Except I need to upgrade because I have no Apple Silicon Macs. They are all 6+ years old too. This was gonna be the year. And the slop hit me in the face instead.
Sounds very similar to what I and a few others were talking about earlier. The RAM shortage has altered everyone's cost to performance equation.
I’ve been through various shortages before. The crypto boom that ate up GPU supply until the market eventually adapted is the first example that comes to mind. I didn't know enough to mine or really get involved at the time. I was too busy trying to become a network engineer, and later I started learning Swift at the same time. But I did get to see what the economics looked like firsthand. Some people around me were spending $10K, $15K, even $20K+ putting together mining farms. I didn't go that far, but I did get to experiment with it.
For myself, when it comes to experimentation, I almost never buy the best thing immediately. I like starting with something that gives me enough capability to develop some firsthand experience and figure out what I actually need. Then, when I have the foundation and the budget, I can make a much better purchase.
For experimentation, I usually try to keep myself around $2,000 max. I'm not necessarily buying today's technology for that purpose. I'm more interested in something that is 2 or 3 years old, because if the experiment doesn't work out, I haven't lost nearly as much.
The memory situation has completely changed that calculation for me. I'm now looking at hardware that is considerably older than I normally would for experimentation. I ended up with an MBP 16" M1 Max 32GB/1TB and an M4 Mac mini 24GB/256GB, which fit right in my $2k budget. The 256GB storage on the M4 I'll upgrade with additional storage, I bought a 1TB SSD that I plan on installing when Apple ships it within the 7-8 weeks I have to wait. I got the M1 Max because I travel a lot, and the M4 mini is going to be my home machine.
What's wild to me is how competitive older Apple Silicon hardware can still be against what you can realistically afford today once you put enough memory into the equation.
A year ago, two years ago, or even four years ago, the budget that gets you into 24GB, 32GB, or higher-memory configurations could put you into considerably newer hardware. Now, if memory capacity is important to your workload, you can end up making a pretty uncomfortable choice: buy newer hardware with 16GB, or spend substantially more to get the memory capacity you actually wanted.
And that matters because RAM isn't just a benchmark number. If your workload actually needs the capacity, running out of memory can mean more compression, swapping to storage, closing applications, reducing how much you can multitask, or simply accepting longer workloads.
Not everyone can just find another $500 or $1,000 because the newest configuration they need happens to cost that much more. Some people have a job starting, school starting, bills to pay, or simply a fixed technology budget that will not allow the time for simply another paycheck or two in order to afford something else.
So I think that's the part that's getting lost in the discussion. A memory shortage doesn't just affect people who want the absolute highest end machines. It changes what ordinary people can realistically afford at a given performance and memory level.
That's why I'm finding myself looking further back into Apple's lineup than I normally would. Not because I suddenly think old hardware is better, but because the price/performance calculation has changed enough that hardware that would normally be considered "old" can make a lot more sense when the alternative is paying a large premium for the memory capacity you actually need.
It's a pretty strange time in the hardware market.
