this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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I'm fine with this.
I mean, I have no interest in an 8GB machine, but it's also fair to say that there definitely are people who are fine with it, and who would like to save the money. Say you've got four kids and you're buying them all laptops -- I dunno if that's the thing parents do these days, or whether kids typically just get by on smartphones or what. And sometimes they get broken or whatnot, and you're paying for the other expenses associated with those kids. That money adds up.
Apple runs a walled garden, unless things have changed in recent years while I wasn't watching. They tried opening up to third-party hardware vendors back around 2000 with some third-party PowerPC vendors, found that too many users were buying that hardware instead of theirs, and killed off the clone vendors. That means that if you want to use MacOS, you have to buy Apple hardware. And so there's good reason to have a broad range of offerings from Apple, even some that are higher-end or lower-end than the typical user might want, because Apple is the only option that MacOS users have. If I want to run Linux on a machine with 2GB of memory, I can do it, and if I want to run Linux on a machine with 256GB GB of memory, I can do it. MacOS users need to have an offering from Apple to do that.
Plus, I assume that these are running some form of solid-state storage, which makes hitting virtual memory a lot less painful than was the case in the past.
Save money, buy an Apple computer. Choose one.
The thing is that Apple charges three kidneys per gigabyte over 8 GB.
If you've got four kids and you're buying them all laptops, I don't think buying them all Macs and "saving money" by getting cut-down machines with too little memory (or whatever other hobbling Apple may cook up now or later) is exactly the smart play. You would need to have a very compelling reason to absolutely have to run MacOS to the exclusion of everything else which if we're honest, most people don't.
A Lenovo IdeaPad Slim, just to pick an example out of a hat that contains many other options, costs half as much as the low spec 2024 Macbook Air the article is spotlighting while having double the RAM, double the SSD, and, you know, ports. For the cost of a 8GB Macbook Pro you could buy a Legion Slim with an i7 and an RTX4060 in it and have change left over, a machine which would blow that Mac out of the water.
There are a lot of things you can say about Macbooks, but being a good value for the money is consistently never one of them.
We both have 8GB Airs in our house, an M1 and an M2. They run just fine.
I agree. But we still have to listen to all the bitching.