You can select the 16 GB option box to drop the price a couple of hundred. But it also drops some of the other options.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
16 GB of RAM for a Pro device is not okay
- Thread starter MrWayne
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
You can select the 16 GB option box to drop the price a couple of hundred. But it also drops some of the other options.
$1,800 for a Snapdragon. You must really want the form-factor to buy that one.
I see Snapdragons getting discounted for the other brands. Lunar Lake and Strix Point have people asking why go with a Snapdragon. There were a ton of inflencers pushing Snapdragon laptops in the spring talking about how great they were but a lot of people don't want to have to deal with compatibility problems. Maybe the X2 is a lot better but I don't see a good reason to buy them unless you're sure your software runs well on ARM and you don't need good GPU.
You could buy a 2014 Mac mini with roughly the same specs ( 16 gigs Ram etc..), add in a 2Tb NvME, and have spent the same amount (or less) as for the Raspberry Pi. Perfect as a small home server ? media centre etc.
If you stop being hung up on "must be the latest, must be the highest spec, must be shiny. must make me feel important", there are loads of ways to have effective functional hardware without overspending with Apple.
All I have to say is when the non-Pro MacBooks get the base model RAM that the pros have, the pro should upgrade the base model. They should never be at the same base model RAM configuration.
You could swam DIMMs back then, so it was far less of a concern. The nature of Apple only offering computers with soldered in RAM brought their price gouging front and center.
Intel Lunar Lake chips have RAM on the SoC so it's not only Apple. Arrow Lake systems use DIMMs but we could see more soldered or SoC RAM on Windows laptops too.
I think 16gb is a good baseline and as so many others have mentioned much better then 8gbs. The way the hardware all works together any M chip Mac is going to run amazingly well compared to someone coming from an Intel chip. What people really should be complaining about is the ability, or lack there of to upgrade your computer with a simple thing like RAM. Apple Makes the hardware, they could make it so this was possible.
Lunar Lake comes with LPDDR5X-8533 on the SoC. The standard speed for Arrow Lake is 6400 so it's possible that higher speeds are possible by putting the RAM close to the CPU and soldering it in. It also simplifies the build, configuration and decrease the space required as SODIMMs use up a lot more space than on SoC.
Overspending today to run a machine out to 2+ times the warranty period and into expected hardware failure time whilst enduring worse performance than an entry level machine by 3-4 years in, is not smart.
You're buying hardware when it is expensive and you don't need it to get less benefit when you do than just buying a better machine at that point for far less money and maintaining some decent warranty coverage.
You're holding onto the hardware until it is literally worthless, instead of flipping it while it is worth something.
Last edited:
Fact is, the vast majority of laptops are never ugpraded.
You know why?
Because by the time someone thinks about doing it, the CPU is out of date, the network connectivity is out of date, the peripheral connectivity is out of date, the storage is also needing to be replaced and at that point you're throwing hundreds of dollars at a machine that may just fail at any moment due to age.
So... yeah slots are kinda pointless for the vast majority of people.
Buy a balanced spec, if it no longer suits your needs after a few years, sell it to someone who can make use of that spec.
If it doesn't suit your needs from the jump.... spend more time figuring out what to purchase in the first place.
No screen
no keyboard
no trackpad
no battery
hilariously bad performance vs. what you're buying from Apple. seriously hilarious. Haven't used a pi5 yet but its not THAT much more powerful than a pi4, and a pi4 struggles to play 1080p youtube properly (I have pi3, pi4 and pi400 here).
Don't get me wrong, the pi is a great product, and as a cheap machine for messing around, it's perfect. But holding it up to what Apple sells as some pricing comparison is.... just silly.
Just because you can do that, doesn't mean you should.
Geekbench 6, Raspberry Pi 5 around 2,144
Geekbench 6 M4 Pro 20,405 (my on M4 Pro Mini).
I couldn't find any GPU benchmarks to be comparable, but I think we can assume the raspberry pi 5 gpu can be likened to a slug, and the M4 Pro to a cheetah - I think that's fair.
I'm a big fan of using the right tool for the job, the raspberry pi's main appeal is not for desktop computing, given its incredibly low power, low core count and lack of a case, cooling, components or buy a Mac who's main purpose is desktop computing?