To be fair I had an 8Gb M1 Mac mini for about a year and never even once felt like it was lacking memory. I could open as many things as I wanted and it didn’t slow down, so I can kinda see where they were going with this. Not saying it makes that situation much better though.

I think the current base iPhones with 4Gb or 6Gb suffer way more from lack of memory than the 8Gb Macs, and people aren’t taking about this enough.

On an Air, 8gb is the bare minimum that is realistically viable, for people who don’t do anything than browse the web

Thanks to the modern web, web browsing of one of the most RAM intensive tasks. Add a few Electron based apps and you're in hell.

Practically all of us know that the difference between these memory modules is pocket change, when mass produced like this, but for those extra couple cents, they get an extra 100$ from you

This is called capturing consumer surplus through segmentation. There's a pretty good explanation of it here.

The long and short of it is that some people are just perfectly fine spending more money on a macbook, and apple wants to give them a good enough excuse to do so.

Your assumption is based and factual

"With an apple silicon architecture, 8gb is like 16gb" -some stupid apple flunkey

removing features is ~~innovation~~ courage.

Honestly we're kinda edging up to the point where I think 32gb of ram should be the minimum, especially for heavy use cases like games and production jobs.

It's a strategy to push customers toward the more expensive models. Their markup is massive, it's a blatant profit move.

My 13 year old MB has 16GB.

It came with 8GB and at some point I spent $50 or so to add another 8GB.

You know, back when upgrading Macs was a thing.

This is just like the iPhone (lack of) storage and the (lack of) SD cards. Apple is trying to maximize profits by using less RAM and by forcing people into buying more hardware in a few years. Apple does a lot of stuff very well but then they also pull this crap.

I’m honestly even thinking to buy a €200 android device to get used to the system.

Don't. Unless it's a slightly older Pixel A-series 2nd hand phone. Manufacturers of cheap Android phones skimp on everything and add bullshit crapware. Shit like that is the cause of many "Android sucks" comments.

I’m honestly even thinking to buy a €200 android device to get used to the system.

Don't do that, I can tell you from experience: Most of them suck, especially cheap Chinese ones.

The Google Pixel 7a is currently $350 and it will get cheaper when the 8a comes out. The 7a will get security updates until May 2028. If you want to get into mobile device privacy/security, a Pixel is an excellent choice. You can install an alternative operating system called GrapheneOS, it's a much more private and secure, improved version of Android. It doesn't include Google spyware and thus also improves battery life. It also extends your feature updates, by default the 7a would only get feature updates until 2026, but GrapheneOS provides Android feature updates as long as the device gets security updates. That would mean 2 additional years of Android feature updates. I highly recommend it!

It's weird how you draw the line at MacBooks for being overpriced, considering every other apple device you name dropped is equally overpriced.

Yup. My MacBook Pro for work has 16GB and I keep running out of RAM. I can't fathom being limited to 8GB...

I guess it works for basic browsing and whatnot, but for any kind of professional work, you're going to have a bad time.

Except it's cost 3x more than average 8GB ram laptops