The "heads I win, tails you lose" mentality
Antonio G. Di Benedetto for The Verge: I tested three Windows laptops in the MacBook Neo’s price range — there’s no contest
Each has an eight-core processor (versus six on the Neo), 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB, and between 256GB and 1TB of storage — the slowest of which is twice the speed of the Neo’s storage.
The article goes onto say that the Neo is a better experience for most people for most things than the similarly-priced Windows laptops, but I pulled this quote because I think it's telling. There's a class of Apple fan that puts Apple in a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation. Through the Apple silicon generation, Apple has been pushing the speeds of its RAM and SSDs higher and higher, typically ahead of what you'd get in mainstream PC parts. Faster computers are good, but it's led to an argument from some Apple fans that anything less than what Apple's offering at the highest end of RAM/SSD speeds is unworthy of people time and money.
In January 2024, I bought 32GB RAM for my gaming PC. It was fast, DDR5 memory, and it more than served its purpose for my needs. This RAM cost me $106, which was a tad (understatement of the year) more affordable than what it would cost to get that in a Mac, and I got a few people comment about how it was an apples to oranges comparison because the RAM in Macs was so much better than the RAM I was getting. My contention was basically, sure, but if I don't need the extra speed, then it's more than fine to get more of what I actually need (capacity and more than enough speed) than the top-of-the-line speeds MacBook Pros got us.
I don't have a personal story about being roasted for using an SSD slower than MacBook Pros, but as Apple fans have transitioned from "benchmarks don't express the experience of the product" to "this benchmark proves my Apple product is better" over the last decade, there has been plenty of obsession with SSD speeds as well.
Stating it again to be super clear, these are good things, and they push the performance of our devices forward.
That said, while Windows computers were critiqued to hell for not being exactly as fast as the highest end Macs, there was always leeway for other Macs. Remember when Macs with lower-capacity SSDs had literally half the performance of their higher end models? Remember when the M2 MacBook Air and Pro models actually got much slower after their M1 equivalents? Or, as referenced above, how the MacBook Neo has much slower RAM and SSD than not only every other Apple silicon Mac ever, but the budget Windows laptops it competes with in 2026? The sober takes today are that yes, these are not ideal, but hey, the only people who will notice are spec-obsessed critics who don't understand real users.
In short, Apple wins when they have the best SSD and RAM speeds because obviously faster is better, and they win when they don't have the best speeds because the vast majority of users don't need all that speed.
In my opinion, the only cogent position to have on this sort of thing is that clearly faster is better, but there's a line you eventually cross where most people don't really see the benefits in the things they do on a computer, and that line is below the state-of-the-art in 2026 when it comes to RAM and SSD speed. The line raises a bit every year as our computing demands increase, but we should all bring the "most people don't need absolute top of the line specs" energy to discussions of all computers, not just Apple's.
