An advanced Mac system monitor for your menu bar, with CPU, GPU, memory, network, disk usage, disk activity, temperatures, fans, battery info and more.
bjango.com
It's probably half the reason why I'm on macOS.
@desiibond @altair21 To repeat myself, I'm not defending Apple's decision of selling a six digit laptop with 8GB of memory today. I'm saying they're selling it because people are buying it, and it's their best seller, and
@superczar's anecdote of 6% SSD wear caused by swapping to disk on an 8GB model over three years shows there's little if any downsides to an 8GB machine with Apple Silicon running macOS.
You could rail and rant and point and shame but it doesn't change the fact that the 8GB model is the best selling model, and people continue to buy it. Maybe the average Mac customer isn't as tech savvy as the average PC customer, maybe they don't notice the disk swapping (I certainly don't), maybe the software is just so good that they don't care. Whatever the reason could be, it doesn't stop the masses from buying a 8GB laptop from Apple. When people stop buying the 8GB model, Apple will probably stop making it. It's happened before with previous models. It's definitely not happening in 2023 though.
None of the above can possibly be construed as me "defending" a company. It's a statement of facts.
As for pricing, it's subjective — if something is worth it to you, you'd buy it. I don't know why this is such a difficult concept for "techies" to understand. But to buy and complain about it, that's just silly. Life has far more meaningful pursuits.
I might have been one of those people at some point, I remember selling my $1100 white Macbook within a year to buy an upgradeable Mac mini and a Powerbook G4 because I could not sleep peacefully at night knowing I had a $1100 base model laptop with a non-upgradeable processor. Both the mini and powerbook were covered in the cost of selling the Macbook and I was very happy with the decision for many years.
My M1 mini was bought on EMI at a time when I was earning maybe 20k a month (hospitals had a post covid slump). It wasn't an easy decision to upgrade to 16GB and 10G upfront but two years later, I'm very happy with my purchase.
Bhai, you made khichdi by mixing up data theft, device theft and architecture.
It does appear that way.
Apple doesn't care about device theft, no hardware company does. They only want the customer to come back to them to replace their stolen device. Apple focussed on this with non-removable storage and memory to allow for failsafe remote wiping. Maybe if a customer knew their data was not compromised, they'd blame the theft on bad karma and go buy a second laptop from Apple.
Apple doesn't care about user
stupidity naivety. Their responsibility ends with their product — hardware and software. So long as they've locked down their product as best they can, the user is free to be as
stupid naive as he or she wants to be.
4. Soldering has no SSD speed advantage.
Yes, that's painfully obvious across both Macs and PCs. Hopefully no one out there made this claim.
I'd even go far as to state that the largest downside of the Apple Silicon architecture is that we'll never see the storage speeds we see on PCs. The SoC is just limited in how fast it can access storage even with the integrated controller. Storage speeds on Apple Silicon will always be behind the latest and greatest because the entire SoC needs be redesigned/upgraded vs an open standard like PCIe where you can slot in a faster drive.
3. Soldering has no use related to security of data on storage.
Not so, but there's an important distinction here to be made. If both the storage controller and storage chips are non-removable then that's just a slight hindrance for anyone after your data. You could argue that stealing an M.2 is easier than using a SMD rework station to attach thin copper wires to the PCIe lanes of a soldered on SSD and trying to access it that way.
But what would someone do with just nandchips on the motherboard without a controller? They'll need to perform surgery on the SoC and extract the controller and reverse engineer it and you can see how it's easier for someone just to revert to social engineering or malware instead (point 2 of yours above).
In that case Apple's closed hardware system did thwart the efforts of this hypothetical data thief — the soldered on design with controller being part of the SoC makes hardware a difficult attack vector when social engineering is far more straightforward. Which was the entire point I was trying to make with
@altair21
And you are quoting me an article from 2007 to defend your so called "closed system superiority".
To put it abstractly, one entity being held accountable is better than multiple entities being held accountable — do you disagree with this concept?
You do know that it's pretty common across all platforms and OS'es?
Except it wasn't common on Macs. Infact:
World’s first (known) bootkit for OS X can permanently backdoor Macs
It's literally right there in the title of the first link — there had been no reports of such an exploit in the ~15 years of computing history of OS X.
Doesn't it make sense that such attempts can be mitigated by closing off access to memory and storage?
I'm starting to question my sanity here — are these not basic concepts of computing and security?
The less entry points you have for an attack vector, the less successful the attack becomes?
Only on Mac Studio. You cannot upgrade in Mac Mini.
And Mac Pro. That's such a beautiful computer, I don't need it but I definitely want it — the rack mount version. Maybe in a few years I'd be able to pick one up second hand. Wishful thinking.
The 2013 Mac Pro is now available for under 40K used these days, It's so tempting to pick up that piece of computing history even though it's so outdated.
www.theverge.com
www.euronews.com
as there is nothing in it for Pro users, except for flashing at Starbucks.