Viztiz
Discoverer
They are probably going to raise the price for the M2 MBA and sell the MBA M1 for the same price
Apple announces new M2 processors
- Thread starter gourav
- Start date
Viztiz
Discoverer
You can't upgrade it. It's fixed to the motherboard
Psycho_McCrazy
Forerunner
It is called "Planned Obsolescence"
That is true the way it all looks but having made such expensive device and expecting people to buy it without giving them a chance to do simple and easy upgrade . It will only make it more worthy and lot of people would have thought more about going for it because in terms of technology and efficiency this stuff is quite futureproof .
The memory is soldered down and is a part of the CPU die, there's no separate memory module. And forget RAM, the Mac Studio has two M.2 ports and still doesn't allow storage expansion. They've built the storage controller onto the CPU and hence standard SSDs don't work.
As to why, simply because then you'll be forced to keep buying everything from Apple. You can't buy a computer from Apple then give the revenue for storage modules to WD. This way they can also ridiculously overprice components like ₹20k for 8 GB RAM or ₹40k for 1 TB SSD, which would otherwise cost 3k and 7k respectively.
I suppose you have not seen the Apple cleaning cloth or the water bottle yet.
Jokes aside it allows Apple to lock you in.
I think the better question you need to ask is what is the intended usage going to be for, say the next 5 years and then find out if you really really need more RAM or more Disk space. If yes, buy the higher version now and resist the urge to upgrade for the next 5 years.
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That's my point. It is okay you want 20k ... take 20k for 8gb more but atleast allow expansion in future. It is very possible people might not have entire funds to get upgraded version and still be needing the device for efficient workflow.
Just denying them simple future upgrades and then talking about reducing waste by removing chargers... ...I know that's apple but there has to be some limit to this level of exploiting consumers need .
I have seen them. Lol ..
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Apple knows how much it can milk its market. They usually stay within the limits which will force people to switch.
And now, the Apple Silicon, they have a real tangible advantage over the competition. So it's actually become easier for them. I'm using the Mac Mini and it's simply ridiculously fast. And the best part is that while it is crazy fast, it barely consumes 30w of power. No other PC or laptop can match both these at present. So they're milking this to the fullest.
All the talks about reducing waste are just fluff. They supported right to repair and then came out with devices which have zero repairability. Look at they Studio display. You can get it with fixed stand or vesa stand, but once you've bought it, you can no longer replace it later. And obviously, the VESA compatible stand costs $100 or 200 more.
The reason I still like their current gen devices are the power efficiency, which is really good for the planet, and durability. Most Apple devices last longer than competing products.
If AMD comes out with a reasonably powered APU which can replicate M1's performance at 45w TDP, I'll immediately ditch the Mac Mini even if AMD is more expensive initially. Because I know it will also come with M.2 slot and SODIMM slot.
I know with M1 and now M2 .. I don't see competitors even close to them.
What was Intel and Amd doing all these years. With so much experience in this field for them still God knows how did Apple manage to beat them in their own field . It seems Wakanda se technology laya...
Precisely because Apple controls the entire ecosystem.
- AMD/Intel can't do anything about slower memory because they have to use DIMM
- AMD/Intel can't switch to ARM because 1. They can't just let go of x86 and 2. Windows - they can't just force an OS migration to ARM which is entrenched in the industry
- They can't build a unified memory architecture because, again, they have to use DIMM (although, AMD has something called smart memory access which is a step towards this, I guess, not entirely sure)
Memory bandwidth will probably become less of a concern as DDR5 matures as a technology.
But even after all this, nothing can help the fact that ARM architecture is simply more efficient than x86. So we'll have I wait and watch on that front.
To be sure, the fact that Apple's products are not upgradable is a part of their performance/efficiency. You can't have that kind of efficiency unless you use an SoC instead of the modular architecture of PCs. And SoCs can't be made upgradable.
Apple Silicon wins hands down in efficiency but not in absolute processing power. For a lot of productivity use cases, time is money and thus Intel/AMD will continue to focus on that market.
x86 cannot compete on efficiency, so Intel/AMD will instead just keep upping the ante in terms of absolute processing power.
Qualcomm's exclusivity on Windows ARM is really hurting Microsoft's development, so may be once that ends and Microsoft figures out a better approach than the current x86 emulation, then probably you might start getting more efficient ARM options on the Windows-side, probably Nvidia might get into the game as well.
Intel/AMD really can't compete in the ultrabook space at present in efficiency but will continue have a significant market share based on price.
That's true. Single threaded performance is top tier, but the lower number of cores keeps the overall performance down. For day to day usage of a normal consumer, there's really nothing better at the moment. Even Intel 12th gen Laptop CPUs don't manage to beat it, and they have nearly double the TDP. A very small proportion of consumers actually use their PCs for demanding tasks, most just use it for browsing, office work, etc.
I expect so. But so far they haven't managed to beat the single threaded performance with a laptop class CPU, only with desktop class CPUs. And who knows for how long, maybe only till M2 benchmarks are out.
For sure. I don't think people will just move to Mac OS. Despite the performance gains, people moving from Windows to Mac will be few. It will continue to do well in western markets, but Indian consumers are not going to suddenly start spending 2 lacs on laptops when a large number of people are content with their phones itself. I tried only because I got really curious about M1 and Mac Mini was really reasonably priced at the point. I got it for 55k with no cost EMI and I already head a monitor. For any average Indian consumer, a Ryzen 5500u based laptop for 45k makes a lot more sense than an M1 MBA for 90k.
That's the irony that Apple Silicon is great for consumers but at the same time priced beyond the mainstream market.
On the professional side though, absolute processing power is still the king.
Apple has created an ecosystem where RAM and SSD are very valuable commodity.
In PC world, RAM and SSD are so cheap that we take them for granted like water and air. So basically what Apple has done is brilliant! It has created a mars.
That was very nice technical explanation . I am not that deep in this. For me its just the end results which is completely in favor of Apple , but explains to a person like me to quite an extend ...why there is suddenly so much difference between AMD/Intel and Apple?
True but got to give them the credit. Everytime they pull it off.
I have been so against apple all these years and honestly still am but at the same time I just cannot get over the efficiency they provide. I will end up buying a second hand Mac laptop if I do see a good deal .
I guess a lot of people are against Apple purely because they don't care about the average consumer. They have always maintained their pricing at a level where it remains out of reach of an average Indian consumer.
I am still against Apple and their practices. Like, I can understand RAM not being upgradable, because you want it on the die. But why should the storage not be expandable? You can connect a USB SSD but not an M.2 SSD. They could have used a concept like Android where internal SSD is always the system drive and external drive is external storage. That wouldn't affect performance in any way. Still they decided not to.
I got the M1 Mac Mini because it seemed like good value. Any machine with this powerful processor and in this small a package (like an NUC) would have cost me 60k easily. So at 55k, the Mac Mini was a no brainer. But I'd never buy something like a Mac studio fro 2 Lakhs, even if I need that power. I would simply go for an ITX build which will easily give me more power at half the price. And will be completely modular.
I am still against Apple and their practices. Like, I can understand RAM not being upgradable, because you want it on the die. But why should the storage not be expandable? You can connect a USB SSD but not an M.2 SSD. They could have used a concept like Android where internal SSD is always the system drive and external drive is external storage. That wouldn't affect performance in any way. Still they decided not to.
I got the M1 Mac Mini because it seemed like good value. Any machine with this powerful processor and in this small a package (like an NUC) would have cost me 60k easily. So at 55k, the Mac Mini was a no brainer. But I'd never buy something like a Mac studio fro 2 Lakhs, even if I need that power. I would simply go for an ITX build which will easily give me more power at half the price. And will be completely modular.
I had M1 MAC mini 16 GB. It was good but the folders stored on the internal drive (which was supposed to be lightning fast) used to open slowly. Videos used to open slowly too. Navigating through images, videos and folders was a pain. Windows was lightning fast in comparison. When I bought it, the prices if GPU was very high so it was a great value for money. That is no longer the case. Today, a MacBook is still better value than older Intel MACs but expensive in comparison to windows laptop. I am not interested in MACs anymore because there is no upgrade path. The upgrade price is ridiculous. I am only interested in iPad pro because that thing always has the best cutting edge Apple tech and my use case allows me to save a lot of money by going for a iPad pro instead of a pc setup. Now Qualcomm is also claiming to beat M2 chip by the end of 2023 so Galaxy tab may become an attractive option too.
I almost bought it too, but the deal fell through precisely because of the RAM prices discussed earlier. I wasn't willing to spend 18k extra for 16 GB version.
I personally haven't experienced slowness of this nature. But the inbuilt photo viewer and video player are both crap. I replaced them with Pixea and Pot Player respectively. Even Windows XP's photo viewer had more features than the Mac's built in Preview app.
Can Pixea works like a windows image gallery ? Can we open pics from anywhere as we do in windows?
The slowness was not huge but definitely noticable in comparison to windows which is very fast especially when browsing through folders and files.
Yes. Setting Pixea as default was a bit confusing, but once done, it works very well. Being Unix based, it will keep asking for permission for every new folder, but it's a minor annoyance.