I can guarantee you that most people buying the $999 laptop have 5 Chrome tabs open and don't store files on their computer. 8GB/256GB is fine.

That's a bold statement.

Videos, music, photos, all of these add up fast. I have encountered plenty of family and friends needing help when their storage is exhausted.

Then there is the ever increasong bloat of software, web apps, etc. that chew through RAM.

If this isn't a daily driver, sure. It is fine. But for those where this is their only computer, this is a lot of money for an 'entry level' model that can't do as much.

The year is 2024, most people don't store videos, music or photos as files on their computer.

Except when you log in with your Apple ID, it'll sync your photos by default, taking up as much space as the system determines.

I am still using a 2015 MacBook Air with 8GB / 256GB, and I use Excel/Safari/Chrome Remote Desktop/VLC/Photos/Handbrake/etc just fine.

And I bet I use my computer more strenuously than 90% of the population.

What are you talking about? Apple Music streaming, Netflix, Youtube. Nothing on the machine.

Those times are over when you swim in the mainstream.

You're making the argument to get them to buy iPads, not entry level laptops for roughly the same price (+-100usd)

And a lot of them do! But that's not feasible for everyone or every use case, for example I would never give a college student just an iPad.

256gb is 3 AAA games. luckily Apple solves this problem by not being able to run any games.

At least on my MBA, 50-60 GB is taken up by the system itself, so 2 games really.

I dunno about Chrome but a single YouTube tab in Safari can use over 1GB of RAM these days. It's absolutely insane to sell a computer in 2024 that's gonna struggle to open 10+ browser tabs.

https://imgur.com/a/VzCQ4zF

Most of those people could save 600 dollars and buy an used Thinkpad that works just as well for their uses

Then they could use a $200 Chromebook.

Worse battery life, such weak hardware (you're bringing up $200 models) that they're laggy and shitty even with a few Chrome tabs, bad trackpads, terrible accessibility options compared to Macs (I was very surprised to discover this latter issue when configuring my elderly father's Chromebook, given the market for Chromebooks is basically kids and old people)

$200 Chromebooks are the kind my various teacher friends complain about because they're so shit that they even drive elementary school kids crazy.

But they don't want to. This is what people who are spec chasers miss. They want to use a MacBook because it's a joy to use compared to a shitty $200 Chromebook

It's not crap, though. I am using the exact config with an M1 and it's really quite usable, even for development. Also I have hundreds of tabs open. You can even watch movies because the speakers are so good - opposed to any PC laptop I ever owned.

It might be usable but the cost difference of 8/256 and 16/512 is negligible. But Apple wants to price gouge you if you want the latter. Computing hardware was always about providing the maximum upfront to give headroom in the future.

I have found 8GB RAM to be completely unusable on Windows and Linux these days. Once you've got Chrome open with half a dozen tabs and any even slightly memory hungry program (VS Code or Android Studio etc.) you're out of luck. Actually I had to have my last work laptop replaced because 8GB wasn't enough for Chrome and a Teams video call! If I tried to screen share a browser tab of Jira everything would start paging.

I have zero recent experience with MacOS or the M1,2,3 ARM hardware but I doubt even the very fast RAM is going to make that much difference to the above.

I have been a minimum-16GB-of-RAM guy since 2012 or so, but I got a great deal last year on a base model M1 Air that I mostly just use for web/email while traveling, and as a thin client back to my Linux desktop with 64GB of RAM. I've found it surprisingly adequate, even as someone who is not so good about closing browser tabs.

I can certainly get it to start swapping easily enough, so I don't necessarily agree with all of the people I've seen claiming that these machines are revolutionary and 8GB is the new 16GB, but it does seem to manage better than I would have expected.

Apple's pricing on memory and disk upgrades really aggravates me, though, and was a significant factor in deciding to switch to Linux for my primary computer.

RAM usage even vs Intel Mac was completely different - I did push my M1 Air a while back and it complained about running out of memory but that was once in the past 1.5 years after I'd skipped rebooting for 4/5 weeks. On my Intel with 16GB this happened more often.

For my kids and parents, the M1 Air has been flawless (even for me - it's my travel Mac). But if you know you're a heavy user definitely get more RAM.

8GB of RAM is extremely usable on macOS - until last year I was using that for VSC, Podman, etc. and the only time I noticed it was running x86 Java containers in emulation. Beyond the much leaner base OS, they have hardware memory page compression which seems to make a huge difference. My corporate Dell with 16GB feels slower in every way even running the same apps (Teams, Edge, etc.).

> I have found 8GB RAM to be completely unusable on Windows and Linux these days. Once you've got Chrome open with half a dozen tabs and any even slightly memory hungry program (VS Code or Android Studio etc.) you're out of luck.

Honestly, even 16GB isn't enough if you keep a modest (say, O(100)) number of tabs open. I regularly find my MBP slowed down due to "memory pressure" (swapping) at that point, with closing/restarting the browser to be an instantaneous fix.

Which browser is that with? I wouldn't try that with Chrome, but I'd be kinda surprised if Safari wouldn't handle it.

I’m writing this from an x230 with Windows and 8GB of RAM. It’s a pretty old machine I’m using for FreeCAD, 3D printer slicers, and simple admin stuff, and it’s pretty usable?

I run an offline LLM on my M2 MBA with 16 GB RAM. It's fine (but I will buy more RAM on my next machine, in large part due to LLM developments).

256GB is completely acceptable? Really? That's less than phones these days!

Cloud storage is a thing. I don't run games on my hobby laptop. I also have external storage for sensitive docs (encrypted). I use like 50% of the storage right now.

People always respond with "cloud storage is a thing" as you have, but the point that people are trying to make is: Apple is hella overcharging for memory and storage.

And instead of everyone going "Apple, stop this" and creating change, they'd rather defend the $1T company by spouting "but the cloud".

Everyone going "Apple, stop this" won't do anything. Voting with your wallet might. Otherwise, you have freedom of choice to select a different platform/vendor.

I have tons of complaints about Apple, but this isn't one of them (the 256GB works for my family machines).

In what world is "keep buying Apple hardware but also pay for cloud storage" "voting with your wallet"

If you want the most well integrated cloud storage with these machines you'll be paying for cloud storage from Apple anyway, I'm sure Apple will be fine

my phone has 16gb ram and 512gb storage, if i'm paying 50% more than i spent on it i expect at least those specs on a current, or maybe last gen macbook, not half the storage and memory on a 2 generation old device

8 GB is barely enough for web browsing these days. What will it be like in a couple years? A MacBook will generally run fine for years, it is well worth future-proofing a bit with more memory, since it is not upgradable.

That's a Chrome problem more than a web browsing problem. Chrome is ridiculously heavy on RAM versus Safari on the same machine with the same tabs.