Considering their industry-leader status, it's about 5-7 years too late.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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I dunno if I'd even consider them an industry leader, unless you break down their ubiquity by industry category (in which they lead graphic design and maybe video editing, iirc). They lead phone sales in the US by a lot, but their overall desktop share is still relatively small (<10%), and their global footprint is buoyed only by iOS (which is still below Windows and Android).
I would say they're an innovator, and they push certain companies to innovate, but they don't really lead by that many metrics.
I meant leading as in "if Apple does something, others will too". That has been true for quite a long time now.
And by that definition, I agree
Finally the RAM on that thousand dollar machine is on par with my decade old T420!
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The localllama people are feeling quite mixed about this, as they're still charging through the nose for more RAM. Like, orders of magnitude more than the bigger ICs actually cost.
It's kinda poetic. Apple wants to go all in on self-hosted AI now, yet their incredible RAM stinginess over the years is derailing that.
I do have a 64gb m1 MacBook Pro and man that thing screams at doing LLM AI. I use it to serve models locally throughout my house, while it otherwise still works as a fantastic computer (usually using about half the ram for llm usage). I still prefer a 4080 for image generation though.
insultingly tiny, unupgradeable storage aside, that's surprisingly competitive with most modern Windows laptops
It's not ideal, but you're getting probably the best hardware in the market in return. The M series still dominates Windows CPUs, and the build quality on most $1000 laptops leaves a lot to be desired.
build quality on most $1000 laptops
You're not kidding.
I have a couple of laptops from various vendors, and they're all built like shit.
ASUS is especially eyerolly: the case is literally crumbling into pieces. Like seriously? You couldn't have picked a material that's not literally going to disintegrate in two years on a $1200 laptop?
Yeah, a lot of manufacturers are just bad. I knew people who had Dell and MSI laptops and those things feel like toys. Cheap plastic and very wobbly hinges. The only manufacturer I genuinely trust is Lenovo. My Legion is a bit thick but I can at least rest easy that it's built well.
Lenovo is, outside of their really cheap consumer options - like, the $500-and-under options - are pretty solid.
But yeah build quality is one reason when I roll my eyes at the 'haha stupid buying apple! apple tax! lol ripped off!' crowd: I mean maybe, but as soon as you pick up a Macbook whatever it's immediately obvious that you're getting something for what you're paying, and not some bendy flexy piece of plastic crap that will maybe physically survive the warranty period, but not much more.
I saw someone’s Samsung laptop last year and the screen was wobbling all over the fucking place. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I commented on it, and the owner just gave me a blank look.
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Just in time for 32gb to become the necessary standard, so they can still sell you egregiously overpriced ram upgrades.
I can’t imagine that being the case for most users. I’m absolutely a power user and I keep being surprised at how consistently high the performance is of my base model M1 Air w/16GB even when compared to another Mac workstation of mine with 64GB.
I can run two VMs, a ton of live loading development tooling, several JVM programs and so much more on that little Air and it won’t even sweat.
I’m not an Apple apologist - lots of poor decisions these days and software quality has taken a real hit. While 16GB means everyone’s getting a machine that should last much longer, I can’t see a normal user needing more any time soon, especially when Apple is optimizing their local machine learning models for their 8GB iOS platforms first and foremost.
I think the next thing people should complain about is the abysmal 256 GB of storage. That’s barely enough to fit the OS plus updates at this point. Should be at least 512 GB, given how basically free NVMe storage is these days.
my windows gaming laptop had a 256gb nvme drive in it. I didnt find it to obtrussive outside of the inability to willy nilly install things from steam. I did eventually upgrade to a 512gb samsung nvme, but almost entirely cause i found a sale that was too good to let pass.
I dont know how much space iOS takes up, though.
The M2 macbook air now starts at $1000 for 16GB RAM and 256GB storage. Limited storage aside, that's surprisingly competitive with most modern Windows laptops.
What do you mean limited storage aside?
If we disregard the fact that it's terrible value for money, it's a good deal. No laptop sold in 2025 and costing over a grand, should have anything less than a terabyte.
But it has a apple logo and it browses facebook just fine.
“640k is enough for anyone.”
Completely laughable. Literally had 16 GB of DDR3-1600 for my 2600K from 2011 that I handed down to a kid nephew for their first PC to tinker with. Hell, my local NAS has more than that...
We use windows PCs at work as software engineers now, but when I was training I used a MacBook Pro M1 with 16GB of RAM and that thing was incredibly performant.
I know it in vogue to shit in Apple, but they build the hardware and the software and they’re incredibly efficient at what they do and I don’t think I ever saw the beachball loading icon thing.
Now the prices they charge to upgrade the RAM is something I can get behind shitting on.
I used Windows, Mac and Linux in the past year.
It's not Mac that's fast, it's Windows that sucks hard.
Same.
- Mac - Fast, user friendly, and UNIX based.
- Windows - Fast (I have a beast), bloated, stupid command prompt (“Add-Migration”, capital letters really.), wants to spy on me.
- Linux - Fast, a lot of work to get everything working as you would on Windows or Mac and I’m past those days, I just want to turn the thing on and play Factorio or Minecraft, not figure out if my 4080 will run on it etc.
it’s almost like people make choices to suit their needs and there isn’t a single solution for everybody.
I wonder what the industry standard is for developers? Genuinely. I’ve heard it’s Max, but my company is all in on Microsoft, not really heard of companies developing on Linux. Which isn’t to say Linux doesn’t have its place, but I’m aware this place is insanely biased towards Linux.
Every place I've been at had developers using windows machines and then ssh into a linux environment
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I just want to turn the thing on and play Factorio or Minecraft, not figure out if my 4080 will run on it etc.
Funny that you chose two games that run natively on Linux.
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I wonder what the industry standard is for developers?
The Stack Overflow developer survey (which has it's bias towards people who use Stack Overflow)... says 47% use Windows, 32% use Mac, and uh, Linux is split up by distro so it's hard to make sense of the numbers but Ubuntu alone is at 27%. (each developer can use multiple platforms so they don't add up to 100%)
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The chip and OS won't do shit when your ram is saturated by electron apps taking 800MB each. Maybe MacOS behaves better under very high memory pressure than windows does, but it doesn't mean it's okay to rip off consumers. That whole 8GB on mac = 16GB on windows has been bullshit all along, and is mostly based on people looking at the task manager and seeing high ram usage on windows (which is a good thing)
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You can use Linux with RAM compression to have the same kind of economy that MacOS does.
Just nobody bothers.
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Fucking PHONES had more RAM. It was so fucking stupid. And despite their arguments, it was proven time and time again 8GB was not enough.
Perfect, just when I've decided 16GB is the bare minimum these days too. My day to day I max out 16 on my laptops without even trying. 32 is my new minimum.
Apple finally caught up with 2018 technology
And here I thought that 8GB on Mac was at least as good as 16GB on plebian PCs.
watch how (corporate) operating systems will now be heavier accordingly.
Yes it’s described as being for “Apple intelligence” which I’m sure won’t be bloated nor hard to disable at all.. sigh
It’s literally a toggle in the settings under apple intelligence
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