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Comment by BatteryMountain | Hacker News Reader

How are companies still releasing hardware with 8GB RAM? My MacBook Air from ~2016 has 8GB of RAM.

My first PC which had 8GB of RAM was built in ~2010 if I remember correctly. My current machine has 32GB. In all honesty, 32GB is not even much, considering my motherboard can take 128GB (in the old days, if your motherboard could take max 8GB RAM, people would fill all the slots to capacity). Also, I have a Lenovo machine that I paid $200 for that has 8GB RAM.

WHY any power user would buy a MacBook is beyond me. They've become devices that only my mother would use, not to get work done.

Apple should've made the baseline 32GB with 128GB as max spec. It would've forced the whole industry to give us more RAM. So for the next two years RAM will still be stagnant, all other manufacturers that copies Apple will indeed keep shipping 8GB without blinking.

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This was an expected step of the evolution of the Memory Hierarchy. RAM is just bigger-but-slower CPU cache. Swapfile is just bigger-but-slower RAM. There's always a trade-off between size and speed.

Incorporating RAM into the CPU package gives a big performance boost at the expense of maximum capacity. To compensate for the reduced performance in tasks that require more memory, you can either add another layer into the Memory Hierarchy (i.e. CPU Cache -> Fast RAM -> Slow RAM -> Swapfile), or you can improve Swapfile speed. It appears Apple have done the latter - they claim their SSD is up to 2x faster.

Video game consoles have done something similar with the latest generation. Only a 2x increase in RAM from the last generation (compared to an 8x/16x increase from the generation before), but a focus on storage performance.

Jisss to be honest the new PlayStation and Xbox hardware is amazing, specificially how the memory/cpu/mobo and streaming system will work. Wish we had something like that in PC land. Then again, their workflow is basically streaming data from disk, thus this round they optimized that hell out of that chunk of the pipeline.

Hopefully AMD learn lessons from that sphere and can bring some of that to our sphere.

The problem I see with the PlayStation 5 at least is repairs, if the solded SSD kick the bucket you will probably need to: buy a new chip from Sony and resolder the fault one (or even worse, resolder the entire SSD chips because you can't rely in which cell is physically the data and swapping the cell will probably corrupt the entire disk), or buy a new PS5/Motherboard

You can't just swap the hard disk like before, I'm sure this you be a major headache with repairs

Battery life is easier to market than an acronym that sounds like it's either related to trucks or sheep.

RAM eats battery. Apple has made a strategic decision to pretend RAM doesn't exist, ship underpowered hardware, then brag about the battery life.

This is also the reason RAM is not listed on iPhone specs.

If I remember correctly the iPhone Pro 12 Max has twice as much RAM as the other 12 models and it's nowhere in the marketing materials. This is not accidental, it's a fundamental part of Apple's strategy.

EDIT: The max has 6GB and the rest of the line has 4GB. That is not twice as much. I did not remember correctly.

The performance of the phones seem to be smooth compared to Android phones with similar ( or more) RAM. The difference comes from vertical optimization, so the raw numbers on RAM would not give us a full picture.

The whole Android ecosystem is mostly written in Java which could also be another reason why it needs relatively more RAM for comparable performance.

While Java GC on Android may not always be optimal in regards to memory utilization (given that there are other concerns) and AFAIK doesn't allow tuning like you can do for enterprise Java apps it seems like quite a few improvements have been made over time and many GC implementations have resulted from this: https://proandroiddev.com/collecting-the-garbage-a-brief-his...

Personally, i'd look at how common cross-platform apps are and how many of the frameworks (like Ionic and React Native) don't always use the native system UI in an efficient manner.

It seems a bit like running Electron apps on GNU/Linux and being puzzled about where all of the RAM goes.

The Native UI in React Native is where Native comes from in the name. Nothing to do with an electron app which is a full fledged browser with a node process attached to it. Not a fair comparison by large

And yet, that is not the case! While ReactNative might not result in quite as big of a performance penalty as embedding a browser engine, its performance can still be worse than actual native apps, given that it adds additional abstractions to make developer's lives easier and allow for cross-platform development: https://medium.com/swlh/flutter-vs-react-native-vs-native-de...

While one could argue that there aren't that many visually driven experiences like that out in the wild, the benchmarks still prove that most abstractions have drawbacks.

Of course, there are good reasons for using them, which is also why many choose even the previously mentioned Electron platform for development, instead of something like Qt/GTK on desktop.

But for the discussion at hand, it simply serves as a suggestion that there's more at play here than just "Java uses a lot of memory and can be slow".

It is not straight comparison.

The relative openness of Android means your are not always getting the most optimized ROM , a lot of vendors add custom crapware into their phone OOTB.

The vendors, who also design phones are not optimizing vertically, as you mentioned.

Yes, and because people should stop making apps that take 1gb to show some text layout, and pictures.

I am very happy that with all their faults, Apple still ridicules the Webdev crowd

Lots and lots of people use their laptops in a way where there's little to no noticeable difference between 8GB and 16GB RAM. Why should those people pay extra for something they don't need? I think the HN crowd - with 4 docker VMs, 3 electron apps, 50 Chrome tabs, ML training, long compile times, etc - need to realize that their workloads and needs are not representative of the majority of users. It's ok for Apple to also make computers for people that are not you.

Uhm. Adding 16GB RAM instead of 8GB costs almost nothing and which by far and large, is useful to all users. The only reason why they ship 8 GBs is because they want to sell you upgrades, similar to why Apple products come with miniscule SSD hard drives. Certainly, only professionals would need something like 512GBs right?

Almost nothing if you buy a PC. Look at the markups for a RAM upgrade in Macs, it’s gut wrenchingly greedy.

Not an argument the parent was discussing. You still compare it to Macs which is not the point.

It's the same RAM, as long as you have one of the few models that is still upgradeable at all.

The fact that so many laptops have gone to soldered-in RAM is an entirely different problem, those are all ripoffs no matter what.

Yes but those certain professionals can now only upgrade to 16GB on a MacBook Pro in 2020 which is shameful. Oh and it's soldered so you have to buy the beefed up version today, cannot upgrade the RAM 6 months from now.

Go look at a non-techie webbrowsing habits alone: they have 50 tabs open in chrome, some of which are months old. And they install all sorts of other crappy software, anti-virus, browser extensions. Some of them use Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer at the same time. And/Or if they use Slack/Steam/Spotify/VS Code/etc they are running another 300MB RAM per app.

If you are a programmer, try all that, with Visual Studio or Eclipse running, sometimes at the same time as Android Studio with an emulator running, maybe with a local postgres or sql server etc... it easily eats up that 16Gb. Oh lets sprinkle some docker/vagrant ontop..

Good luck if you are into video/image editing, 3d modeling, illustrating, CAD etc... then MacBook Pro's are basically the wrong tool for the job today, where it became very famous for being the right tool for the job in ~2010.

Same problem with Intel CPU's...they've been riding the wave of success of their initial chip redesign for 10 years and now AMD seems to be wrecking them every 6 months.

My problem with the RAM situation is that we've been paying ~$100 for 16GB for 5 years now.. instead of getting scale up to ~$100 to 64GB and down to ~$25 for a 16GB dim. The RAM companies riding the wave too at the moment. Luckily SSD's forced HDD manufacturers to up their game else we would've still paid ~$200 for 500GB hdd with 8mb cache, so now we at least have 10TB+ drives avail for consumers.

Months-old Chrome tabs are not resident in RAM.

> It's ok for Apple to also make computers for people that are not you.

Yes, it's perfectly fine to sell machines like these with specs from 2012 but their efficiency should be reflected in the price. Honestly, what Apple is doing now seems like pushing power users buing new hardware towards non-macOS systems.

Apple: Populism sells more than power users. Here's a 'free' apple sticker.

Maybe HN needs the docker VMs however I have yet to see a single laptop which doesn't atleast run 3 electon apps and 10-20 tabs in a browser.

Even worse is that the RAM upgrade pricing hasn't changed in almost a decade.

When I bought my 2012 MacBook Air more than eight years ago it cost me 100 euros to upgrade from 4 to 8 GB of RAM.

Currently it costs 225 euros in the German Apple Store to upgrade form 8 to 16 GB, which is a higher per GB price than in 2012!

I upgraded my MacBook in 2012 from 4 to 16gb for 110 euro... Just put new memory even before first booting

it seens that RAM is now in the package, making it very very hard (almost impossible in practical terms) to upgrade.

Right? Or did I miss something?

yes, right now memory is built-in into the motherboard... So you need to buy overpriced memory from Apple (and it makes me think about leaving Apple platform)

With the new macs, the RAM is on the chip. So even the mini can't be upgraded once you buy it.

That's (slightly) unfair because obviously the RAM produced in 2012 isn't the same as the RAM produced in 2020. Better to compare Apple's price against the cost of top-of-the-line RAM available for other laptops. I checked around and it looks like you can get 8GB 3200MHz DDR4 from a highly respected brand for 56 USD, while Apple will sell you some mystery RAM for 200 USD. It's not an (ahem) apples-to-apples comparison because the Apple RAM is closely integrated with the SOC, but I think it's fair to say they're making a comfortable margin.

https://www.amazon.com/HyperX-HX424S14IB2-2400MHz-Unbuffered...

Do we truly believe that on die memory has similar costs? I don't see how this is remotely possible but its going to take tear downs of both configurations to check what is going on; as in are the 8gb units using chips which never had the circuitry or perhaps disabled by hardware and its still there?

For a work laptop that only serves as an interface to a personal workstation set up in a server room, Macs are so much more enjoyable to use. No worrying about wifi drivers, being able to use the Mac touchpad etc.

Absolutely agree. - First they took away the ability to upgrade RAM, then to change HD/SSD. What‘s next: Can‘t boot any other OS. - Taking away freedom step by step.

I am a die hard Apple products aficionado, I don‘t use any other computing device, but why are many HN commentors stubbornly defending every Apple decision that limits its users is way beyond me.

Edit: Re taking away freedom: Let‘s not forget the many app store dramas on iOS. This is Apple‘s vision for macOS as well: Install only approved apps, show a warning for all other apps (and finally disallow them?)

On paper the new Macs seem like Raspberry Pis with a fancy case and display.

I was thinking the same thing. I have new Pi and it's pretty close performance wise to my old Mac Mini which is still a fine desktop PC.

Seriously considering getting a Pi for Christmas (8gb) as my current laptop is slowly dying, and just do python on it and return to a simpler life.

My 2012 Macbook Pro was also slowly dying. As a Hail Mary I opened it up, cleaned it and renewed the thermal paste on CPU and GPU. Now it's back to old speeds!

so maybe we can expect raspintosh?

The new raspberry pi 400 ?

Plus a significantly more polished OS, which is the reason I enjoy coding on my Mac.

I'm also a fan of macOS, but those hardware specs (RAM, SSD) were weak 5 years ago.

There’s a fairly significant performance difference between Apple’s new cores and the Pi 4’s A72s.

If you ignore that and the high-end display, touchpad, and keyboard, then I suppose it’s not too far off from a Pi in a fancy case, but then you could say the same for any laptop.

The specs that irk me are RAM and SSD, even more since they started soldering them on. CPU & GPU were always kinda on par with the rest of the field.

In 2012, the same Mac mini case held a cooling system for a 45W chip, 2x2.5" storage bays (or one storage bay and a DVD-Drive), 2 RAM slots, and had three more ports and a card reader. They really used every last corner.

The new one is apparently half empty: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22027513/m...

None of these new M1 devices will be densely packed. They’re putting smaller boards into the same enclosures. I assume next gen is when they will take advantage of space savings.

And this is not only about 2020, most likely people will use the machine till 2025. ( Also consider the fact that Apple solders the RAM to motherboard. )

Apple is in the business of making money not pushing the industry towards benefiting users.

Not only the base spec is 8GB but the largest possible upgrade is 16GB. My previous-generation Macbook Pro had the possibility of 32GB, which is what I bought because I think that's a decent minimum for a computer I want to last.

We will probably see the next round of new Macs in either March or June. I suspect that is when we will see the next version of the chipset that would support higher RAM limits and more I/O ports. We might start seeing the new hardware design language,too.

8GB is def low. I do have 16GB MBP and honestly it's doing fine for local dev on a large enterprise project with about 40 services running in docker.

My base model macbook pro from 2014 had 8GB of RAM. So, yeah, they've been selling laptops with the same base amount of RAM for at least 6 or 7 years.

Because not everyone is on containers fashion running full blown clusters on their laptops and 8 GB are more than good enough for enterprise developers.

One doesn't even need to be a developer to fill up 8GB with just a browser, Teams and Slack in the background (or any other Electron apps of their employer's choice).

Another wise choice is not to use anything Electron based unless forced by the employer, or customer, and in that case, it is expected that they pay for the hardware.

This is a confusing comment. If your mother doesn't need more than 8GB RAM, why should she have to pay for more? It's not as though you can't order more if you want it.

It wouldn't force the industry to offer more. It would just mean purchasers such as your mother wouldn't buy a Mac.

Let's not pretend decent amount of RAM is prohibitively expensive.

> It's not as though you can't order more if you want it.

You can't upgrade it on new Mac laptops. The ram is basically fully integrated in the system now.

You can do 16gb for silly high price, but that's also not massive these days.

Agreed, but I'm talking about ordering more initially. As in it's not a bad idea to have 2 options instead of one.

My MBP from 2013 has 8gb RAM and I considered that an essential upgrade at the time!

I only upgraded from my 2013 MBP this time last year. Through most of that time the macbook was my workhorse as a contractor. It's still more than sufficient for many of the web and data jobs I did.

I'm not even sure how much ram my laptop has. It's probably not that important.

I’ve got 64gb Ram in my mbp.

The vast majority of laptops in the $999 range are bought by people that only need "devices that only my mother would use"

A bit out of touch I think. All the midde age mothers I know personally buy $300 laptops from Walmart.

I think the point was that the people who buy the $999 laptops would be fine with the $300 laptops

Exactly - I'd guess the majority of Macbook Airs are used for surfing, email, writing a presentation etc. not developing.

For this 8gb is fine though right? I get the idea - we want Apple to push the bar. But my 2011 4gb MacBook Air with Catalina does those things fine... swapping to an SSD is reasonably fast.

Yes - I'm developing on an 8gb 2013 MacBook Air - I'd like more RAM, but it is about doable.

But in general MacBook Airs are not developer or video editing machines and they're not speced for that.

Ah! Then yes I agree.

Not true at all. Maybe in the US but not elsewhere. I know more than a few developers that work on sub $999 laptops/machines. Specifically Dell/Lenovo laptops seems to be the go to, since they can get them with 16GB RAM + 1TB hdd + non-discrete gfx, then they just swap out the hdd with 256/512GB ssd.

About half of all my dev friends have given up on laptops (specifically apple gear, incl iPhone) and ALL of them built ryzen-based machines and work from home. My previous workplace refused to buy us laptops and built typical workstation PC's for everyone (quadcore i5 + 16GB RAM + 256GB ssd + 1TB hdd, this was around 2017). The guys that do have iPad's tend to hang on to them but swapped their iPhones with Android phones when they ditched their MacBooks. Main complaint? Ports & (Performance vs Price vs (ryzen pc with same price)).

I didn't say that developers don't buy $999 laptops I said that the majority of $999 laptops are bought by non developers.

> How are companies still releasing hardware with 8GB RAM?

8GB is a huge amount of RAM. I cannot imagine writing a serious program that needs more than 2% of that. The real problem is programmers using "frameworks" and shit that requires inordinate amounts of unused memory.

Do you only ever run a single process in some non-multitasking OS?

The rest of us are using Linux, Windows and MacOS, where many processes run side by side, each with memory requirements.

Indeed, my first versions of Linux were running on 512 MB PC and my 8GB laptop from 2009 does just fine.

I run regressions on half a million data points. My 2017 Macbook Pro with (checks) 8 Gb of RAM works fine. I'm not sure what all you guys' mothers are doing.

Half a million data points sounds like a lot but it's smaller than a 1k texture. RAM for integrated graphics is VRAM too, just to render to the screen you need a ton of it, for every open window.

Not op, but my main laptop is a 2013 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM. It’s old enough to have developed dead pixels, the backlight is now noticeably uneven, the USB ports have become loose, several keys now only work unreliability, and it now does an emergency low power shutdown when the battery reports 55%.

(Naturally this means it is now permanently plugged into mains power and an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse).

Yet the RAM is still sufficient for my use of macOS, dozens of Chrome and Safari tabs, Xcode, TextWrangler, iTunes, etc.

Your use is probably shaped by the limit, though. I mean, a few tabs open in Chrome is easily a couple of GBs alone.

A few dozen tabs, as in often in the range of 24-60.

That one aspect never even seems problematic or limiting, and it’s not like I’m oblivious to all the other things wrong with such an old piece of hardware.

Mostly Electron. I don't like it either, but Electron is a fact of life now.

While you don't have to join in on that as a developer, you still have to be aware that 95% of users will have no idea that their instant messaging application uses 800mb of RAM to idle, or whether that's a bad thing.

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