
Yea, not just snapdragon and apple. Even intel and amd processors usually get paired with higher bandwidth soldered ram on many mobile offerings.
And on GPUs soldered VRAM has been a thing for a loooong time, with HBM memory being the prime example for what RAM close to the chip can do. AMD‘s Vega cards were highly sought after during the mining craze, even though they weren’t that fast in general computing, simply because their memory bandwidth was so beyond any other consumer cards…
Because that gives the user as much or more control over the device as Apple themselves have. One of the fairly consistent things about Apple over the years has been a desire to maintain tight control for themselves over the products they make.
There is what they say they are in favor of, and there is what they really are in favor of.
They are in favor of apple getting all the monies, the end
Because then they can’t gaslight people into thinking their 8GB is magical.
They certainly used to. My wife’s 2012 MacBook Pro has upgraded RAM and SSD parts I’ve put in over the years and still runs fine, though it isn’t used much anymore and OS upgrades stopped a while ago.
Their current environmental marketing is pure greenwashing bullshit and their stances on upgradability and repairability are terrible.
It’s basically just greenwashing. They pretend to be into renewables and recycling only when it doesn’t disincentivize people from buying the newest product. Ex: iPhone trade in for recycling - Yes, they do recover some raw material but you can only do it if you’re buying a new iPhone with that credit, and its probably also an attempt to keep cheap used iPhones off of the market.
My basic web dev Docker suite uses about 13GB just on its own, which - assuming you were on 16GB (double Apple’s minimum) - wouldn’t leave much for things like browser tabs, which also eat memory for breakfast.
A fast swap is not an argument to short-change on RAM, especially since SSDs have a shorter lifespan than RAM modules. 16GB remains the absolute bare minimum for modern computing, and Apple is making weak, ridiculous excuses to pocket just a few extra bucks per MacBook.
Playing devils advocate here: As someone who deals with stuff like that, you also wouldn’t buy the base model mac. The average computer user can get by with 8GB just fine and it’s not like you can’t configure Macs with more than that.
That of course doesn’t justify the abhorrent price of the upgrades…
And here I am, putting 16gb in every machine I work on because it’s so damn cheap there’s no reason not to future proof
I mean, same. The difference in price for 8GB and 16GB is negligible, especially if you want dual channel on desktops
My girlfriends mum wanted to know why her laptop was slow… It was because HP thought that 4gb of ram is acceptable in 2022 (when the laptop was sold). Granted ram wasn’t as cheap then as it is now… Still I paid £30 for a brand new 8gb DDR4 sodimm, there’s not reason hp couldn’t do that. It’s annoying the corners these company cut.
My experience is, that 4GB is just about useable for a bit of web browsing and similar stuff. Even on windows 11. I have an old Surface Pro 4 laying around that, in a pinch, works perfectly fine with 11. Of course, it’s not fast. But it’s totally useable.
Her laptop just wasn’t having it, windows 11, windows was using 3.7gb ram took about 30 seconds for task manager to open. As soon as I upgraded the ram is was usable.
I checked for any surprising background services or anti virus software and there was nothing really
That sounds more like issues Windows would have running on an HDD (or maybe eMMC) instead of an SSD… Bit that wouldn’t explain why it got better, when you upgraded the RAM…
For apple, that difference is $200… not negligible I’d say
That’s because apple is a greedy grabby company who wants all your money. The easiest solution is to stop buying their products
Oh yea, absolutely. I meant that in regards to the price of memory itself, be it as modules for your desktop PC or the chips itself for soldered solutions. Apple’s markup is bonkers
I just slap in 32GB on every computer I build because the MoBos can take 128GB and anything less feels cheap and silly.
The average computer user can get by with 8GB just fine
Hard disagree. The average computer user is idling at 5gb already because the average computer user is stupid.
Still leaves 3gb for the web browser and the average user isn’t using anything else anyways. And even on chrome that’s quite a few pages.
No they can’t. I ran 8gb of ram for years and it turns out that that’s why my computer sucked
Maybe you’re not an average user then. Most people just browse the web and maybe manage some photos or fill out a document once in a while. You could do that on 4GB if you wanted to, let alone 8.
I wouldn’t say 4gb is usable for the average consumer. Using the assumption they’re using windows 11 that’ll eat 3.7 ish GB of ram just idling.
How? I have 108 tabs open and still use 2.67GB of RAM.
Tabs of what? Chromes ram usage is more of a meme than an actual ram issue, windows will only allow an application to use so much ram depending on ram availability
108 tabs in chromium. Mentioned RAM usage is total RAM usage including all system and kernel, but excluding page cache. Forgot to mention libreoffice in background.
You forget there though, that a lot of the RAM, that Windows (and most modern operating systems) uses, while idling, is a cache of programs you’re likely to open and that gets cleared, if you open something else. That has been a thing since Vista and was btw one of the reasons why Vista was criticized for high memory useage. Windows 11 is very useable with 4GB of RAM, if you’re not planning to do something bigger than browsing the web or editing a word document.
I’m not forgetting that, but it won’t just clear that ram it will want to put it into swap, and depending on your storage speed that can slow tasks down. Making it quite stuttery.
I mean, a (good) SSD is worth quite a lot, even on very old systems. I have an old 2008 MacBook laying around. It’s certainly not fast but with an SSD it’s totally useable, even on current macOS versions.
PS5 has 16GB and it’s a toy.
My basic web dev Docker suite uses about 13GB just on its own
Skill issue
average webdev
Wow! 13GB! I did some heavy stuff on my computer with like a shit ton of Docker servers running together + deployment and I never reached 13GB!
Without disclosing private company information lol what are you doing ;)
not OP, but I have to run fronted and backend of a project in docker simultaneously (multiple postgres and redis dbs, queues, search index, etc., plus two webservers), plus a few browser tabs and two VSCode instances open, regularly pushes my machine over 15gb ram usage
pretty much like this
That was a fun song, t4t.
That is basically my use-case. You add a DB service (or two), DNS, reverse proxy, Redis, Memcached, etc… maybe some containers for additional proprietary backend services like APIs, and then the application themselves that need those things to run… it adds up FAST. The advantage is that you can have multiple projects all running simultaneously and you can add/remove/swap them pretty easily.
RAM is cheap. There is no excuse for shipping a 8GB computer… even if it’s mostly going to be used for family photos and internet.
Running a suite of services in containers (DBs, DNS, reverse proxy, memcached, redis, elasticsearch, shared services, etc) plus a number of discreet applications that use all those things. My day-to-day usage hovers around 20GB with spikes to 32 (my max allocation) when I run parallelized test suites.
Dockers memory usage really adds up fast.
The people need to know how you use 13GB of ram worth of containers for web dev.
Docker is awesome for a lot of things. But it’s not particularly good for RAM.
What do you bist that takes that much memory?
Have you seen the difference between the 8 and 16Gb Macbooks, it is ridiculously expensive.
Nah its about £13 retail.
Oh wait, you mean from apple… Its £200 from them.
Yes, my bad, I wanted to say the difference in price between the 8 and 16Gb model, I know that RAM became dirt cheap nowadays and there aren’t any excuses for Apple to continue offering 8Gb model, as this is exactly a planned obsolescence.
Yeah I was just pointing out the insanity of their pricing, using sarcasm. Its the main way we communicate over here.
The price difference between the first 2 models where 8gb ram is the only change, is £200. Post 2025 I’m going to need some solution to replace my windows install which solely runs CAD/CAM software. If it wasn’t for this scumbaggery I’d buy a Mac to replace win10, but at present apple are such a shower of cunts I think I may have to put up with win11.
What a fucking choice…
You know there’s a third way…
I already run Linux for everything else. Its not an option for my CAD work unfortunately
Common apple L
There is exactly one reason why they do this: So they can charge you $200 to upgrade it to 16GB and in doing so make the listed price of the device look $200 cheaper than it actually is. Or sometimes $400 if it’s a model where the base model comes with a 256GB SSD (the upgrade to 512GB, the minimum I’d ever recommend, is also $200).
The prices Apple charges for storage and RAM are plain offensive. And I say that as someone who enjoys using their stuff.
That’s why I dropped them when my mid-2013 MBP got a bit long in the tooth. Mac OS X, I mean OS X, I mean macOS is a nice enough OS but it’s not worth the extortionate prices for hardware that’s locked down even by ultralight laptop standards. Not even the impressive energy efficiency can save the value proposition for me.
Sometimes I wish Apple hadn’t turned all of their notebook lines into MacBook Air variants. The unibody MBP line was amazing.
Sometimes I wish Apple hadn’t turned all of their notebook lines into MacBook Air variants. The unibody MBP line was amazing.
Typing this from a M2 Max Macbook Pro with 32GB, and honestly, this thing puts the “Pro” back in the MBP. It’s insanely powerful, I rarely have to wait for it to compile code, transcode video, or run AI stuff. It also does all of that while sipping battery, it’s not even breaking a sweat. Yes, it’s pretty thin, but it’s by no means underpowered. Apple really is onto something with their M* lineup.
But yeah, selling “Pro” laptops with 8GB in 2024 is very stupid.
Yeah, sure. Even if what they say about the OS resource usage is true, it’s only a fraction of the total usage. A lot of the multiplatform software will use the same resources regardless of the OS. Many apps eat RAM for breakfast, doesn’t matter if it’s content creation or software development. Heck, even smartphones these days have have this much or more RAM.
I won’t argue, I just won’t buy an Apple product in the near future or probably ever at all.
buys [insert price] laptop, top of the line, flagship, custom silicon, built ground up to be purpose specific.
Opens final cut pro: crashes
ok…
Especially paired with Apple’s 128gb integrated, non replaceable hard drives. Whoops you installed all of Microsoft office? Looks like you have no room to save any documents :(
ah yes, we can’t forget the proprietary non controller based nvme drives that use m.2 but arent actually nvme drives, they’re just flash.
No way. It isn’t NVME?!?!
it’s NVME in the sense that it’s non volatile flash, probably even higher quality than most existing NVME ssds out there today.
The thing is that it literally just the flash. On a card with an m.2 pin out, that fits into an m.2 slot, it doesn’t have a storage controller or any standardized method of communication, that already exists. It’s literally a proprietary non standard standard form factor SSD.
The controller is integrated onto the silicon chip die itself, there is no storage controller on the storage itself.
Yet another reason to never go back to Apple
apple, we innovate where no one else does, because for some reason, we like doing that.
Same. And I bet you the price will also go up with less ram.
I bought one of the early M1s and bought into a lot of the early reviewers that claimed 8 was enough on the ARM architecture. Honestly, for most folks, it’s probably fine. For me, it’s not.
My wife and I use the M1 has a multi-account family machine. And we’re both experience design directors, so we both have RAM hog design apps open under our accounts. The poor little Mac just can’t handle all that abuse with 8 gigs.
Our old ass Intel Mac with 16gig of RAM had no problems keeping a ton of crap open.
The battery life and low heat are absolutely amazing on the M1. That stuff was a monumental upgrade. But we absolutely can’t be lazy and just leave crap open unless it’s actually needed.
The fact that Apple is selling “Pro” machine with 8 gigs is a joke. 8 would be fine for my folks who fart around on Facebook all day, but it’s not enough for a lot of heavy multimedia work.
8 megs of RAM? I didn’t know they brought back the Macintosh II.
lol. Fixed. My brain is broken.
I dunno if you noticed or if that was the joke. But you said “8 megs” three times in your comment when I think you meant to say “8 gigs”. 1 gigabyte ~ 1024 megabytes. Just wanted to let you know in case it wasn’t a joke about how 8 wasn’t enough. That’s all, thank you!
lol. Apparently my brain is broken.
Actually, 1 gigabyte (109 B) is 1000 megabytes (106 B), while one gibibyte (230 B) corresponds to 1024 mebibytes (220 B). I know that in some circles, 1 GB is treated as 1 GiB, so I don’t blame you. This system of quantities is standardised internationally in order to conform with the SI (mega must mean a million times and not 220 times), but many don’t conform to it, such as Microsoft as far as I know.
Thank you for the correction and details.
I found for most CS-ish tasks 8GB is okay. I also bought an early M1 and haven’t had too many problems outside of running VMs, which I expected. I purchased one of the stocked configurations at an Apple store, so there were slim pickings with 16GB of memory that weren’t like double the price of the machine.
Yeah, my guess is 2x accounts is the cause of 90% of my performance issues. One person’s Adobe crap is fine, but two us too much for 8gigs without the occasional beach ball.
Is Adobe still the standard? When I realized browsers and 3rd party apps render PDFs much quicker than Reader, I started looking for other alternatives to Adobe. I was familiar with the flow of PaintShop Pro and GIMP, so now the very little I did in Photoshop I do in GIMP/Inkscape/a couple other freebie tools. When they acquired Macromedia and killed Flash, I was out of their ecosystem, so my poor knowledge of their products is almost 2 decades old. What are their can’t-live-without products nowadays?
Depends what you’re doing, but for branding and print media, Adobe still dominates most shops. If you’re doing UX, then you’re probably in Figma these days.
Ooh, Figma looks interesting, thanks!
Yeah, Figma is the new standard for UX design. Adobe was trying to buy them for the last couple years because most people no longer use Adobe tools for UX work.
Apple said some pretty dumb things to defend that 8gb, but let’s not pretend that most manufacturers do the same thing.
For years people have known it can’t be upgraded. You know that going in.
No one complains that video cards on (most) laptops can’t be replaced, yet many of them wind up being useless for anything but daily tasks.
For years people have known it can’t be upgraded. You know that going in.
Not sure that is true, lots of people see the marketing for a MacBook and think that any of them will be enough. Or see the price difference and think they are getting a good deal, or don’t understand why that is. I’ve had to tell people, sorry I know you spent a lot of money on this, but it does not have the storage for what you are wanting to do. Yes, the only way is to buy another one.
Otherwise yea, everyone tries to gaslight customers into thinking they didn’t get ripped off.
Sure, some people buy a computer without knowing anything about the computer.
Unified memory is not user accessible. If you think you’ll need additional memory, it’s a good idea to upgrade now.
They say it right there. Should it be red and flashing? Should there be a confirm button?
If you go into the Apple Store, someone who is trained to help is always available, and various models are typically in stock.
I’d like to firmly repeat, that Apple never should’ve said that bullshit. Also I feel that 16 gigs should be the standard amount for any Apple laptop. They are premium products. Perhaps the Mac Mini could start at 8.
And since you pulled out the gaslight, I’ll call you a misinformed accuser.
As engineers, we should never insert proprietary interfaces into our designs. We shouldn’t obfuscate the design.
The motivation for these toxic practices comes from the business side because it’s profitable. These people won’t share the profits with you because they are psychopaths. Ultimately we are making more waste when electronics cannot be upgraded, maintained and repaired. It’s bad for people and it’s bad for the environment.
So much stuff in both the hardware and software world really annoys me and makes me think our future is shit the more I think about it.
Things could be so much better. Pretty much everything could be open and standardised, yet it isn’t.
Software can be made in a way that isn’t user-hostile, but that’s not the way of things. Hardware could be repairable and open, without OEMs having to navigate a minefield of IP and patents, much of which shouldn’t have been granted in the first place, or users having no ability to repair or upgrade their devices.
It’s all so tiresome.
I think Napoleon said something similar to “the army is commanded by me and the sergeants”?
Well, not true anymore today. All this connectivity and processing power, however seemingly inefficiently they are used, allow to centralize the world more than it could ever be. No need to consider what sergeants think.
(Which also means no Napoleons, cause much more average, grey, unskilled and generally unpleasant and uninteresting people are there now.)
It’s about power and it happened in the last 15 years.
I think it’s a political tendency, very intentional for those making decisions, not a “market failure” and other smartassery. It comes down to elites making laws. I feel they are more similar to Goering than to Hitler all over the world today.
This post may seem nuts, but our daily lives significantly depend on things more complex and centralized in supply chains and expertise than nukes and spaceships.
We don’t need desktop computers which can’t be fully made in, say, Italy, or at least in a few European countries taken together. Yes, this would mean kinda going back to late 90s at best in terms of computing power per PC, but we waste so much of it on useless things that our devices do less now than then.
We trade a lot of unseen security for comfort.
Granted, I’m a developer and my dev ide already uses a good 10+GB, I have probably hundreds of tabs and windows open over 6 desktops… But I got 64GB, and I’m considering upgrading to 128, and these clowns think 8 is okay today? My development laptop of like 10 years ago has 8GB
I’ve been okay with 16 for a while. I use ViM as my editor, and occasionally VSCode. I use a single desktop, but I generally have a half dozen or more tmux tabs for various parts of the project.
That said, I’ve been feeling a bit squeezed with 16GB. The main RAM consumers are:
- Firefox - I frequently have 100 tabs open, so it takes a few GBs RAM
- Docker - running most of our app (a dozen or so microservices) takes 3-4GB if I’m careful about turning stuff off that I don’t need, 5-6 if I’m not
- Teams and Slack - especially during calls, these use a lot
So I think 16GB should be the minimum, and 24GB should be average. I’m going to be adding another 16GB to my personal development machine (hobbies and whatnot), and my work laptop can’t be upgraded (MacBook), but I’ll be upgrading to an M3 or M4 soonish and will request more RAM.
8GB is probably fine if you’re just running a browser and that’s it. If you’re doing anything else, 16GB should be the minimum.
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Most people are similar to him.
I have 16GB and I have to run shit I dev on local k8s. I have to close teams and my browser to get enough ram sometimes.
Buy more memory, if you have the financial means to do so. If not then I’m sorry you’re in that situation
Of course they do.
Apple is acting like this article does not exist.
My X220 and T520 each have 16GB. The designed max was actually “only” 8GB, but it turns out 16 GB actually works. I replaced the RAM modules myself without asking Lenovo for permission. Those models came out in 2011.
My HP Omen 17" was designed for a maximum of 32GB ram. I’m currently running 64GB on it.
This was also true for Apple computers before they started soldering the ram in place. I remember going way over spec in my old G4 tower. Hell, I doubt the system would crash if you found larger ram chips and soldered them in.
I doubt the system would crash if you found larger ram chips and soldered them in.
You can’t even swap components with official ones from other upgraded models. Everything is tied down with verification codes and shit nowadays. So I doubt you could solder in new ram and get it to work.
Yeah lol my thinkcentre with a 6gen intel had only 8GB (I paid under 100€ for it) so I went shopping to double that on a second hand site, but the price for 4, 8 or the 16GB ddr4 ram stick (sodimm, there seems to be a flood of used ones) I bought was about the same, like 30€ shipping included, so now I got 24GB.
