Not mentioned in the article, but another motivation behind this could be that with split a CPU/GPU Apple could try to up-sale on both when purchasing Macs.
The prices they charge just to go from 16GB to 32GB of RAM is outrageous ($400 for Macbook pro).
I love the fact you can buy two 16GB/256GB Mac Minis and have cash leftover compared to somone that bought a single 32GB/512GB Mac Mini. Apple's upsells are insane
Hahaha wow I just checked Apple UK and the base 16GB/256GB is £600. 32GB upgrade is +£400, 512GB upgrade is +£200.
It should not cost that much! 2x Mac mini M4 16GB/256GB should not cost the same as 1x Mac mini M4 32GB/512GB!
Can someone help explain this in a way that isn’t just absolute price gauging of the higher end customer base? Are the components genuinely that much more expensive?
>Price gouging is a pejorative term used to refer to the practice of increasing the prices of goods, services, or commodities to a level much higher than is considered reasonable or fair by some. This commonly applies to price increases of basic necessities after natural disasters. Usually, this event occurs after a demand or supply shock.
Using the term "price gouging" anytime a potential buyer thinks a seller is asking for too much money renders it meaningless. I ask for as much money as the buyers for my labor will pay, as I assume the people selling to me do also.
It's just business, you try to earn as much as possible (and that could involve not maximizing in a specific transaction to incentivize repeat business in the future). But in no way is anyone under any duress when deciding to buy an Apple device, so if a buyer does not feel like being price gouged, they should buy something else.
> Can someone help explain this in a way that isn’t just absolute price gauging of the higher end customer base?
It's a pretty normal pricing strategy. It's more common than not. Most products or services you buy anywhere will be sold at higher margins for more premium offerings.
It might seem strange when compared to legacy PCs with socketed components, but this isn't that, nor are most products. Even among PCs this isn't strange anymore: go take a look at MS's pricing on their first-party PCs.
Calling this "price gouging" is not really the right use of the term -- usually it refers to price increases of basic necessities in emergency situations.
Microsoft isn't a great example. They basically just crib Apple's approach. And they do at least still have socketed storage so that's very cheap to upgrade if you do it that way.
All of the big OEMs are soldering memory on at least some (if not all) of their thin-and-lights, and I haven't seen a single one priced at margins that weren't significantly above the cost of materials.
Either way, my point is that flat margin pricing is exceedingly rare. Everywhere from the grocery store to the car dealer is charging higher margins on more premium products.
Luxury cars have higher margins than economy cars. Organic milk has higher profit margins than regular milk. And Macs with 32GB of memory have higher profit margins than Macs with 16GB of RAM. The fact that the desktops PCs of our past priced RAM upgrades nearly at cost was an outlier; a courtesy, not anything normal.
It is basic microeconomics that a seller wants to be able to get as high of a price as buyers are willing to pay, but since different buyers have different abilities and willingnesses to pay, a seller can maximize their revenue by providing options at different price points.
Especially with societal wealth gaps, the people able and willing to pay higher prices are going to be able to pay higher price premiums, resulting in higher profit margins.
The reason why the change to 16gb was such a big deal was at least in part because it meant people didn't feel forced into shelling out 200 dollars (or whatever it was) for an extra 8gb of RAM.
It creates this weird dichotomy of having arguably the best value computer on the market in the base mac mini with 16gb of RAM and 256gb of storage and some of the absolutely worse value upgrades (like spending $400 on 16gb of RAM or $200 on 256gb of storage).
There's not much to explain here; they price gouge upgrades because they can. People that want/need MacOS for their work will pay for it, even if begrudgingly. I'm not necessarily happy about paying that much for these spec bumps but the benefits of using a Mac still outweigh the cons for me.
If gravitational waves can be detected by looking at pulsars, then what is the purpose of LIGO and ground-based gravitational wave observatories? Is there any difference in the waves detected by LIGO and those from observing pulars?
As mentioned in the sibling comment, different frequencies means probing different things.
I found this talk[1] rather nice to explain the NANOGrav experiment, and at 6:45 there's a very nice plot that shows where NANOGrav fits in compared to the other gravitational wave experiments and which type of sources the various experiments can probe.
LIGO detects gravitational waves in the frequency range of hundreds of Hertz (10^2 Hz), which are produced in the last moments of the in-spiraling of merging neutron stars or blackholes.
Nanohertz are 10^-9 Hz which relate to a rotational period of decades of years.
Those two methods observe waves of much different wavelength/frequency, and the mechanisms that create such different wavelengths are assumed to be different. So cosmologists are studying different things by looking at different wavelengths.
I have to disagree with you. I know people who genuinely spend 10+ hours a day on the net, completely wasting their time. These aren't people who are browsing HN for short breaks while working. These are the people who live in their parents basements or dorm rooms playing league of legends, watching twitch or browsing reddit while ignoring classes, education and/or serious work.
Newspapers and radio didn't result in people spending 40+ hours a week following the news. There probably are some people addicted to TV, but it's such a minority that we don't consider it an issue.
Just a personal anectode, but I definitly agree. I've very likely had an average screentime of 8h on the phone per day for the past the past 10 years of my life. With only few timeframes inbetween where it has been less. Only this year it has gotten somewhat better. And I don't think I am the only perspn like that.
I can't help but feel uneasy about the implications for accuracy and trustworthiness. It's reminiscent of the current state of search engines, where ads often compromise the user experience. I'm curious to see how long it takes for ad-supported LLMs to become the standard, and if we'll eventually see Kagi-esque alternatives rise to offer paid, more reliable versions.
Those apps are still banned as per III.A.c of the Twitter Developer Agreement and Policy [1]. These new limits are for the remaining users of the Twitter API (bots, social media managers, data analyzers, etc.).
For the unfamiliar: "Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other."
This announcement was released simultaneously with 6 papers that use the newly released data. They are linked in the bottom of the press release and are definitely worth checking out.
The prices they charge just to go from 16GB to 32GB of RAM is outrageous ($400 for Macbook pro).