[Nicole060]

> So I can't blame Apple for feeling the same way. When they originally released iPad 1, they probably didn't quite anticipate how graphical and visual the user interfaces would eventually turn out to be.

Oh yeah ? Apple has always skimped out on ram on every single device and made you pay a premium to get more. That wasn't a real problem on macs in the past because it wasn't difficult to add ram yourself, but now with tablets and the new macbook air and macbook pro retina.. that's kind of a problem.

I bought one of the first macbook air that had the ram soldered to the board without thinking. If I had known that Mac OS Lion and Mountain Lion would've become so bloated I wouldn't have bought the 2gb model that I sold for a measly 200 euros recently. This piece of shit couldn't browse the web with multiple tabs open without swapping even though the same task was okay in the past with Windows XP and 512mb of ram. (I probably could have gotten more but I didn't WANT to sell it for more because I would have felt like I'd be robbing someone by selling them a defective device for a premium) By the way, there wasn't a single PC vendor selling laptops with less than 4gb of ram, when I bought my MBA, even el cheapo laptops that sold for $400 had 4gb of ram (what does it says about Apple ?). I was kind of retarded to buy the 2gb MBA, and I should've spent a little more for the 4gb, but I don't really regret it either since I opened my eyes and sold all my Apple devices, and will never buy anything from apple again.

It was obvious to a LOT of people that the first iPad was way too lacking in power and would be prone to something akin to planned obsolescence. Even me, who got fucked by the Macbook air, knew that the first iPad was indecent (I waited for the iPad 2 before I got my first tablet.)

Look at the top of the line in the android world : the (tablet) Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, which has a much lower resolution than the iPad Retina (and thus less hefty memory needs for the apps), has 2gb of ram inside, future proofing it a bit against future applications. The (phone) Galaxy Note 2 also has 2gb of ram, as do some of the variants of the Galaxy S3, now that's a real top of the line phone. When I saw the retina iPad for the first time, my first impressions, after the initial "wow" you get for the screen, was, the specs are underwhelming for this kind of device.

Apple is all about the shiny. The 13" Macbook Pro still has 4gb of ram as a standard in the entry level, even though it sells for 1249 euros. I've seen PC laptops under 999 euros sold with 8gb of ram, 1TB hard drives, core i7 and a nvidia chip inside (rather than the shitty intel graphic chip that's included in the entry MBP).

I'm done getting ripped off by Apple.

[taligent]

I really don't know where to start with this ridiculous diatribe.

Firstly as for your MacBook Air. OSX runs fine with 2GB and shouldn't be swapping constantly for browsing. And not sure why you are complaining that you got 200 euros for a 4 year old machine.

Secondly you seem to be really bitter about not buying the cheaper and arguably nastier laptops. Why not buy them ? Clearly the only thing that concerns you is specs so why not buy an Apple ?

Thirdly a LOT of people thought the iPad was an incredibly feat of engineering to get all that it did into such a small form factor. Seems to be a lot of revisionist history there.

[Nicole060]

>Firstly as for your MacBook Air. OSX runs fine with 2GB and shouldn't be swapping constantly for browsing

What the hell are you smoking. Safari with multiple tabs will eat all the remaining memory. The whole system itself took 1,4 gb, there was only 700 mb left after startup on a CLEAN system, formatted and reinstalled without a single program running in the background (Mountain Lion).

> And not sure why you are complaining that you got 200 euros for a 4 year old machine.

Two years old actually. It's a late 2010 MBA. And I'm not complaining, I'm actually saying that I could have sold it for more but didn't bother and sold it myself for 200 euros to get rid of it faster AND to avoid the feeling of ripping off someone (which I would have felt if I had sold it for more, because I consider it a DEAD machine. A useless machine. You can't add ram and the base system is already overloaded with its 2gb. Selling it for what I could have gotten from it (you should look up what people can actually get from selling Apple devices even when they suck) would have been ripping off someone else.)

>Secondly you seem to be really bitter about not buying the cheaper and arguably nastier laptops. Why not buy them ? Clearly the only thing that concerns you is specs so why not buy an Apple ?

I just did that, right now. Am I not free to speak my mind on Apple just like you did when you called those laptops "nasty" ?

> Thirdly a LOT of people thought the iPad was an incredibly feat of engineering to get all that it did into such a small form factor. Seems to be a lot of revisionist history there.

Putting mobile phone hardware inside an iPad's case is not a great "feat of engineering". I would have agreed with you if you called iOS a great feat of (software) engineering, and its user interface revolutionary for the time. But there is nothing special about the iPad's hardware. We got mobile phones today that are far more powerful than the first iPad and many mobile phone at the time had hardware similar to the iPad, it's not like Apple did anything special there, they just put a big screen and battery inside an aluminum case, where in the flying fuck do you see a great feat of engineering ? the bullshit, it hurts.

Ultimately, what's attractive about apple is what their software engineers do. And what's pushing me off is their business practice, closedness, cheapening out on specs to create planned obscolescence.

iOS was what made the iPad great and possible, as it did for the iPhone. And OS X used to be a great OS, until they added so much bloat it couldn't run on 2gb of ram. No apple fanboy here is going to admit it, but the iPad had 256mb of ram to ensure that people would upgrade to the next iPad, end of the line. Just like the first iPhone didn't have 3g even when top of the line phones from competitors had 3g, to make the early adopters spend even more money the year after.

Apple has been ripping off its customers since forever, it's just the last straw. Do you remember the days of the cd-writer/dvd reader combo you could find on many Macs even when the cheapeast PCs had DVD writers ? I do. Apple is a cheap company, that sells cheap hardware with an expensive case. It's hard not to think so, I can recall so many examples of them behaving that way. Do you know the price difference there was even back in the days of the combo drives in the mac between a combo and a dvd writer ? Nothing, it was practically nothing, a matter of a few euros. But to get a mac with a dvd writer inside you had to buy the one that cost much more in the lineup with a better processor and so on. Ridiculous. I can't believe we, as in the collective of Apple customers around the world, put up with so much shit for so long.

The only thing that saves Apple is the software, and it won't last for long, because the competition is getting much better at this. Windows 7 is stable and really nice to use, Android Jelly Bean runs as smooth on my Nexus 7 as iOS did on my iPad 2. Goodbye Apple, it was fun while it lasted.

[nicholassmith]

I have a 2010 MBA with 2Gb of RAM, it only chugs on browser stuff when I've got a VM running and compiling, a terminal running various bits and 3 windows with about 6-7 tabs open. It works fine. Your personal experience is not a good way to go "What the hell are you smoking", as there's many of us with that model who've had nothing but happy happy joy times with it.

[LordIllidan]

I am going to have to agree with Nicole060 here. I recently bought one of the new Macbook Pros for work - non retina, 4GB RAM.

It became as slow as hell. I am a developer.. I need at least one VM with IE open, I need to have Chrome open, photoshop open, xcode, etc. Luckily I was able to upgrade it with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM, and it's now a pleasure to work with.

Apple only offers an 8GB increase on their online store at 100$ for my macbook pro.. and at a 100$ increase.. In my opinion, 8GB should be standard.

I love my Macbook, wouldn't give it up, I like using OSX, but I really do believe that Apple tends to rip us off when it comes to specs. And FYI, I can't imagine using OSX with 2GB.. my mac mini had 2 GB of RAM and it ran like a pig until I got 4GB of RAM into it.

We all know Apple has outrageous margins on their products.. fine, I am not against them making money. However, I do wish they invested more into their products.

[jasomill]

I've seen a 2GB mini running Lion where Excel and Word were all but unusable whenever a Time Machine backup started. Perhaps a bit of tuning would have fixed the problem, but additional RAM was an easier fix.

On the other hand, on my 4GB (Ivy Bridge, 11-inch) MacBook Air, I regularly run Visual Studio on Windows (8, 32-bit) under VMware, with IE, IIS, and MS SQL Server running in the VM, along with a number of OS X apps (Terminal, Activity Monitor, Console, Safari, Mail, Preview, Emacs, X11, Script Debugger, and several resident utilities like Alfred and SizeUp), and have no problem dipping in and out of larger apps like Illustrator and Photoshop as needed with few performance problems beyond short (no more than a second or two) delays when switching to a long-inactive app. Do my 8GB MBP work more smoothly? Undoubtedly. But I'm running a much larger Windows (Server 2012, 64-bit) VM on this, and often another Windows, FreeBSD, or Linux VM, and I rarely quit anything unless I'm updating it or rebooting, so I generally have all of the above open plus iTunes, Xcode, Transmit, Excel, QuickBooks, and half of CS6. The only time I see even minor delays is when I nearly overcommit RAM or CPU cores in VMware, open insanely large files (in Photoshop, say), concurrently run several large, parallel compilations that manage to peg nearly an entire core in kernel mode, or go to town with live output from frequently fired dtrace probes.

Were you, by chance, swapping to a mechanical hard drive? If so, and for anyone else whose Mac "crawls" with lots of apps loaded, the single best way to make your machine usable is to replace the hard drive with an SSD. All recent MacBooks that don't come with "built-in flash storage" have user-replaceable hard drives (as in, "easy directions in the manual and doesn't void AppleCare"); the Sandy and Ivy Bridge models even support 6Gbps drives at full speed.

As for the iPad 1, I thought it was slow even on iOS 3.2. It was still quite usable and useful, however.

[LordIllidan]

Yes, both are using mechanical harddisks.

I also use utilities like Alfred, etc... I can see how a fast SSD makes your system smoother.

An SSD is my next desirable upgrade.. but a considerable expense seeing as I need at least 512GB (I dualboot OSX and Windows)

[danbee]

Check out the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive. I put one in my MacBook Pro and it's a screamer. Almost as fast as a standalone SSD.

[achompas]

Firstly as for your MacBook Air. OSX runs fine with 2GB and shouldn't be swapping constantly for browsing. And not sure why you are complaining that you got 200 euros for a 4 year old machine.

This wasn't true for me on my 2GB 2006 Macbook running Snow Leopard in 2009, so I don't see how it could be true now.

Thirdly a LOT of people thought the iPad was an incredibly feat of engineering to get all that it did into such a small form factor.

Marco is spot-on here, though: many reviewers commented on the frequent page reloading in Safari, claiming (correctly) that the RAM would be an issue in the future. This was the main issue preventing me from getting an iPad 1.