The step down from 32GB to 24GB of unified memory is interesting. Theories? Perhaps they decided M4 allowed too much memory in the standard chip and they want to create a larger differential with Pro/Max chips?
Update: I am thinking the 24GB for M5 is a typo. I see on Apple's site the 14 inch MBP can be configured optionally with 32GB of RAM.
I had the same question, but I can only speculate at the moment.
The cynical part of me thinks in a similar line: create an artificial differentiation and push people to upgrade.
If anyone has any real clues that they can share pseudonymously, that would be great. Not sure which department drove that change.
They definitely do that. You could get 64gb ram without going up to the top spec of the Max tier of CPU in the M1 and M2 generations, but with the M4 Pro you can only do 24 or 48gb, while on the lower spec M4 Max you can only do 36gb and nothing else, only the absolute best CPU can do 64, therefore if you were otherwise going to get the 48gb m4 pro, you'd have to spend another ~$1200 USD to get another 16gb of ram if all you cared about was ram.
There may be a technical explanation for it, but incentives are incentives.
you can get 64GB on the mini with M4-Pro so that lays credence to no technical reason, but at the same time if the business reason was strong, why allow it on the mini but not in a macbook? I think this is equally likely to be due to reducing SKUs or something. E.g they found that most people buying 64GB ram do also buy the upgraded processor.
Ya, what you're talking about did spread a bit on the various forums when it became clear they were aggressively segmenting that market.
> E.g they found that most people buying 64GB ram do also buy the upgraded processor.
It seems like the way they've divided them, there's at least one more SKU than there would otherwise be, because of that base M4 Max with only 36gb of ram (can't get it with 24,48,64,96), so if you want the extra few cores, you now have to go to the max Max to get any more ram.
It took me a while to commit to the purchase, because I felt like an idiot implicitly telling them I'm okay with that bs pricing ladder, but at least I didn't over extend and go for the Max. They already charge comically too much for ram and storage.
I could be wrong about this but, if I had a guess, I'd say the 24GB M5 chips/systems exist due to binning.
Apple is designing and manufacturing a chip/chipset/system with 32GB with integrated memory. During QA, parts that have one non-conformant 8GB internal module out of the four are reused in a cheaper (but still functional) 24GB product line rather than thrown away.
Market segmentation also has its hand in how the final products are priced and sold, but my strong guess is that, if Apple could produce 32GB systems with perfect yield, they would, and the 24GB system would not exist.
The memory is not on-die, it’s separate (completely standard) memory chips, either DDR4 or DDR5 depending on which M-series CPU you’re looking at. So binning doesn’t really apply.
Seems like there's a misunderstanding on my part here. <reads more>
Ah, the memory is integrated in the same package (the "chip" that gets soldered onto the motherboard) as the integrated CPU/GPU, and I had understood that correctly. However, I had incorrectly surmised that it was built into the same silicon die.
Thanks for the correction!
Lesson: TIL about the difference between System-In-a-Package (SIP) and System-On-a-Chip, and how I had misunderstood the Apple Silicon M series processors to be SoCs when they're SiPs.
No worries! It’s made more difficult to understand by 1) Apple’s marketing, which does a great job of tricking people into thinking that the memory is actually integrated into the die without actually saying so, and 2) the fast-and-loose use of the SoC and SiP terms, which are often used interchangeably, including by Apple in official marketing materials [1].
M1 MBPs are still great laptops. In fact there are even Intel models from 2019 that are still officially supported. Apple is pretty much the last company it makes sense to accuse of planning obsolescence.
Yup, but only on the hardware side. On the software side, you are entirely at their mercy - unlike Windows which goes to utterly ridiculous length to keep software dating back to the Windows 95 era running on top notch Windows 11 systems, Mac developers are all too used of having to constantly keep up with whatever crap Apple has changed and moved around this time.
I've tried running old Civ2 on a recent windows machine, no dice.
I'm sure it's possible to do that, but the backwards compatibility on Windows is definitely not as good as you say.
That said, I'm also currently, as a fun personal project, converting a game originally intended to work on 68k Macs and which still has parts explicitly labelled as for resource forks, and I've lived through (and done work on) 68k, PPC, Intel, and M-series hardware, plus all the software changes, so I agree with you about Apple.
This gave me a flashback of me as a kid messing around with the "resource fork" of Mac applications. I felt like a major hackerman back then. During the era of "free" dialup ISPs, I would effectively remove the giant ad banners they all had.
That doesn't really have anything to do with planned obsolescence. Causing churn for developers is not intended to make people buy more Macs before they should need to, which is what planned obsolescence means.
A piece of software I got in 1995 (Earth Siege) is reasonably playable on a modern PC, no VM, no emulator, it just works (albeit with requiring compatibility mode).
No piece of Mac software anyone has bought in the late PPC Mac era can even run (!) at all natively on a modern Mac, and even early Intel Mac software will not run on the last Intel generation ever since macOS dropped 32-bit support in userspace entirely. You need to pay the developers for a new version, that's obsolescence by definition and particularly I'm still pissed about the 32 bit removal as that also killed off WINE running 32 bit apps which, you can probably guess, include many games that never got a 64-bit Windows binary because they were developed long before Windows x64 became mainstream (or into existence).
I do love Apple for high quality hardware, but I'll stick the finger to them till the day I die for killing off WINE during the Intel era for no good reason at all.
I understand all that. Nevertheless, it has nothing to do with planned obsolescence.
> You need to pay the developers for a new version, that's obsolescence by definition
Sure, but you don't have to pay Apple.
The entire point of the idea of planned obsolescence is companies intentionally making their products last less time than they should, so you have to pay that company more money.
This is a company making it so you might have to pay other companies more money, because backwards compatibility isn't a priority for them. You can be annoyed by that, sure, but it is not the same thing, and is not obviously corrupt like planned obsolescence is.
The churn means software eventually stops working on whatever macOS version your hardware EOL'd on. For example, builds of Firefox and Chrome deprecate older macOS APIs, therefore they can't run on older versions of macOS. This eventually happens for everything, including Homebrew.
There are tons of applications that strictly don't run from even windows 7 era. Some games work with a couple hours of looking up fixes and patches, some not even then. Interestingly I've been pretty succesful with wine/proton on those
Pulled shenanigans wrt TPM requirements for Windows 10 and 11. Actively trying to make sure people login to a Microsoft Account and making it hard to use Local Accounts.
> Mac developers are all too used of having to constantly keep up with whatever crap Apple has changed and moved around this time.
Mmm...
Win16 API
Win32 API (including variants like GoodLuckSystemCallExExEx2W(...))
MFC
ATL
.NET WinForms
.NET Avalon/WPF
Silverlight
MAUI
...
The thing is, MFC/ATL are _still_ supported. With the last release in October, 2024. And the Win32 API is so stable that people are joking that it's the only stable API on Linux.
.NET technologies... Yeah, MS dropped the ball there.
For what it's worth I'm running Mac mostly, outside of ham radio stuff because there's just so much stuff that only is available on Windows.
The thing with all the mentioned APIs is that, excluding 16 bit stuff (that got yeeted in Win7 x64, but if you did need it you could run W7 x32), you can still run software using them without too much of a hassle and you most probably can compile it if you need to fix a bug.
Good luck trying to get a Mac game from the 90s running on any Mac natively without an emulator/VM in contrast.
It does feel like planned obsolescence when companies like Apple limit software support for older hardware, Ubuntu run smoothly on much older devices. They could certainly do better by extending support and focusing on sustainability.
I see this criticism of Apple all the time and it’s completely at odds with my experience.
Our family iPad Pro is older than my 8-year old son, and still gets security patches. My wife’s phone is an XS Max, launched in 2018; iOS 26 is the first release that doesn’t support it - it will continue to receive security patches for the foreseeable future. My son’s school laptop is my old 8gb 2020 M1 Air, which continues to have stellar performance and battery life and could run Tahoe if I was crazy enough to want to upgrade it. My work machine is a 2021 M1 Pro that runs just as great as the day I bought it (thanks, Al Dente!). My 3 Apple TV 4Ks are I-have-no-idea-how-old but they are still being updated and just get out of the way like a TV box should.
I have no particular love for Apple (or any other company), but they’ve always treated me well as a customer. I can’t really think of another tech co that seems to make people as irrationally angry. Is it their marketing? I hate their marketing too. But their products and support are great.
Update: I am thinking the 24GB for M5 is a typo. I see on Apple's site the 14 inch MBP can be configured optionally with 32GB of RAM.