Apple has finely tuned their pricing ladder to push people to spend more, and storage and memory are a big part of that. For example (pricing is from memory and probably incorrect, but illustrates the point)
The base iPad is a pretty capable tablet and a good deal at $329, but it only has 64GB storage and I want to load it up with movies and games for long road trips. But upgrading to 256GB storage bumps the price to $479. At that price I may as well get the iPad (10th Gen) for $449 and get the nicer screen. But that only comes with 64GB storage and 256GB storage costs $599. But for that price I can get an iPad air and all the benefits that brings. But that only comes with 64GB storage...
It may be illogical but I have personally gone through that process, starting out thinking I need a basic tablet for content consumption and ending up at the Apple store looking at iPad Pro because otherwise I'd feel like I was getting ripped off paying too much for storage. They do the same thing with the Mac lineup.
Those tests are what I would expect but I will say that I think most people who buy base configuration macs are not doing heavy production workloads like those tested. Doubling your ram is certainly going to be the most cost efficient upgrade, but I'm not convinced that the majority of buyers of the base model would find that to be money well spent.
You double your RAM, but get at least 3 or 4x more available to applications. Consider the relatively fixed OS overhead (4 to 6 gigs?) which almost always gets worse with updates.
This is a subject that I have always been confused by. For instance, my WindowServer is currently shown to have 3.26gb, which is a "VM Compressed" amount of 1.96GB, but a "Real Mem" amount of 223.1 megs. This is on a machine with 32GB of physical memory so there would be no problem having it all in physical memory.
I am not sufficiently clear on the relationship between the total virtual allocation a particular service and how much physical ram is required to service that in practice. I don't think it's true that you can simply jump from the total allocation to physical memory numbers.
The WindowServer process uses 1.2GB right now on my machine. Finder takes 400MB, the dock process for some reason needs 150MB. Together with a couple others like Spotlight it's around 2GB, I'd say.
Apple fans will tell you anything, but my experience is that macOS is actually much less efficient than windows out of the box and not even running more useful stuff.
The complaints about Windows are mostly on low-end machines loading all kind of crappy background software that are always running and eating a lot of ressource for not much (very often antivirus, VPNs, file syncing stuff, "cleaning" software and more).
If you do not overload your Windows install with all kinds of useless crap it will just be better and snappier than macOS on the same amount of ressource. I can tell you that much from building some hackintoshes...
Funnily enough Apple software is notoriously bad on Windows, so I'm pretty sure where the problem is.
Almost like making more money by selling more powerful hardware leads to shitty low end specs experience.
To be clear I think macOS is cool and a pretty good OS but the reality is that to make the most of it and the software that can run, you need a powerful machine that is extremely expensive, and even more so since Apple soldered the RAM/storage to control price.
This is precisely why there is outrage, everyone who has had an entry level Apple device knows very well how miserable an experience it is but also how much worse it will get.
On paper an iPhone 6s was "supported" for a long time; in practice it's 16GB of base storage made it almost unusable barely 3 years after launch. You could only install 10 apps at best and not put much music, or other media.
The "real" price of an iPhone was effectively 200 more or something like that to access the relevant level of minimum storage that was advisable.
But this way Apple gets to advertise a price, and instead of subsidizing better devices by making only a small number of variants and using an average cost for pricing they prefer to individualise the rip-off. The poorer you are the more they steal from you. I truly hate Tim Cook, not only because he raised the prices at a time where Apple needed it the least but also because he made despicable greedy corporate behavior the new norm.
I guess he makes a lot of money, because only money matters in life...
I find it funny that there are still some people defending this behavior. The only way it doesn't affect you is if you are rich enough to buy the fully loaded version of their hardware and then it just become blaming peoples for being poor. An occupation a lot of Apple users like to engage in very often in my experience; in fact the meaner, incompetent but luckier they got in life, the better the correlation.
I'm showing a little over 5.5 gigs memory used after a fresh reboot on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro w/16 gig RAM. No apps running, just Finder and the base OS. I'm not counting the cache, just "app" and "wired" memory. Of course, some of this can get paged out, but still, that's a lot of stuff running!!
8GB is not enough for even "regular users" - it just limps along with swap to SSD, but video memory from those same 8GB cannot be swapped out. 8GB is what you put in a phone nowadays.
This is also not about cost - if it was, the upgrade would be what, 40 USD? The only reason for having an 8GB model at all is so they can make 16GB into a hefty upsell with a 100x markup - without it, the 16GB model would be the listed baseline and would have to be priced as such.
Presenting an almost suitable model with a much too pricey but within reach upgrade is a pretty standard trick to make someone commit to a higher price.
That's also why they carry older iPhones and iPads - not to sell those models, but to lure you with a low price, then convince you that you need more storage, then that storage is almost the price of the other model, which needs more storage... Up the ladder you go.
> a pretty standard trick to make someone commit to a higher price.
The worst part is that, this is priced like automobiles. Now you're going to upgrade the RAM, and it reaches the price of its sibling products. You'll be tempted to consider that product.
Prices listed in Euros:
MacBook Air 13 inch M2 8core cpu, 8core gpu
Entry level price: 1299.00
Cpu upgrade +120eu: 8core cpu, 10core gpu <- why does this exist? Solely to upsell you into the Pro level.
Ram upgrade +230eu: from 8gb to 16gb <- essential
Storage upgrade +230eu: from 256gb (pitiful) to 512gb (barely acceptable these days at this price)
Total: 1879,00
Now you're goin to start looking at other options from here.
From here, you realize.. the 14" macbook pro M3 laptop is priced at... 2029,00 It's a 150 euro upsell to get that nice space gray M3 laptop.
The specs? 8 core CPU, 10 core GPU, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD. You're now going to want to upgrade that RAM once you start to consider the Pro model.
That pushes the price to 2259,00! Which is shy of the M3 Pro version of the 14" Macbook Pro (at 2549,00 but now it has 18GB RAM which, you know. For 290 euros more, you can get 2GB more RAM and the M3 Pro).
It's just clever positioning of prices to scale the customer into spending the most possible amount and to generate FOMO.
Well, I'm waiting for 16Gb/1TB MBA for 6 weeks already, and it's not here yet. It's how long you have to wait in Serbia if you want better than base model. And I was told in advance it will take that long, it wasn't something unexpected.
I generally agree - I recommend friends get at least 16gb - but I also know many non-technical people who just don't value "high performance" as much as I do. I would never put up with the way their computers perform, but they are totally disinterested in spending any more money on a computer. They are happy, even if by some metric they have bought a dumb configuration.
Oh I knew somebody who bought the cheapest thing in the shop when it comes to electronics every time and would only upgrade if he absolutely could not make it work.
Tell that to my company which bought a dev the 8GB 14" MBP. I couldn't figure out why his Rails parallel tests were running 7x slower than mine until he revealed this tidbit.
At the end of the day Apple killed of the usability of the 32GB iPad with iPadOS 17. So future release expectations should be taken into account dealing with Apple. The economics are different if a stroke of Apple can diminish the life expectancy of a machine by years.
No not conflating storage with RAM. It’s the same underlying effect. Apple can any day drop an update of an OS which increases the lowest usable line of RAM/storage above that what they have sold in the past. So as with anything Apple (happy user of their ecosystem though) you are at their mercy.
I got 8 GB of RAM with a ~€900 laptop back in 2012. 8 GB were a lot back then, but not an immense amount. How the heck does Apple justify selling 8 GB RAM laptops in 2023? My two years old phone has that amount of RAM.
This is clearly a way to make their products look cheaper than they are.
Ram is not the only consideration in a laptop. In my experience Apple products have much better screens, trackpads, and speakers than any thinkpad product.
Personally my machines have 16 GB of ram. If I ever need more I will ssh into an actual server (in my basement or cloud-hosted) and run a ram intensive workload there.
> In my experience Apple products have much better screens
That depends on the definition of "better". Mac laptops' screens are ultra brittle. To me the first quality of a laptop's screen is how sturdy it is.
My laptop (LG Gram) has a screen which I can literally bend/deform and whose previous owner (I bought it from a friend) stepped on it when he woke up. People love to make full of "MILSPEC" (MILitary SPEC) because "that means nothing" but my LG Gram can literally be thrown down concrete stairs and it'll still work, like this dude (not me) on Youtube tried (skip at 0:35):
To me that's a "better screen" than my Mac M1's screen that broke after 13 months, overnight for no reason, just out of warranty (because I didn't pay the 20% additional Apple tax to have an extended warranty).
I'd be careful extending one anecdotal experience to an entire class of computers.
Given how much scrutiny Apple goes under, for example the heat-gate fiasco on new iPhones and the many other "gate" events they have endured, I think that if this was widespread we would have heard about it.
There were 26,000,000 macbooks and macs sold in 2022. You are using a sample size n=1 to extend to 26 million devices.
In my anecdotal experience. I have never had a screen die on me or known someone who has had it happen. My family all has macbooks and I have had them for ~15 years. I've purchased about 5 personally over that time, averaging about 3 years per device. I have owned 4 additional macbooks through company device programs. I have watched ~30ish macbooks go through the hands of various family members over the same time period. I have never seen a screen just die randomly. My sister is terribly rough on computers and phones and she destroys computers but has started buying Macbooks because they are the only ones that last with her. So she has an opposite experience.
That's not to say it doesn't happen. It is a tech product. I am sure it happened to you and has happened to others. But it isn't common. As ubiquitous as macbooks are, Apple would be under a lot of scrutiny if this happened to even 1% of their devices.
How would you know the better one unless you sampled the other 100 PC variants at the same price point? Perhaps you were taken in by marketing and better than average PC components?
Me - running a Lenovo Legion with 5Ghz i9, 32GB, 2TB, 16GB 3080RTX and comfortably running large LLMs 34b, at a push 70b, at a 2K price point, whilst using a Mac Pro with M2 and 16GB at work that can't run any AI whilst working.
Apple is the same price, but in my experience poorer performance with build time and lacks hardware features.
Only benefit I've seen is the Mac lasts 2.5x on battery, but as it's a work machine it's nearly always plugged in :shrug:.
My kid spilled some coffee on her 16G/512G M1. That killed it for all intents and purposes. Even Rossman repair was like "its going to cost more to fix than it's worth" although I wasn't there for the conversation so I don't know what all was damaged, but if they can't fix it, I probably can't either.
I'ved spilled a lot of things on my keyboards in the past, even killed one or two on laptops that way. In the past it was a few screws and the keyboard could be removed from the top panel and swapped, rarely was the replacement keyboard more than $50. Even recently on some cheap acer with the keyboard glued to the top of the case the entire case+keyboard was like $20 used from ebay.
"Much better screen" is also not necessarily true for everybody. For example I can't stand the glossy reflective screen, from what I saw last time I stopped in an apple store it was pretty much a mirror. I find the mate screens on thinkpads vastly superior and less difficult on my eyes, and their trackpads are fine: the magic track pad on my mac mini m1 is fine too, but I don't prefer one over the other.
I assure you that the Hacker News crowd are very aware of the availability of ThinkPads. Those that choose to buy MacBooks have valid reasons for doing so.
This seems suspect. It looks like Lenovo makes 4 lines of AMD laptops currently and 3/4ths of them have soldered ram. Of those, the cheapest option to get 64GB of ram seems to be the ThinkPad P16s Gen 2 which is just over $1600 or not "a good deal less" than the 8GB Mac. The other options are in the $2k to $3.8k range.
You can get any number of the "low end" thinkpads, which have socketed ram, and put 64G in them for ~$100. And, of course, as other people have mentioned, if you are not getting 50% off the MSRP on a Lenovo you're doing it wrong. Wait a couple of days, and it will go on sale. </wisper>
I tend to like the L14 line, because while they are a bit chunky, the parts are relatively easy to come by, and its built like a machine from a few years back, meaning everything can be swapped/upgraded. Swap the parts you don't like for something better. I've changed the ram and battery in mine for more capacity and find its nearly the perfect device for me now. I've been considering if one of the older t450ish timeframe keyboards will fit in it after noticing the older keyboards are much, much nicer than what is shipping on the more recent laptops.
If 8 GB is ok for you, you don't need an M3 chip with tons of cores, either. You can just keep using your old laptop. Apple has kept the same base memory on these machines for a decade and now they are horribly unbalanced.
Really-very-performant 8G quad core Tiger Lake Chromebooks are sub-$300 now, actually. Moved to one (finally, after much delay and insistence that no-I-really-need-a-Linux-Thinkpad) for my everyday client and, other than a few old keybindings I can't get out of my muscle memory...
I miss nothing. It's great. And contra Windows or Linux laptop integration, it really does have an all-day battery.
I love my Chrome machines; they really are diamonds in the rough for simple tasks, and you can take them much further with the built-in Linux VM/environment.
If you're looking for a fairly cheap one, Lenovo *00e series has been good for me. EXCEPT for the 100e, that has a design flaw that makes it easy for pins to cross in the USB-C charging port, permanently bricking the device. So except for the 100e, that series is great.
Walmart's marketplace has a 500e listed for $92 right now, and it's also mostly compatible with all operatimg systems via Chrultrabook.
If you're at all interested in running other operating systems on a Chromebook, then I'd recommend checking out compatibility in the Chrultrabook docs [1]. Nearly all devices listed there are verified to support Linux, albeit many have issues, usually missing volume limiter support, camera support, or fingerprint reader support. And keep in mind that ARM CPUs are currently entirely unsupported.
Also, it's absolutely hilarious to me that some Chromebooks support macOS better than they support Windows or Linux. In the vast majority of cases, though, Linux has the best support.
1) The base configuration comes with insufficient resources (low memory, low disk space, till surprisingly recent past slow HDD instead of SSD), and
2) The upgrades are way too expensive compared to any other hardware manufacturer, meaning that
3) The advertised price is a lie! Almost no one should buy the base configuration.
You see a device advertised as 1500$. You think "Sweet! That's the price I am willing to pay!". But then you go through the selection process and end up with a 2000$ minimum on the checkout page. Even though it's not the same, psychologically, it feels like when you try to get an AirBnB for 100$ a night for 3 night and end up seeing a price of 920$ in the checkout page instead of 300$.
Apple is pricing necessities (like 16 GB of RAM) as luxuries, and people don't like that.
Thank you for proving the parent's point. The base model is insufficient for your use case.
You know Apple's base models have a history of being insufficient for your use-case and that upgrades are pricier than you'd like.
You see the cost of the base model and are upset when you find that you will need to spend more than that base cost to get the model you want.
Apple devices and upgrades are costly, without a doubt. But there is clearly a market for whom the price and capabilities of the base model is more than enough.
I know the prices on AirBnB are a lie too, but they still make me unhappy.
I know the unlimited data plans are not unlimited, but I am no happier due to this knowledge when I see their ads.
I know if I buy a perpetual license for a service, it will probably stop functioning in less than 5 years, but I am not more content when it happens because of this knowledge.
People are complaining about the expected tip percentage rising well above 20%. But they feel unhappy about this, instead of mentally adding 30% to the list prices and counting that as the real price and imagining the tip is 0.
At this point, it should be fascinating if we find an instance where human emotions don't work like this, rather than if they do.
I don't know; my wife is limited to primarily these things[1], and she was always asking me why her computer was so slow; she refused to close most of the open apps or browser tabs for various reasons.
I bought here an air with 16GB of RAM and all of the complaints have gone away.
1: Though s/Facebook/Pinterest/, and occasionally a non-word office app open.
> she refused to close most of the open apps or browser tabs for various reasons
At some point I got in the habit of closing tabs and restarting web browsers periodically as their RAM footprint would expand until they were consuming gigabytes.
I'd like to think that an 8GB machine could easily support hundreds of open browser tabs, but this may not actually be true, especially if you don't run an aggressive ad blocker.
Which is an ipad use case, I think people aren't so offended by the air, which could be viewed as "ipad with keyboard" but by the macbook pro with 8G, because presumably a person using it for "pro" work would be doing some heavy lifting to justify the "pro" bit.
But, I think pretty much everyone understands apple tends to have a social signaling aspect tied to it, too. This is why you see plenty of PowerPoint warriors/middle mgmt toting them around too, because "pro" even though their use case for the machine is frequently little more than light office work (ppt/word/excel). So, why not offer it with 8G, they get their social signalling for cheap, and everyone else gets to pay $$$$ for the real configuration.
I don’t get this, it’s not like apple made the pro model worse with the M3, they made it more accessible than before, where the entry price was 2k. Now there’s a model in between for those that want a bit more than an Air, but can’t/wont pay 2k for a more loaded Pro, at $400 less. Sometimes one just needs a few more ports, and a nicer screen.
Yes I agree upgrades are expensive but more choice than before isn’t a bad thing.
Someone who only cares about Word, YouTube and browsing Facebook also doesn't need a $1,600 laptop with an 8-core CPU and a chunky GPU, they could get by with something much less powerful and probably wouldn't even notice the difference - and if anything, having only 8 GB of RAM is more likely to cause performance problems than not having a fast CPU or GPU (the modern web and modern apps are pretty memory hungry especially if you open a lot of tabs).
I’ve been using an 8gb M1 Air for 3 years now. It’s fine for personal use, and there have been stretches where I needed to use it as a dev machine in a pinch.
Not optimal but to say 16 is a necessity is an overstatement t
Apple is the brand that many of us in the tech crowd have long recommended to our non-technical friends and relatives. You could pay a slightly premium price and expect a machine that is easy to understand, “just works” and most importantly: that you would get a fair few years’ worth of use out of for the extra upfront cost.
Apple is undermining that by shipping 8GB and 256GB in the base configuration. They’re setting up a situation where the expected life of their computers is potentially shortened by unexpectedly-bloated future OS upgrades.
Remember the crappy underspecced Celeron laptops that Walmart used to sell? That unsuspecting non-technical customers would shell out hundreds for, only to become unusable slow in only 1-2 years, meanwhile suffering through it that whole time?
We recommended Apple to our friends and relatives precisely to avoid those kind of cheap and nasty predatory products, but now Apple is moving in that direction too.
As someone (who is technically skilled) who has recommended Apple tech to my whole family (who are non-technical) with massively positive results after migrating from Windows PCs, yes that does anger me.
It is enraging because I know that not technical people will buy it and then after suffering 2 years they will seek for an upgrade, not knowing that this is just a memory issue. Which btw could be an easy and cheap upgrade, but no, with apple you have to toss the 1600 machine altogether.
Similar to the situation where apple was downgrading the iphone cpu after a year to hide their faulty batteries.
I think it's partly jealousy and partly a feeling of abuse. They want to want the laptop but Apple doesn't cater to them. In fact it feels like Apple is being extremely hostile to them by selling an amazing laptop only to laughably cripple the RAM and force people to upgrade for stupefying sums. It feels so rude. They don't have to do it but they do it because they can. I'm a Mac owner and I paid outrageous sums to upgrade the RAM and hard drive I hate Apple for it.
It's more like, people complain that something you _are_ going to buy costs more than they want. Apple has had this exact pricing model for decades now. People are always complaining the base configuration (for macs, iphones, etc) are underpowered and they have to fork up the extra $$$ for the better specs but Apple knows they're going to do it anyway.
I do feel it is starting to become a real joke now though which is affecting their brand. I think also over the lifetime of the M3 models it'll start to become a real issue for even 'basic' work as RAM usage continues to increase.
I dunno, I think it’s somewhat understandable for a tech crowd. When your relative buys an expensive 8GB laptop who are they going to complain to when it doesn’t do what they want? Their techie relative of course!
I could, of course, handhold every family member buying hardware to make sure they get the right thing. I’d just rather not.
Who's furious? Seems like the negative views on this 8GB configuration are driving benchmarks like this, which in turn give the buyers the ammo they need to make a purchasing decision.
In this case, a couple hundred bucks extra seems to make a world of difference in performance and therefore, more importantly, longevity of the machine.
EDIT: Apparently from reading here, folks in the MacRumors comments are furious. Guess I'm glad I don't read the comments!
You're posting to a forum full of people who are the tech support for their families and friends that buy these terrible devices. Of course we dislike them. They cause needless trouble and work.
Sounds to me like you're interpreting simple criticism of a brand as "people getting furious and being mortally offended" because you're biased by your own brand loyalty.
You're just going to have to accept that some people don't like your favorite brand's newest product, it's not the end of the world.
The interpretation of this is important, as many Windows PCs come with unspeakably bad bloatware out of the box, not to mention stuff that's piled on by users like questionable antivirus suites and huge background auto updaters.
And then there's the question of hardware. Lets say the closest analogue to a Mac's low-noise GPU performance is an Asus G14... then you are factoring in discrete GPU RAM. If you just pick a decent AMD-7000 series IGP laptop, then its way cheaper than the Mac, but has less GPU oomph.
The higher end S22 Ultra models even have 12GB RAM which does go to show how ridiculous it is that Apple consider 8GB of RAM to be acceptable for a laptop at that price point in this day and age.
This seems like a case of someone needing to benchmark app switching with a fast camera. The compressed ram is going to do a good job of swapping out stuff that isn't really running, but then presumably swapping a browser tab, or app to the foreground and reactivating it should presumably have some additional lag.
I support this public shaming campaign and hope Apple listens this time. They do listen sometimes (hello ports in new MBPs!) but usually they do it with a delay, so I'm not sure about M4 but M5 should have 16 GB in the base model.
How is it that HN has stayed so relatively civilized for so long? I'm a newbie here, but I know HN is pretty old, and it's less nasty than the oldschool forums I remember.
I think there's a culture on HN too that most of us enjoy and try to maintain. When a low-quality/low-effort or not at all relevant comment comes in, it gets downvoted to oblivion. Forming that culture from the beginning is the hardest part, but now that we're all used to it, maintaining it is a lot easier now.
What filters to the front page is interesting too.
For instance, I just saw what was clearly a artificially promoted post in /new with 17 upvotes... and no real responses? It wasn't even flagged. I think it was shadowbanned from the front page, and everyone looking at /new just collectively knew to ignore it.
Another interesting bit is the flagging/vouching system. It would be in a disaster some places, but is very effective here.
There is a cross section of Macrumors that behaves like tech YouTube. That is, they're obsessed with on-paper specs (rather than real-world performance) and have a hair-trigger on calling out Apple for insufficient spec bumps. 8GB is still sufficient for many workloads, and where it isn't, memory optimization by macOS and fast SSD swap can make up the difference.
I think many people fail to realize that the starting price is dependent on the 8GB configuration, and if Apple bumps it up, then we'll have the same people complaining about the entry-level price. There's no winning with some people.
People who think they're smart tend to get snippy. See: Ars Technica comments. We have a constant source of humility by being reminded that there are much smarter people out there, and we have excellent moderation.
Yeah. Politeness is part of the culture, but HN does have a conspicuously high chance of someone professionally involved in the discussed topic popping in.
Yeah, it was already debated 12 hours ago. My take is it costs Apple more to make an 8GB SKU (they have to package with the CPU, test, support and so on) rather than just consolidating it down to a 16GB base. Even setting user requirements aside, it makes no economic sense unless you assume Apple is motivated by planned obsolescence and upselling.
But still, there's a lot of insulting and vitriol on Macrumors. Not much "8GB is fine an here's a polite, thought out reason why..." and more "8GB is fine and you are an idiot jerk complainer (insert more unrelated personal attacks) for not even seeing that in the first place," and vice versa.
This marketing/labeling is what I find insane. I wouldn’t be bothered at all if the Air came with 8GB standard. A machine with low storage, low RAM, low GPU core count, and so on then being labeled as Pro is just insane. It kind of makes their product lines not make sense too. Why even have these distinctions? If the entry level Air and Pro have the same specs, why make two different products?
Apple clearly generates more revenue than any company I’ve ever worked for, so I should probably shut my mouth, but their entire product naming and positioning of the last several years has seemed inconsistent and childish to me.
If there was no 8GB option, the price of the base model would be higher -- going by the comments, apparently $200 higher.
That would kind of screw over the people who don't open 20 Lightroom tabs or similar workloads, who might want that $200 for something else.
I guess people are imagining that if the 8GB option didn't exist then 16GB could be had for the same price, but that isn't rational. I think all Apple customers would quite like their prices to be lower, of course, but it's not like they are suddenly about to change from a publicly traded for-profit company to a charity organization.
The bill of materials for 16GB of RAM isn’t remotely close to $200, it’s likely under $10. This is pure profit for Apple.
Chips get cheaper over time and there is a general expectation the base specs move forward without the price rising. The MacBook Pro has had 8 GB of RAM base since 2014, which is a century in chip time. 16 should have been the base several revisions ago and the long apple leaves it this way the worse it looks, since no one should be buying a “pro” device that needs upgrades to be competent.
Well, this is actually part of the (horribly, unnecessarily complicated) problem. You'll have to base your own conclusions on what feels right to you.
That being said, this machine seems obviously intended to fill the gap the 13" MBP would inevitably leave. It just... doesn't feel like a compelling base-model. The M1 refresh of the Macbook Pro set a decently high watermark for the "Pro" experience, and this model feels like a compromise in many ways. It's $300 more expensive than the model it replaced, and while the chassis is certainly better, the internals on the base model are undeniably gimped. It's hard for me to understand why someone would get the 14" base model when the other M3 options are practically identical. I struggle to imagine a class of user that needs Pro Motion and active cooling, but not 16gb of memory.
It's subjective, but I much prefer the old pricing model. The 13" Pro felt more like a holdout from a bygone age, not a trend that needed to be revived. Now we're here, and everyone is kinda asking why this machine exists.
Blindly buying because one number goes up without looking at the whole picture (like competition or their own product line) just leads to over paying for shiny baubles.
The base iPad is a pretty capable tablet and a good deal at $329, but it only has 64GB storage and I want to load it up with movies and games for long road trips. But upgrading to 256GB storage bumps the price to $479. At that price I may as well get the iPad (10th Gen) for $449 and get the nicer screen. But that only comes with 64GB storage and 256GB storage costs $599. But for that price I can get an iPad air and all the benefits that brings. But that only comes with 64GB storage...
It may be illogical but I have personally gone through that process, starting out thinking I need a basic tablet for content consumption and ending up at the Apple store looking at iPad Pro because otherwise I'd feel like I was getting ripped off paying too much for storage. They do the same thing with the Mac lineup.