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Apple Doubles the Price of RAM Upgrade on Entry-Level 13-Inch MacBook Pro
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You've never heard of hackintosh??? Yep, it's not perfect, but you can pick different laptops according to the specific things that won't work with hackintosh that don't bother you so much. I also have been on Macs for years, but simply can't see any laptop in the current lineup that I even want, especially at the price, so I'm starting to come to the conclusion that I will be jumping to hackintosh myself next. Extra bonus is you can install Mojave or older instead of Catalina if you like.
At a glance Dell XPS 15 is one I would look into more. Can buy the base model w 8GB RAM and 512GB SSD, and either i5 or i7, and upgrade with 3rd party parts straight away to 32GB/1TB for US$400 (and with a spare 512GB drive you can put in an enclosure), or 2T for another $200. Yep, it's nowhere as nice as a MBP16, but less than half the price, and upgradeable and repairable, and won't end up as landfill in 4 years.
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Best upgradeable laptop in 2025 — it's Framework for the win
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And that's your choice. Everyone has their individual needs and wants and obviously one brand can't meet all of them. I was more referring to people that feel the need to announce their departure like it's the airport.
Yep, as all these post-2015 machines run out of warranty, they are going to end on the scrapheap. People are going to learn that a second hand MB out of warranty is a worthless purchase, and the resale value of them is going to plummet. This will put a massive dent in the demand for new ones, as people realise the total cost of ownership of a new Mac is way too high. It's all going to come home to roost pretty soon I'd say. All these soldered in components are going to be the death of Apple laptops. I've already realised it, and am already planning to move to hackintosh. Now, of course, a lot of non-Apple laptops have the same soldered-in issue, so it will be a case of researching which, if any, are built correctly.
I guess you could say the Apple's a little bit more sour today than yesterday
I'm sorry, but unless you can show me a factual analysis to the contrary, the reliability of soldered parts is no greater than modular parts. Furthermore, the only time there are problems with connections is when the connector itself is of poor design. I have seen enough of them. Better designed boards do not have these problems.
Accidentally breaking things when upgrading really doesn't happen. Only tech savvy people are going to open the computer to upgrade it and a RAM or SSD slot can't be broken without breaking the mother board itself.
In short, those are excuses, not factual reasons. The only "reason" you provided is to make the computer thinner; I would argue it is to prevent people from upgrading the computer in order to force more frequent purchases. Soldered parts mean repairs are more expensive and generate more e-waste. The only people for whom soldered components makes life easier is for techs at repair center,s who are nothing more than parts changers, unless your name is Louis Rossman.
Apple TV HD: extremely ancient A8 chip
iPad 10.2": ancient A10 chip
iPad Air: only 3GB RAM on a mid-tier iPad
MacBook Air: bad thermals
MacBook Pro $1299: ancient 8th gen chip + slow LPDDR3 2133MHz RAM
iMac: 5400rpm hard drive
Hard times to be an Apple fan, hope this changes until next year.
All this $100/$200 RAM upgrade issue IMO is just a small thing compared to all that.
I wanted very much to buy the MBA, but:
iPad 10.2": ancient A10 chip
iPad Air: only 3GB RAM on a mid-tier iPad
MacBook Air: bad thermals
MacBook Pro $1299: ancient 8th gen chip + slow LPDDR3 2133MHz RAM
iMac: 5400rpm hard drive
Hard times to be an Apple fan, hope this changes until next year.
All this $100/$200 RAM upgrade issue IMO is just a small thing compared to all that.
I wanted very much to buy the MBA, but:
hmm, I never said anything about value proposition, straw man.
But anyway, feel free to link to one of these comparable PC laptops, I’m interested.
LPDDR RAMs aren't upgradable since the beginning. They always soldered to the motherboard. DDR RAM for laptops arent LPDDR RAM.
Do you even know how LPDDR RAM looks like?
I feel for anyone who buys any second hand post-2015 Apple laptop with expired warranty. They are all lemons - one thing breaks and it will be too expensive to repair, and become landfill.
19 years of using Macs here and they're definitely making me reconsider buying another, next time I'm ready to upgrade one. I was able to get a new Macbook Pro 13" issued by my new employer, simply because I did really well on part of a long interview where they asked a number of Mac specific tech questions. But apparently the new corporate policy is NOT to issue Macs just because an employee requests one anymore. They always used to let everyone pick their preference, but the cost for a new Mac has just gotten too high (essentially double what they pay for a suitable Windows laptop for a given new hire).
I'm still happy with a base model iMac Pro I purchased shortly after they were released, when Micro Center was doing that $1,000 off sale on them for a brief period of time. At that price, it was a good buy and I even got AppleCare on it for the same price they charged for any normal iMac.
But yeah -- our household is pretty firmly embedded in the Mac environment. Using a number of HomeKit compatible things around here, and we have two vehicles with CarPlay compatible stereos in them, plus a couple of Apple TV's, and Apple watches. Got used to having a family calendar synced via iCloud too. But at some point, you really have to start questioning how much financial sense it makes to keep paying a premium, if you can get by fine another way....
I set up my own NextCloud server on a FreeNAS server in the cellar, and that would be ideal as a cross platform compatible way to sync calendars and tasks with all of our devices as well as providing "cloud" type drive storage. I've already got my iPhone configured to save photos to it automatically, since they have a NextCloud iOS app that handles it. With the need for iCloud removed? It really does make it easier to move away from the Mac ecosystem.
I'm still happy with a base model iMac Pro I purchased shortly after they were released, when Micro Center was doing that $1,000 off sale on them for a brief period of time. At that price, it was a good buy and I even got AppleCare on it for the same price they charged for any normal iMac.
But yeah -- our household is pretty firmly embedded in the Mac environment. Using a number of HomeKit compatible things around here, and we have two vehicles with CarPlay compatible stereos in them, plus a couple of Apple TV's, and Apple watches. Got used to having a family calendar synced via iCloud too. But at some point, you really have to start questioning how much financial sense it makes to keep paying a premium, if you can get by fine another way....
I set up my own NextCloud server on a FreeNAS server in the cellar, and that would be ideal as a cross platform compatible way to sync calendars and tasks with all of our devices as well as providing "cloud" type drive storage. I've already got my iPhone configured to save photos to it automatically, since they have a NextCloud iOS app that handles it. With the need for iCloud removed? It really does make it easier to move away from the Mac ecosystem.
The fact that you have to think about it this way should highlight how ridiculous their policies on some stuff is.
New MacBook Pro 13 " only $999 !!!
With screen: $2000 !! With RAM $2500 !! With battery 3000 $ !! With ports ... sorry, there are no ports
With screen: $2000 !! With RAM $2500 !! With battery 3000 $ !! With ports ... sorry, there are no ports
Its stupid since there is nothing on the MacOS platform that makes it any less capable than Windows, in fact MacOS is more pleasant to use. The only advantage I see Windows having is that Windows tend to support relic software, literally you can run apps from 10-15 years ago on Windows.
I think personally for me the $100 increase is more like a wtf move. With $100 more it isn't going ot affect me all that much, but it's just doesn't feel right that Apple is doing this. I get that they are a company and they can set the price to whatever they want as long as they can get away with it. But it just puts a very bad taste in my mouth.
With that said, this won't affect most people. Most people don't care enough to read this forum. Macbook air i3/i5 will last them at least 3-5 years. I'll p
With that said, this won't affect most people. Most people don't care enough to read this forum. Macbook air i3/i5 will last them at least 3-5 years. I'll p
How is the nextcloud IOS app? I noticed some photo backup apps doesn’t work well when it has to deal with iPhones photo optimization. I think partly because the photos are no physically on the phone and some apps gets very confused by that. How do you have your phone setup? Do you delete photos from your phone from time to time?
I'm not sure what COVID-19 has to do with people needing laptop. Those who have been employed pre-Covid and have to work from home already have laptops, either self-owned or company-provided. And it's not like Apple is the only company selling laptops.
This price-increase imo is simply to reduce demand for BTO as that is costly at the moment. Apple, just like majority of other companies, prefer consumers to but their standard configurations that are already ready to-ship.
Meanwhile I put DDR43200 32GB of ram in my PC for 115 bucks
Same here AMD 32Core workstation, 64GB, ATI 5700xt because of the OSS drivers for Linux and macOS, 3x M2 NVMe 1TB SSD - First I thought this would be nice to run macOS but with Catalina this makes no sense so now it runs Linux and Win10.
My 2018 MBP with a Core i9 is slower than the comparable i7 caused by thermal throttling, much like the new MBA. Still would like to return many tasks to macOS but I need a flexible and fast computer, capable of standards like OpenGL / Vulkan, running 32 bit programs, many cores/gpu support for ai and my ws gives me all of this for a price lower than what I payed for this MBP ...