| ▲ | wincy 9 hours ago |
| I typed “RAM” to search for it and boy they hammer home how lucky I am to be getting 1TB SSD standard, but no mention of RAM anywhere on this page. Anyway, the MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of RAM. It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB. Interestingly, 36-128GB models are showing as “currently unavailable” on the store page, and you can’t even place an order for them right now? But for anyone curious, it’s quoting $5099 for the 128GB RAM 14” MacBook Pro model. |
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| ▲ | jsheard 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB. No change from the previous models then, 16GB->32GB was already $400. They're cutting into their previously enormous margins to keep the prices stable, rather than hiking the prices to maintain their margins. |
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| ▲ | philistine 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They bought the fab time for that RAM 2-3 years ago. Apple is renowned for their foresight and preparation. We'll eventually see price increases from Apple's RAM upgrade, but we're not there yet. | | |
| ▲ | scottyah 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Commodity futures made sense to me at FedEx- they would pay money with a supplier for the option to buy gas/oil at X price at Y date in the future. It costs more than just agreeing to pay for it at that price in the future, but if deliveries went way down (or prices) it'd be less costly to "back out". I wonder if there's a fab time secondary market where Wall Street types are making millions off speculating fab time. |
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| ▲ | daveidol 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Their margins may not have changed actually. https://youtu.be/IGCzo6s768o | |
| ▲ | niwtsol 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is not exactly correct. If you have an M5 Pro chip instead of m5 Chip - I just built a 16inch, M5 Pro chip, it is $400 to go from 24 -> 48gb. An additional $200 ($600 over base) to go to 64gb. So the memory prices change based on chip. M5 Max Chip starts with 48gb of memory. | | |
| ▲ | abhikul0 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | M5 Max starts at 36GB memory at $3599. M4 Max started at the same memory at $3199.
They have doubled the default storage from 1TB to 2TB, that's a $400 increase I'm paying even if I don't want the extra 1TB. |
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| ▲ | aroman 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They raised the base price by $200. | |
| ▲ | carefree-bob 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Apple's previous policy of price gouging for RAM means no need to raise prices yet, they still have a buffer. | | |
| ▲ | __loam 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | They also have long term contracts with the suppliers in all likelihood |
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| ▲ | sgt 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In practice, you can really go a long way on 16GB on a Mac with unified memory. I like to say it's comparable to 32GB during the old Intel days. | | |
| ▲ | cardanome 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They advertise local LLMs which will be servery limited with 16GD of RAM. Plus the GPU could in theory provide decent gaming performance but again might suffer from the RAM limit. Most people can totally live with 16gigs but it is kind of a waste for the horsepower. They know what they are doing. Apple is a master in upselling. Though personally I don't mid the aggressive upsellign as long as the quality is there. Problem is, the hardware quality is great but the software side is severely lacking and getting worse. | |
| ▲ | cthalupa 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If anything, it's less, because you're giving up more RAM to the GPU. Which, I mean, I love unified memory, as one of those weirdos that does do local LLM stuff and am contemplating if it's time to upgrade my m2 max. But if you needed 32gb then you still need at least 32gb now. Unless swap on nvme disks is enough for you - and it isn't for me. | |
| ▲ | jsheard 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | RAM is still RAM, the switch from crusty HDDs to fast NVMe SSDs may have helped to smooth things over when you spill into swap but it's not going to do miracles. | | |
| ▲ | sgt 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | RAM isn't just RAM though. Unified memory on Apple Silicon provides significantly better memory management and efficiency compared to trad RAM |
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| ▲ | jeroenhd 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I know RAM is scarce and everything, but doubling down on LLM local acceleration with all of that dedicated silicon while at the same time sticking with Apple's traditional lack of RAM availability makes for a very weird product proposition to me. |
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| ▲ | raincole 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to 307GB/s of memory bandwidth, while M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth Isn't this it? |
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| ▲ | wincy 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ah yeah you’re right, thanks. I tried to at least make my post useful and pull up prices for the different tiers. Overall, those prices are surprisingly competitive now compared to the rest of the laptop market! |
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| ▲ | stetrain 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| On the M5 Pro tier (not the base M5 tier that was released last November), the base memory is 24GB. My M3 Pro from a few years ago for the same price had 18GB. |
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| ▲ | kylec 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Apple doesn't tend to use "RAM" in their marketing materials, they usually use "memory", which appears 9 times in the press release. |
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| ▲ | armsaw 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Preorders open tomorrow according to the store page. You can’t order the base RAM model today, either. |
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| ▲ | tonyedgecombe 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >Anyway, it starts with 16GB of RAM. $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB Interesting that this hasn't budged since the memory shortages appeared. |
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| ▲ | lm28469 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They sell you 1gb LPDDR5X for $25 while buying it at $5, don't worry for their margins... | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Fair chance that Apple has price/purchase agreements already in place. Consumers are left to fight over the excess capacity after megabuyers get their orders filled. | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Interesting that this hasn't budged since the memory shortages appeared. Apple has had enough war chests with the ability of buying the entirety of TSMC's new capacity years in advance in the past. If I were to guess, Apple locked in their entire BOM and production capacity two years ago. That's something even the large players cannot replicate because they run cash-lean and have too many different SKUs, and the small players (Framework, System76, even Steam) are entirely left to the forces of the markets. |
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| ▲ | reenorap 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The price hasn't changed between the M4 and M5. I honestly don't know how they did it. But I had a standing order for a maxed-out M4 (128 GB RAM, 2 TB drive) and the price is the same as the M5 so I cancelled my M4 order and will pre-order the M5 MAX instead. |
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| ▲ | tedivm 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well, guess I was wrong about that. | | |
| ▲ | reenorap 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, that's not how it works at all. They still source all their RAM from Samsung, Hynix, Micron, etc. | |
| ▲ | dmitrygr 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | that is ... not at all how that works. RAM is a separate chip, that is placed on top of the substrate that holds the main dies. It is bought from normal ram manufacturers like micron. it is not "embedded in the chip" by any possible meanings of those words. |
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| ▲ | aurareturn 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It starts at 16GB for the base M5 and 24GB for the Pro/Max. It's been like this. |
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| ▲ | edvinasbartkus 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| on Silicon Mac's it's never called RAM, it "unified memory" |
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| ▲ | lxgr 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm honestly just glad they don't brand this as "1016 MB of unified memory". Swap and ramdisks are a thing, after all... |
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| ▲ | 2OEH8eoCRo0 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Insane for the "Pro" to have only 16GB of memory. My 11 year old Intel i3 laptop has 16GB of memory. |
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| ▲ | detritus 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Don't these integrated ARM-based SoCs make much better use of RAM as opposed to old Intel-based boards? That's my understanding, anyway. | | |
| ▲ | wincy 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | My wife’s 8GB MacBook Air crashed yesterday with Firefox and Find My open and nothing else because of running out of RAM, so, sort of, but they’re not magic. (Find My was using 3GB of memory!) | | |
| ▲ | astrange 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you mean it showed the out of memory dialog, that wouldn't be caused by an app using 3GB. The dialog shows up at ~48GB swap space used on an 8GB Mac, or when you're out of disk space and can't write a swap file. | |
| ▲ | nozzlegear 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | So Firefox was using 5gb? There's your problem. | | |
| ▲ | cloudier1 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | What page? Azure portal is notorious for leaking memory in both chrome and firefox, that’s the only tab I’ve seen using 5+ gb ram. | |
| ▲ | wincy 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s a losing battle me trying to tell my wife to close her Firefox tabs, haha, but yes, Firefox does use a lot of ram when you have 500 tabs. Maybe I’ll get her a 64GB MacBook Pro for the premium web browsing experience she so desires! | | |
| ▲ | qudat 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Tabs as bookmarks, people keep falling into this trap, my wife included | | |
| ▲ | nozzlegear 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I do it myself and I'm sure a lot of people on HN do too. But I've tried to embrace the "zen" of closing all tabs lately and it's been nice. If I really want to find something later I can search my history or, like you said, just bookmark it. |
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| ▲ | astrange 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | She shouldn't have to do anything. That's the browser's job. |
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| ▲ | 2OEH8eoCRo0 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The benefits are in speed not capacity. | |
| ▲ | dawnerd 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | More to do with the faster storage allowing you to swap without noticing it as much. There was this whole trend when m1 first came out of people saying it didn't matter if you got the lowest spec because the ssd was so fast it made up for the lack of ram... totally ignoring that swapping like that was destroying their drives really fast. |
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| ▲ | TheCapeGreek 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Apple's RAM price bumps were already insane, now they'll get worse. |
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| ▲ | ezfe 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | They’re literally not changing | | |
| ▲ | cloudier1 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | If they can just absorb the current ram price hike, you know they having insane margins. | |
| ▲ | hu3 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It did change. They bumped $200 on the entire line. So even the 16GB version is more expensive. I'd love to have customers like Apple. Bumps $200: "it didn't change!!!" And no power adapter included. | | |
| ▲ | SirMaster 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You mean bumped $100. M4 MacBook Pro and M5 MacBook Pro started at $1599 with 512GB SSD. Now it starts at $1699, a $100 bump but comes with a 1TB SSD. Previously it would have cost $1799 for the 1T SSD, so it's a $100 bump on base price but you are also getting 1TB SSD for $100 less than before. | | |
| ▲ | brailsafe 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | To me, this is kind of like Telecom providers giving you bandwidth headroom that realistically should have been there for a long time, but removing the option to get a cheaper plan whether you'd otherwise pay for the upgrade or not. Like for my last upgrade, I bit the bullet and upgraded to 1TB for the first time ever instead of base storage at Apple's absurd prices, so it's good, but if I'd not have been willing to spend money on that at all, they lifted the floor. My cell phone plan has been increasing every year by small amounts, but my usage pattern hasn't changed, and meanwhile they've restricted HD streaming using Deep Packet Inspection or whatever, so I theoretically have a 100GB full speed cap but can't practically use more than 20gb anyway, so they're pricing the bandwidth into the contract but I can't save money by getting a lower ceiling |
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| ▲ | nozzlegear 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I'd love to have customers like Apple. Bumps $200: "it didn't change!!!" Try making a good product that people love? | |
| ▲ | ezfe 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The base storage increased as well, and the upgrade prices for RAM are the same, which is where the real issue was. | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > And no power adapter included. To be fair, ever since the advent of high power USB-C PD that really, really is not needed any more, way too many power bricks are effectively e-waste. People already have USB-C power bricks and docks everywhere and unlike pre-USB-C generations, you can use them not just across different generations of hardware, but across vendors as well. | | |
| ▲ | NetMageSCW 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I doubt if that many have USB-C high power bricks unless they are upgrading from another USB-C laptop. | | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 an hour ago | parent [-] | | > unless they are upgrading from another USB-C laptop. Which MacBooks have been for almost a decade - the 2016 MBP with Touch Bar was the first that went fully USB-C PD. Anyone who has had a MacBook in that time frame will have had at least one high power USB-C PD wall wart. The Windows world, as usual, has been different, but even there, I'm not aware of any mainstream model being sold in the last two years without even a single PD capable port. |
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| ▲ | re-thc 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It did change. They bumped $200 on the entire line. I wonder if that would happen regardless of RAM, e.g. for tariffs etc. | |
| ▲ | vile_wretch 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The EU forbids them from including power adapters. They're still included everywhere else. | | |
| ▲ | Romario77 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | EU doesn't forbid including. The new law requires there to be an option without the adapter. If the manufacturer chooses so they can have an option with and without the adapter. | |
| ▲ | hu3 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I can buy a laptop right now close to home and it comes with power adapter. | |
| ▲ | gambiting 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Except that it's literally not true and people are repeating it for some stupid reason, I assume you just never actually looked it up - laptops are specifically excluded from that regulation, and in fact Apple does bundle a power adapter with their laptops, just not on the cheapest models. | | |
| ▲ | jlokier 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > in fact Apple does bundle a power adapter with their laptops, just not on the cheapest models. Here in the UK, they no longer include the power adapter even with the top models. I just specced out a fully-loaded M5 Max Macbook Pro, 128GB RAM, 8TB storage on the Apple Store, and it doesn't include a power adapter by default. The 140W power adapter can be added as an option to the MacBook Pro for an additional £99 + VAT, or purchased separately. If you purchase separately you can of course choose a lower-power adapter for a lower price. Now that a power adapter isn't included and you have to pay for it separately, it might make more sense to get one of the good brands of GaN power adapters instead, because they are smaller than the Apple ones for the same power, and have more ports. | | |
| ▲ | gambiting 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >>Here in the UK, they no longer include the power adapter even with the top models That's incredibly stupid(of apple), I'm in the UK and literally got my M4 Max MacBook Pro delivered on Friday, it came with a power adapter. |
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