RAM — Blog — Healy Chen

We're all paying for it

You know RAM prices have truly gone off the deep end when Apple of all companies is raising prices on their products. The same Apple that famously already charges a premium for extra storage and memory. It seems even those fat margins are not enough to swallow the hyper inflation of semiconductor chips due to the supposedly AI revolution. It now costs $1999 for the base MacBook Bro, up from $1699. Kind of insane.

I guess this M1 Max MacBook Pro of mine will solider on until it literally dies.

All eyes now turn to the annual September iPhone event. Will the iPhone get a price bump for the first time in a long time? Place your bets at your prediction market platform of choice.

AI has been cashing checks and making promises (still a solution looking for a problem if you ask me), and yet the downstream negative effects are burdened by everyone. We’re all paying for it, just so Silicon Valley can keep on minting fresh new millionaires and bilionaires. An iPad for grandmother is now $150 more expensive - thanks to AI-caused inflation, even though AI won’t touch her everyday life in the slightest. Our utility bills keep going higher thanks to data centers drawing energy the equivalent of entire cities.

Whether you use Chat-GPT or not, you’re paying for it one way or another. That’s not very fair, is it?

Not enough memory

The generic, no suffix iPad is the best iPad for most people. I have the 9th-generation version, and it’s a great media consumption device. You know, for when I don’t want to turn on the TV, can’t be bothered with my MacBook Pro, or take the iPhone off the charger. First world problems demand first world solutions. We need devices with different display sizes to suit our immediate tastes, damn it!

Let me then continue to complain in a first world way: the standard iPad does not have enough RAM. The 3 GB in my iPad is paltry, and the 4 GB the 10th-generation now comes as standard is not that much better. The problem is using browser with lots of tabs open. There isn’t enough memory to keep everything on memory. Jumping between tabs can include lots of reloading. You had a spot in an article where you were reading? Well, you just lost it.

I’ve been eyeing an upgrade to the iPad Air with 8 GB of RAM, but the frugal me cannot force open the wallet. After all, I do have a MacBook Pro with 32 GB of memory. I could always use that for tab-intensive duties.

There’s got to be an end with memory inflation? The first laptop I ever bought - a 2007 MacBook - came with 2 GB of RAM. In 2025, the cheapest MacBook Air comes with 16 GB. It’s a chicken or the egg question: are apps truly demanding more memory, or are developers being lazy in building memory-hungry apps without a care? We’ve been joking about Google Chrome tabs using an absurd amounts of memory since tabs were a thing, and yet it seems the fix hasn’t ever come from the browser side! Manufacturers simply kept adding more RAM into their devices.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be jumping between tabs. Focus on one thing at a time, am I right?