What Apple wants to happen is for you to eat into your soldered SSD's endurance (TBW) through virtual memory swapping out RAM to your storage volume so that you Buy More Stuff.
I investigated my unexpectedly high disk writes and made a few changes, disabled some MacOS services, disabled write-caching for video in Firefox etc and this reduced my write volume by tens of gigabytes per day. By this point I think I'd written 50TB of the drives TBW in a year which was significant/
This is particularly relevant if you use a mac with a soldered SSD, because when you approach endurance ratings the drive will probably fail spectacularly and your computer will unrepairable by reasonable means.
I don’t think the “Buy More Stuff” theory actually applies here. The average purchaser of the 8/256 model just uses it as a Chromebook with a fancy logo. By the time they hit the TBW limit they’ll likely have upgraded anyways because the battery will be completely degraded.
On the other hand, the average person who purchases a computer with the knowledge that they need to perform data-intensive tasks will likely also understand that 8/256 is not sufficient for their needs.
Thus, the amount of Mac owners that will realistically actually run into premature SSD failure is probably pretty low.
Apple is just running a multi-pronged strategy here: a “good enough” model for 90% of people, and then a “squeeze every last penny out of them” approach for the people who require performance and are willing to pay the Apple tax.
The actual downsides of this approach are pretty limited, as the swap is fast enough that it won’t create a class of newly disgruntled Mac owners annoyed that their Mac “got slow just like a pc”.
Miserly from their side? Sure. But I’m certain the beancounters weighed every aspect and decided that their RAM budget per board was $2, so 8gb it was. Spending an extra $1.30 for a 16gb LPDDR4X chip would break the bank.
Those are actual, current spot prices on those chips. A 150x profit margin on that upgrade from 8 to 16gb makes for some nice fat CEO bonuses. Where do you think the money to pay Tim Apple his 99 million dollar compensation last year came from?
Great points. Obviously its about maximum profit, and it's 8GB only because they can get away with it with virtual memory and 3GB/s SSDs making swap mostly unnoticeable to the end user - the side effect being for heavy users in a few years needing a whole new board because the SSD endured prematurely. I don't care much for imagining a typical user as a technology person isn't a typical user. Most normal people I know expect a computer to last 5-6 years and will just take it to a repair guy to replace the battery or whatever if its out of warranty. Except what repair person can desolder and replace SSD chips on a motherboard? Buy More Stuff I guess!
+1. When there were still spinning HDDs, some of this fuckery was obvious, like spotlight indexing all the time like crazy. This might still happen, or happen again, but we sheeple would'nt know because SDDs are much quieter than HDDs.
What Apple wants to happen is for you to eat into your soldered SSD's endurance (TBW) through virtual memory swapping out RAM to your storage volume so that you Buy More Stuff.
I investigated my unexpectedly high disk writes and made a few changes, disabled some MacOS services, disabled write-caching for video in Firefox etc and this reduced my write volume by tens of gigabytes per day. By this point I think I'd written 50TB of the drives TBW in a year which was significant/
This is particularly relevant if you use a mac with a soldered SSD, because when you approach endurance ratings the drive will probably fail spectacularly and your computer will unrepairable by reasonable means.