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Any Mac that has a base price over $1,200 should have a 512gb SSD standard.

Whoever at Apple is working on the M2 updates for the iMac, take note of all of this. Because you currently have to be in $1,699 before you can get a desktop with Ethernet and 512gb of storage...

They sell a monitor stand for $999, don't imagine too much, they will just keep increasing price with fast speed.
 
Well look like Apple tries hard to cut every corner like not even let ipad Pro 2020 use Stage Manager or this case to indirectly decrease product quality/force you to upgrade earlier to raise earning instead of directly increase prices a lot.
 
I made it to page four, then gave up reading.

The market increase in Macs certainly has led to people fawning over benchmarks. Back when I joined the Apple ecosystem, noone actually cared about things like this. All everyone cared about was that things just... you know... worked.

People get way too worked up over spec sheets and numbers, and I only knew this from the Windows world until more recently, when it stated bleeding over into the mac user demographic...

I'm not defending Apple. All I'm saying is that I - again, as many times before - can't shake the feeling that people are desperately trying to find something to be upset about, whether or not has actual 'real life' impacts (as someone else pointed out as well), or not. Paired with your standard click-baity headline...

Sometimes I think y'all have too much time on your hands when you actually have the time to focus on and (over)think about such things. I'm happy to take some of that time. Because, you know, most pro users are too busy... working...on their macs...just fine... to even consider worrying about something like this.
 
They sell a monitor stand for $999, don't imagine too much, they will just keep increasing price with fast speed.
A lot of brands sell monitor stands at varying prices from around 20 quid to multiple thousands. What is your point?

I spent well over 500€ the other day on a suitcase for my camera gear - in the shop down the road they have the same size suitcases for 49€. Did I get ripped off or is it the price todays society deems acceptable to safely carry ten’s of thousands of quids worth of camera stuff?

Point is, Apple is not unique in pricing things the way it does, nor is it anything new from them in the first place. It says quite a lot more about the people commenting on such things than it does about the company deciding such things.
 
A lot of brands sell monitor stands at varying prices from around 20 quid to multiple thousands. What is your point?

I spent well over 500€ the other day on a suitcase for my camera gear - in the shop down the road they have the same size suitcases for 49€. Did I get ripped off or is it the price todays society deems acceptable to safely carry ten’s of thousands of quids worth of camera stuff?

Point is, Apple is not unique in pricing things the way it does, nor is it anything new from them in the first place. It says quite a lot more about the people commenting on such things than it does about the company deciding such things.

I don't know any computer monitor stand is sold over $999
 
I'm not defending Apple. All I'm saying is that I - again, as many times before - can't shake the feeling that people are desperately trying to find something to be upset about, whether or not has actual 'real life' impacts (as someone else pointed out as well), or not. Paired with your standard click-baity headline...
Normally I’d 110% agree with you. Like people complaining that about using Apple continuing to use the same 2016 design. Who cares, it is a tried and tested design that works.

The SSD situation is different though. It’s clearly a severe bottleneck for certain workloads that changes the performance of the computer and they should have at least disclosed it. Put it this way: if you were to buy the base model M2 Air for $1199 Apple makes it very clear that M2 has only 8 GPU cores vs. 10. Any reasonable person would be quick to determine they’re only going to get about 80% of the graphics performance if they select that model vs the upgraded one. Imagine if Apple didn’t bother to make that 8 vs. 10 core distinction clear in the marketing… If selecting 256gb of storage means any degradation in performance, the consumer similarly deserves to know it up front. Simple.
 
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So you cannot even find one
I don’t care either way about it. If I want something and I see value in it - I buy it. If I don’t then I just don’t worry about it.

I’m merely pointing out that nice stuff costs money. Apple is already a premium brand, it actually markets itself as one and has a reputation as being one, yet people insist on complaining about the prices of incidental items that they would never purchase in the first place - even though said items can be found at various prices, higher or lower, across the board.

Decent equipment for my studio costs ridiculous money, but is tax deductible and can be purchased on the business. I don’t have either Apples monitor or the stand (I use Benq and Eizo monitors), but I can assure you they’re nowhere near the most expensive in the market that the target audience is in.

It’s ok not to know that by the way! No one knows everything, and displaying that openly on a forum is your business.

A few comments hereaside, I’m certainly not bothering to research something to prove a point to you. You can just keep raging on and I’ll just live my life.
 
I don’t care either way about it. If I want something and I see value in it - I buy it. If I don’t then I just don’t worry about it.

I’m merely pointing out that nice stuff costs money. Apple is already a premium brand, it actually markets itself as one and has a reputation as being one, yet people insist on complaining about the prices of incidental items that they would never purchase in the first place - even though said items can be found at various prices, higher or lower, across the board.

Decent equipment for my studio costs ridiculous money, but is tax deductible and can be purchased on the business. I don’t have either Apples monitor or the stand (I use Benq and Eizo monitors), but I can assure you they’re nowhere near the most expensive in the market that the target audience is in.

It’s ok not to know that by the way! No one knows everything, and displaying that openly on a forum is your business.

A few comments hereaside, I’m certainly not bothering to research something to prove a point to you. You can just keep raging on and I’ll just live my life.

So you still cannot find one
 
I’m merely pointing out that nice stuff costs money.
Yes, but if you pay money for nice stuff you should actually get nice stuff.

I spent well over 500€ the other day on a suitcase for my camera gear - in the shop down the road they have the same size suitcases for 49€. Did I get ripped off or is it the price todays society deems acceptable to safely carry ten’s of thousands of quids worth of camera stuff?
...and was the 500€ suitcase nicer than the 49€ one? Because if you pay 10 times more than the "budget" option it's entirely reasonable to expect all-round better quality, performance, design, bundled extras etc. If the 50€ case had an uncomfortable plastic handle and a rubbish lock that could be opened in 2 seconds with a paper clip you could say "well, it was a cheap case". If your 500€ case had any of the same faults, you'd be perfectly entitled to be upset about it and to blog and post your dissatisfaction to warn others.

(Anyway - it's not really a relevant analogy, because you were perfectly free to buy a cheap generic flight case, spend 10 minutes picking out the little foam cubes to fit your equipment and done. With Mac, your choice is to switch to Windows or Linux, locate and quite possibly pay for alternative software, waste time converting files, and have your productivity nobbled for months while you adjust to a different system. That cost may vary from negligible to deal-breaker depending on your workflow.)

I have the base M1 MBA model with 256gb storage and it’s more than enough space for my needs.

...but the M1 Air used 2x128GB flash chips that could be accessed in parallel - not a single 256GB one, so the speed issue discussed here probably didn't apply...

However, to a certain extent, it's always been true that (ignoring the cost) a bigger SSD is better - sometimes bigger chips are a bit faster because of their internal organisation, but also filling a SSD to the brim is never a good idea - even more so than with HDD - and will cause slowdown and excessive wear (for anybody who doesn't know why, see e.g. wear levelling and garbage collection for how spare space on a SSD is a good thing)

In the past, I've built my own PCs, and the "how much RAM/Storage" judgement - whether it's DRAM, spinning rust or Flash - usually comes down to:
  • the largest capacity modules use "bleeding edge" highest-capacity chips and disproportionately expensive
  • the smallest capacity modules are only being made in small quantities for 'legacy' applications, and are also disproportionately expensive.
  • between that there's a 'goldilocks zone' where you pay a commodity price-per-GB that doesn't depend very much on what permutation of number and size of modules you use. (For hard drives/SSDs with onboard controllers there's obviously a fixed 'minimum price' element - but if we're talking M1/M2 Macs that's already built into the SoC)
...so the most economical choice is to pick something from that "goldilocks zone" - filling all the slots in cases where that has a performance impact. Installing less is false economy (...and as small chips fall further into disuse it will eventually cost more than a higher spec).

The fact that Apple have resorted to using a single 256GB chip in place of 2x128GB - whether it is down to cost or supply shortages - is a strong clue that the 128GB chips have passed out of the "goldilocks zone" and that, therefore, it is time to drop 256GB as the base model. Just like most other laptops in the mid-$1000 price range.

(...and let's not forget that we're talking about the 13" MacBook pro here, which sells for a premium over the M1 MBA, which is still the go-to Mac laptop for anybody with more modest needs).
 
Anyway there isn't a computer monitor stand which is more expensive than Apple $999

your prayers might have been heard.
If rumors are true there soon might be a significantly more expensive solution from Apple with their dual monitor stand
 
Except that the Dell XPS 13 has SSD speeds that is twice as fast as the M1 MBA.

The M1 MBA had slow SDD’s to begin with.
What matters in real life scenarios is not how fast the SSD is in sequential, but in random 4K r/w.

The XPS 13 Plus boasts PCIe Gen 4 speeds of roughly 6-7 GB/s r/w, but that's in sequential (just like the 2021 MacBook Pros). This performance metric only matters when transferring or reading/writing huge files. If you want to gauge the actual responsiveness of the SSD, you need to take a look at random 4K I/O.

This is part of the reason (aside from equal single-threaded performance) why the M1 and M1 Pro/Max/Ultra perform the same in everyday scenarios when opening apps/documents and browsing for example: their random 4K r/w speeds are virtually identical.

Due to this, we must not look at the sequential SSD performance of the M2 NAND to measure its real life performance, but its random speeds. Sequential speeds don't matter in real world scenarios unless you frequently transfer or access huge files on a daily basis.
 

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I appreciate the polarised nature of this one, and I'm not a fan of Max's style or content, but for me, the M2 should be an evolution of the M1 in every way (that is to say, slightly better, slightly faster, but never slower), and these results show that in some cases it's not. To me that is disappointing and it merits the anger expressed in this thread.

Personally I would think Apple will change the base M1/Pro/Airs to use one chip also and this will level things up, if they have not already done so with new machines being built now. It makes no sense otherwise to leave the base M2 as the odd one out.
 
Yes, but if you pay money for nice stuff you should actually get nice stuff.


...and was the 500€ suitcase nicer than the 49€ one? Because if you pay 10 times more than the "budget" option it's entirely reasonable to expect all-round better quality, performance, design, bundled extras etc. If the 50€ case had an uncomfortable plastic handle and a rubbish lock that could be opened in 2 seconds with a paper clip you could say "well, it was a cheap case". If your 500€ case had any of the same faults, you'd be perfectly entitled to be upset about it and to blog and post your dissatisfaction to warn others.

(Anyway - it's not really a relevant analogy, because you were perfectly free to buy a cheap generic flight case, spend 10 minutes picking out the little foam cubes to fit your equipment and done. With Mac, your choice is to switch to Windows or Linux, locate and quite possibly pay for alternative software, waste time converting files, and have your productivity nobbled for months while you adjust to a different system. That cost may vary from negligible to deal-breaker depending on your workflow.)
The op and I were actually speaking about Apples monitor stand - a little off topic tangent I know, but there you are.
 
Personally I would think Apple will change the base M1/Pro/Airs to use one chip also and this will level things up, if they have not already done so with new machines being built now. It makes no sense otherwise to leave the base M2 as the odd one out.
Yeah agreed. I think if Apple can, they may do it. But I don't think they will because there will be some law issues (or at least high risk of producing law issues) in some countries without telling the consumers that in the base m1 macs, which have been in the market for 2 years, they change the chips, because the SSD chip is defined as "key part" (sorry i don't know the exact English words in a professional way), They may get away with it if they can prove that one chip is better or at least equal to 2 chips, but that is another story. They can also argue that the one-chip has always been the original standard, and the 2-chip is actually a bonus, but after the two-year mass production, i don't think this will win.

So with the information that I've got, i think there are two possibilities: one is that Apple is getting really greedy, and they want to cut the cost and make even more profit; the other is that due to the global shortage, between the M2 macbook pro 13 and the new macbook air m2, Apple has to make a choice of which one to sacrifice, or even worse, they have to sacrifice both.
 
The op and I were actually speaking about Apples monitor stand - a little off topic tangent I know, but there you are.
...and is that $1000 stand "nicer"? How does it compare with the $400 one for the Studio Display (which admittedly is holding a lighter weight, but still...). I don't have one - how about you?

As you say, the stand is off-topic in a thread about an actual, real issue that makes the M2 13" MBP "less nice".

Personally, I was never seriously in the market for a Pro XDR, nor do I know anybody who might ask me for advice on that... OTOH, I've definitely held off buying a Mini or Air to try out M1 partly because upgrading them to (for me) sensible minimum RAM and storage capacities would have added 40-60% to the price. If they'd tried the same ruse with the Mac Studio (remember, mere months ago they were selling $3k 10-core i9 iMacs with a ludicrous 8GB base RAM) I probably wouldn't have bought that, either. (even so, theres no clear info about SSD configurations vs. speed - but at least the first upgrade step is $200 for 1TB, not $200 for 512GB!)
 
I don’t care either way about it. If I want something and I see value in it - I buy it. If I don’t then I just don’t worry about it.

I’m merely pointing out that nice stuff costs money. Apple is already a premium brand, it actually markets itself as one and has a reputation as being one, yet people insist on complaining about the prices of incidental items that they would never purchase in the first place - even though said items can be found at various prices, higher or lower, across the board.

Decent equipment for my studio costs ridiculous money, but is tax deductible and can be purchased on the business. I don’t have either Apples monitor or the stand (I use Benq and Eizo monitors), but I can assure you they’re nowhere near the most expensive in the market that the target audience is in.

It’s ok not to know that by the way! No one knows everything, and displaying that openly on a forum is your business.

A few comments hereaside, I’m certainly not bothering to research something to prove a point to you. You can just keep raging on and I’ll just live my life.

if your point is that Apple is a premium company and thus prices their products accordingly, then shouldn't they not skimp on the quality of their products by decreasing SSD speed between generations?

while I do agree that the real-life impact of 1x256 vs 2x128 SSD modules is likely to be minimal to most people (and this won't impact me personally since I wouldn't even buy a computer with only 256GB storage these days), Apple is in the wrong here & should not have decreased performance for the M2 MBP vs the older M1 version from 2020.

unfortunately this doesn't bode well for the M2 MBA since it's unlikely they'll spec those computers to perform better than the M2 MBP, so it'll probably have the same 1x256 SSD configuration in the basic configuration as well... :(
 
A lot of brands sell monitor stands at varying prices from around 20 quid to multiple thousands. What is your point?

what are some of these monitor stands that "a lot of brands" are selling for multiple thousands? I'm admitting I don't know of any (and couldn't find any with a quick google search; was only able to find some multi-monitor mounts for a few hundred, but nothing even close to a thousand $$$), so I'm asking since I'm genuinely curious... 🤷‍♂️
 
if your point is that Apple is a premium company and thus prices their products accordingly, then shouldn't they not skimp on the quality of their products by decreasing SSD speed between generations?

while I do agree that the real-life impact of 1x256 vs 2x128 SSD modules is likely to be minimal to most people (and this won't impact me personally since I wouldn't even buy a computer with only 256GB storage these days), Apple is in the wrong here & should not have decreased performance for the M2 MBP vs the older M1 version from 2020.

unfortunately this doesn't bode well for the M2 MBA since it's unlikely they'll spec those computers to perform better than the M2 MBP, so it'll probably have the same 1x256 SSD configuration in the basic configuration as well... :(
I never said anything about agreeing or disagreeing with Apple, just that it’s a premium brand priced as such - and that that is no surprise to anyone. As I said, we went off topic a bit.

On topic - Whilst I don’t agree with the ssd situation, I also don’t think the comparisons made in the max tech video in particular are that valid as anyone doing stuff where a few seconds of export time shaved off really matters, is not using these machines, and if they are, certainly not the base model. And if by chance they are using a base model, then they know they made sacrifices when they researched this decision.
what are some of these monitor stands that "a lot of brands" are selling for multiple thousands? I'm admitting I don't know of any (and couldn't find any with a quick google search; was only able to find some multi-monitor mounts for a few hundred, but nothing even close to a thousand $$$), so I'm asking since I'm genuinely curious... 🤷‍♂️
Actually, I said a lot of brands sell at varying price points, from 20 quid to multiple thousands, not that a lot of brands sell monitor stands for multiple thousands.
 
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