I can't disagree with you. Software support can't last forever (and Apple has generally had a great reputation on the iPhone and the iPad lineups for offering generous support cycles). But on the Mac side of things, 5 years seems a bit too short. 7 years for full support would make much more sense IMO.
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Deals: Apple's 15-Inch MacBook Air Hits New Record Low Prices at $200 Off, Available From $1,099
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And that is when one should individually decide if they are willing to overpay for Apple.
I do not game anymore, but have had gaming Lenovo for Productivity. I got it for $1100 and it had 17.3 screen with all the bells and whistles like 16GB/1TB/8core/RTX2060. It is much better value than base Apples if you don't care enough about Macs/OS/battery time/portability.
I did the same thing when I bought my Thinkpad. Was able to put as much RAM and storage as I want to into it, and can upgrade it as I please.
I did eventually buy an M2 Pro 16GB/1TB because of frustrations with dealing with external storage on Logic Pro, and will likely stick with this machine for a while. I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon. If I need 32GB, it's going into my Thinkpad.
It’s the same price at Best Buy as well.
This must mean these aren’t selling well, just as I suspected when they started selling them at $1199.99 last month.
Apple needs to start bumping up RAM and SSD sizes on base models all around.
Less folks are willing to pay for 8GB/256GB configs for devices that start at $1000+ these days.
This must mean these aren’t selling well, just as I suspected when they started selling them at $1199.99 last month.
Apple needs to start bumping up RAM and SSD sizes on base models all around.
Less folks are willing to pay for 8GB/256GB configs for devices that start at $1000+ these days.
I agree that price is a problem and the person buying it is also paying for the Apple brand. If these 15" MBA's were priced at $899 for the base model, then price wouldn't be a problem. I recently purchased a 16" Dell Inspiron with 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD which can be upgraded for $459. The display 1920x1200 has 400 nits.
It's not a Macbook but the Dell laptop is priced right.
I just recently had this argument with some friends as well. 8GB may be fine for casual use, but if you do anything requiring a lot of memory (including all those people who like to keep dozens of browser tabs open at once), you're going to start swapping.
I've heard many Apple enthusiasts say that that's OK, because the SSD is so fast that there's not much penalty for all the swapping. To which I strongly disagree, because it can (don't know for sure yet) lead to premature SSD failure. Which, on a machine where storage is not replaceable, will necessitate a new computer or an expensive motherboard swap.
FWIW, I'm still using a 2011 11" MBA with 4GB RAM and 128GB storage. It works fine for me because my usage is strictly casual - Firefox web browsing, MS Office and not a whole lot of anything else. But that's because it's a secondary computer that I primarily use when traveling or if I don't want to be in my home office where my other Mac (a 2018 mini) lives.
The mini has 16GB of RAM, and I'm probably going to max it out to 64GB sometime soon. Partly because I can (and SO-DIMMs aren't very expensive), and partly because I plan on hosting VMs (for Linux, older macOS releases, etc.) on it and I will probably want to assign 6-8GB of RAM to each one of them.
It shouldn't be surprising. If you have a product that sells more than you can produce, then you raise the price to take advantage. You provide discounts when you have stock you're trying to get rid of - either because it's not selling well or because you're trying to clear inventory in preparation for a new model coming soon.
Yikes must nor be selling well. Has me wondering perhaps that I should keep my 14 m2 pro and return the 15 air. Decisions
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Yep. 8gb is fine for a lot of stuff now. But it is precisely those casual users that don't upgrade their computers every three to five years. I know lots of people who buy Macs with a 10-year lifespan expectation. And they have those expectations because that is what they got on their last Mac. They are going to be very disappointed if they are buying a Mac in 2023 with 8gb of RAM if they think it will be useable in 10 years.
If you want to buy and hold for long - M3 coming at the latest mid next year should be a great option. You will buy it and enjoy the latest status for far more than you would do with M2 and no FOMO.
I am holding out to do the same. But if you need 15 inch now then nothing is wrong having M2 that will be updated soon - it will not become obsolete, you can just swing better machine at the same price when M3 gets to us.
A lot of it isn't so much because of fast SSD speeds (even the fastest SSDs in the world are orders of magnitude slower than RAM due to access latency, unless you count Intel Optane or something of that sort). The reason that some amount of swap usage generally isn't a problem for casual workloads is because of the way that virtual memory works. It's not swapping out actively used data, but rather getting inactively used data out of the way.
A couple gigs of swap usage is unlikely to produce any noticeable slowdowns for casual workloads. With that kind of swap usage, very little of that data will be frequently accessed. It doesn't become especially noticeable from a performance standpoint until the system is no longer able to free up enough RAM for its actively used data, which then forces it to send much more frequently accessed pages to swap (a situation that will quickly throw memory pressure into the red, even on the fastest SSDs).
You can get an idea of how much data is actually being paged in and out with something like iStats menus, which gives very neat graphs of this sort of thing. Often, the system may even be using several gigs of swap, but not necessarily be paging in very much data.
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My friend is rocking 4gb Win machine from 2008. It served him well back then and it serves the same now.
8GB of Ram should be useable just like the day you bought it. If you like how it performs today, then it is going to perform the same way going forward if you stay on the MacOS shipped. The fact that banking, YouTube will stop working without software update is a little bit another side of the story, which one needs to account for when wanting the 10 year span.
In terms of web browsing, there is actually a pretty strong incentive for browsers to try to remain as optimized as possible. Chromebooks are still being sold with 4GB of RAM, and plenty of cheap Cortex-A53 phones are being made worldwide and devices with these kinds of hardware are being sold in the billions. The web has absolutely become much more bloated and harder to run on older hardware than it used to be, but it has to at least remain functional on these kinds of devices for the foreseeable future (otherwise, websites would make themselves much less accessible to much of the world).
The nice thing about browsers is that even though they are fairly RAM intensive these days, it's fairly easy for them to withstand some of their data simply being compressed or paged out if the user isn't actively on any given tab. The actual active working set of data is usually fairly small at any given time, so they still run reasonably well on RAM constrained systems.
a lot of this is also likely just Amazon effect.. deeply discounting IMO
Anyone who thinks they are getting an M3 MBA before next summer is delusional. For the majority of consumers in the Air market the M2 (even M1) is already overkill for the casual use they are intended for.
I'd say we're going to see the first M3 MB's at best first quarter '24, with perhaps an M3 iPad / iMac / Mini announcement in October.
Personally I wish Apple would take take a breath and hold off with M3 release until the Ultra / Extremes are ready for primetime and update processors in the Pro machines first, followed by the Air a few months later.
I'd say we're going to see the first M3 MB's at best first quarter '24, with perhaps an M3 iPad / iMac / Mini announcement in October.
Personally I wish Apple would take take a breath and hold off with M3 release until the Ultra / Extremes are ready for primetime and update processors in the Pro machines first, followed by the Air a few months later.
Yeah I really think this is what's going on. I was worried when I saw the headline, since my 16GB MBA 15 arrives at the Apple store in 2 days, but then I saw that there are zero deals for the 16GB model, which I consider the minimum. There are deals on models with upgraded hard drive, but not memory. So the 16GB models are probably selling well.
I have a desktop PC with 32GB. RAM is not expensive. Apple could set the minimum at 16GB and still do fine.
You can find 32GB of DDR4 desktop RAM all the time under $50. Apple is charging 4x that ($200) for 1/4 the memory (8GB).
That's a 1600% markup.
It's one thing to price gouge for niche / professional uses, if they started at 16GB RAM, but their base specs are really lame. Non-Macrumors readers just buy something and expect "It Just Works."
If you run out of storage and the system grinds to a halt 2 OS upgrades from now because it has a tiny SSD and 8GB of RAM, people will not be happy and just conclude "Macs are not good anymore." But when you have a bean counter instead of a dreamer as CEO...
What are the recommendations for OSX? 8 GB of RAM is fine for every day users, and some "power-ish" users? Who should spring for 16 GB? Those who want more "future proofing", being able to run bigger/more things at once, and heavier video gamers?
Another side of the story is that you can always underbuy to upgrade earlier. Think of a ton of people who got screwed with their 4K-6K 2019 Intel MBP 16 just to see M1 Air crushing theirs for 75% cheaper.
It will - just give it some time. Usually it is 8-12 month after release during the summer when stars are aligned for EDU pricing(-$100) + gift card (-$150).
And that’s the conclusion I came to when I purchased an M2 base model mini. My M2 mini with 8/256GB is twice as fast as my 2018 i5 Mini with 32GB of RAM. The M2 mini boots in half the time vs the 2018 mini. For my needs, I have not found 8/256GB to be a problem.
Charging $100 for a MacOS upgrade after that 7 year point, makes even more sense IMO. (In case you dont know, there are plenty of Macs from 2008 (!) running Ventura right now, and they run great)
I'd be okay with this if it meant extending support cycles. Apple would likely never do this, but I think it would beat just cutting support outright.
They used to charge for system updates, until 2012...ish (?) I forget exactly when that stopped.
I thought this was normal, and thought it was weird when system updates became free.
ETA: Looks like it was October 2013 when system updates became free. It was $129 before that.
I mean, I guess I'm glad they're not charging for updates in the sense that I don't have to pay every year for them. I probably would update much less frequently if they did. But if it were for extended support, it would make sense. I think a lot of people would prefer that over having to use OpenCore to get it working.