this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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Mac hardware is a fucking atrocity. $2k for a "pro" laptop with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage and no i/o except 4 USBC ports, that's completely and intentionally irreparable and unupgradeable? SSDs and RAM that are marked up 3000%? That's what you call "excellent"? If they were cheap I might not completely object to them being disposable but it's the opposite. It's fucking gaslighting. You'll never convince me it's anything other than a cult.
I will give you the RAM and SSD capacities are atrociously priced. USBC is perfectly acceptable for the people apple is targeting. Nobody is trying to use a MacBook as a server. Ignore the “pro” name in any consumer electronic device. It has nothing to do with anything other than marketing, and that’s not exclusive to apple. Apple did give up on the 8GB bullshit already though.
You need to take a closer look at how the M-series chips work and why they work they way they do. There are design considerations in how PC does things and Apple does things and they are not 1 to 1. What makes sense the PC world doesn’t always make sense int he Mac world.
Apple does a lot of anti-consumer bullshit which we should absolutely club them over the head for, but many of the things they pulled off with the M-series Macs were NOT possible with traditional PC methodologies. One thing’s for sure though, the hardware performs and it does so with very little energy. It’s so great a difference the entire industry is changing course to try to outdo Apple. They eventually will too, but they haven’t yet. They are just cheaper.
It's literally called a "pro", who do you think they're targeting?
I do, thanks to Apple. It doesn't make it any less shameful or ridiculous.
You're going to have to elaborate because I already have and I don't understand what bearing that has on this discussion.
You shouldn't "club them over the head", you should just stop buying their trash. That's literally the only thing that will work.
Daves garage actually had a good video on the shared memory architecture recently that gives some insights on why apple designed this way they did. Don’t dismiss “different” as “trash.” You sound like an idiot when you do and it makes it difficult for adults to take you seriously. PC and Mac are designed with different goals in mind, so they tend to make different choices in their engineering, and you aren’t going to like every decision either side makes.
https://youtu.be/Cn_nKxl8KE4
Shared memory is different to unified memory, AMD's got an implementation of the later with their "Ryzen AI MAX+" (ugh) systems, does quite well in benchmarks.
It also doesn't hurt that Apple puts the RAM on the SoC and gives it a truckload of bandwidth. DDR5 is about 70GB/s, meanwhile the M4 Max is around 540GB/s.
I didn't know AMD had managed to switch over to unified memory too. Managing that while remaining x86 compatible is quite an achievement!
I think the next big thing will be when storage becomes as fast as ram and they unify that too, getting rid of separate RAM. Working with data directly in place could have massive efficiency boosts. But the industry has been trying to get it that fast for many years and still not succeeded. And once they do, separate SSDs wouldn't be possible, at least not as a primary storage, so it wont be an advance that makes sense for every use case.
Yeah "universal memory" is the holy grail, seemingly as hard to find as it as well.
The articles on Wikipedia about the related tech is great, it'll mention something like "Developers expect commercialisation to happen relatively soon" and then link to an article from 2004, or research papers from the 1980s.
This is not "different" this is "anti consumer non-sense" and you sound like a chud when you recite corporate propaganda.