The majority of Apple owners are not using them for anything more than office productivity, light multimedia consumption, and web browsing. They rarely use more than two of those applications at a time.
Given iPhones have 6GB of RAM, I think 8GB is fairly generous for the average Apple user.
> I think you're making massive assumptions on how people use computers these days.
I hear this a lot, but my own experience doesn’t stack up. It’s just anecdata or whatever the cool kids say, but: my mother, two sisters and brother all have their own laptops. None of them work in tech, and I’ve never put my finger on the scale to persuade them to get a laptop either — if anything I’ve tried to persuade them to get iPads in the past so I don’t have to play IT department when something goes wrong.
For reference, my mother is a nurse practitioner, sister 1 is a daycare director, sister 2 is self-employed working for her husband’s construction company, and my brother just has odd jobs working at gas stations and youth counseling.
All four of them have asked me for some kind of help or advice about their laptops in the last couple of months, so I know they actively use them. My sister with the daycare called me just a couple days ago to help her get her laptop connected to a projector so she could give a PowerPoint presentation to her employees.
Sure, and generally, those are performed either in the same app or one at a time. All of those are also doable in 6GB of memory (iPhones and iPads are great for it).
"For iMovie for macOS, you can edit and share 4K video on Mac computers from 2011 or later with at least 4GB of memory." [0]
I think a lot of people over-purchase with Apple devices because they're not sure what the hardware specs mean and end up generalizing to cost. "Well, I /use/ my computer (for photos, video, etc) and that seems like it'd require more, so I probably shouldn't buy lowest tier... What's the next one up that I can afford?"
In the end, they feel good about their choice for being "just right", even though all of the options would have been.
I live in the SF Bay Area and know tons of people; and almost everyone is in tech.
I know exactly 2 people that program on their personal laptop, and one that does photo editing.
For everyone else it's a glorified Chrome or Safari browser. They almost all have whatever affordable Macbook they got the last time they needed a new laptop.
The only people I've ever heard complain about their laptops were non-Macbook users.
Yeah, everyone I know uses their MacBooks for work, coding, music, music and video editing, photo editing, some games, some doing AI/ML (though this is currently the minority), lots of crappy Electron apps like MS Teams, Slack, Spotify, 1Password, Chrome etc…
I can't edit this comment anymore so I'll just add here that I misread smcleod's comment – I thought they were implying that most people don't use computers/laptops these days, something that I've heard in tech circles before.
Sorry, but I think you forgot to make your actual point.
You haven't mentioned how your "anecdata" supports either viewpoint.
Do they have Apple laptops? What actual applications do they use? Do they run out of memory?
I can't see a previous comment from you that would provide context...
I was only making a point to the part of the comment that I quoted, where they surmised that most people don't use computers these days. I don't personally think this bit of tech folklore holds true.
Edit: actually I see now that I misread the comment, so my reply was indeed out of place.
To back parent's point, students (including moddle/high school) have roughly the same requirements and can get by with iPads or chromebooks, sometimes with 4Gb(!) of RAM.
So I'd agree there's some non negligible amount of users that will be fine with the absolute most basic functioning computer.
The question could be why that user base would buy a Mac when they could get something way more cheaper and probably better adapted to their needs ? My answer would be they don't need to care about the money or utterly like macs, and it's their choice. It's still surprising Apple caters to those users though.
AI is here now and here to stay. By locking students into RAM suited for 2008~ era machines you’re locking them out of any local AI / LLM tooling and to the current apps they can (just) run today. RAM is super cheap - we can’t normalise companies hamstringing devices at almost no cost savings just to lock people into future upgrades.
Agreed, but better-than-middling small model local LLM inference on the M-series has largely been a happy accident that Apple have been silently capitalizing on without bothering to correct. They were first in mobile, not the best.
Generative performance and training are poor to nonexistent, Core ML is incomplete and underdeveloped, memory bandwidth was decreased on the M3 Pros, and eGPUs don't work with Apple Silicon - and what, normalizing 16GB of memory will encourage Apple to stop segmenting when they already have so little to offer? They're paygating /inference/ performance beyond their Pro chips. That's their official stance.
Even Intel wasn't prepared for the Cambrian explosion of AGI, and their libraries and APIs have been taught in higher ed for the past decade. The good news is that Apple are not the best or only consumer option and will likely be out-classed by AMD and Intel in the next 18 months. The price of any new Mac for inference today would be better spent renting GPU time.
I'm a SWE by day. But on my personal Mac all I do is have a tons of Chrome tabs open, Discord, Apple Notes and Spotify. Once in a while I'll compile and run random projects off GitHub (nothing too heavy) for fun.
Given iPhones have 6GB of RAM, I think 8GB is fairly generous for the average Apple user.