I don’t see it happening, at least not without significant changes to the card itself. The whole premise of the Apple Card is to provide tools and policies that help cardholders cut down on the types of spending that actually lead to card issuers making money. The Apple Card transaction volume would have to be really high to offset the lost opportunity for interest revenue, and if that were the case Goldman probably wouldn’t be struggling right now.

I don’t see what Chase has to gain from taking on this card. It’d need to be a non-dominant player with something to gain from growth.

They should add an “open control center” shortcut action for this purpose.

If the current MBP still charged $200 for 16gb of RAM but started at $200 less, you still wouldn’t buy it?

Not sure how an article that compares 8gb vs 16gb on otherwise the same CPU can possibly disprove a statement that 8gb on Apple Silicon = 16gb on x86. We need to see comparisons to the most closely comparable Intel chip.

Of course 16gb is better than 8gb on the same machine, that was never disputed by anyone.

I recently spent 3 days debugging the WiFi on my Windows PC because it wouldn’t connect to the internet at all through one of my satellites, and would not connect to certain domains (specifically Epic and Windows Store download services) from the base router. The problem ended up being fixed by assigning a static IP.

I’ve spent tons of time fighting with all sorts of other weird problems in the past, often sound related. My wife’s work computer (a PC) refuses to do sound output over DP or HDMI, for example.

Point being, Windows machines, due to the OS alone, are worth several hundred dollars less than Macs to me because they take so much babysitting and can break in weird ways at a moment’s notice.

If you market a product as “pro” targeting professionals or power users , 16gigs should be the base memory for those models.

Why? If they make the part for iPads and MBAs anyway, why not offer the choice of a lower-price model? You can’t conceive of a person who doesn’t need the extra memory but would like the better display and extra ports?

It’s absolutely too expensive by probably at least $200, but that’s different than saying it shouldn’t even exist.

They charge too much for 8gb, but so many articles are coming out that just fundamentally either misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent memory utilization and memory utilization metrics, and they’re really muddying the waters around whether or not the average person needs more than 8gb. I still believe the answer is “no” at least when using Apple Silicon. That doesn’t mean I think it’s sensible to pay $1600 for a computer with only 8gb of RAM, but let’s focus the discussion around the right thing: Apple charges too much for 8gb of RAM. The fact that the option is there is not a bad thing, and in fact would be actively a good thing if they priced more reasonably, because it would mean that there is a more affordable entry point for those people who do get by just fine on 8gb.

Even relatively casual users who load up on browser tabs and inefficient Electron apps (household names like Slack, Teams, Discord, etc.) can find performance compromised by running out of RAM.

Based on what? I have never found this to be true on personal machines. Perhaps if you load up on browser tabs and actively use all of them frequently then you’ll run into issues. That isn’t what most people who use a lot of tabs do, though. The tab is left open as a sort of lower-commitment for of a bookmark. The number of tabs actively used is generally not anywhere near equal to the number of tabs open. Swap handles this beautifully, and additionally, modern browsers are increasingly incorporating tab sleeping to help make both memory and power utilization of a lot of open tabs more efficient. Tab hoarders on desktop are probably tab hoarders on mobile, too, and you don’t often hear complaints about how iPhones don’t have enough memory because of all the tabs.

Electron apps are not as easily dealt with, but I don’t buy that the average user has more than one or two of those running at a time. If you do, then yes, you’ll need more RAM. That doesn’t mean the lower-RAM option shouldn’t exist, though.

As I write this, with just a handful of browser tabs open, Slack, and a distraction-free writing app (iA Writer—it’s great), I’m consuming just about 11GB on my M2 MacBook Air.

Apps will use it if it’s there. That doesn’t immediately mean you’ll notice performance degradation if it’s not. I’m using about double that RAM with roughly the same set of open stuff, not because what I’m doing right now demands 20gb of RAM, but because the RAM is there and isn’t needed for anything else, so the system can’t be bothered to care, and neither can the apps. A lot of modern software is garbage collected, meaning technically unused memory just sits there as long as more memory is available, because there’s no reason to take the compute hit of cleaning stuff up if it’s not hurting anything by being left behind. Software will intentionally bloat its memory utilization to fill the available memory, that is not the same thing as you “needing” that much RAM.

I would be really curious to see what the conversations would be if the current MacBook Pro were actually just called the MacBook, but was otherwise the same machine offered for the same price. My guess is we’d all be having the real discussion, which is that the 8gb base is actually just fine but the base price is too high (just like we did when the M2 MacBook Air launched, still with just 8gb of RAM, but for $200 more than the outgoing M1 MacBook Air).