M3 MacBook Pro: Base Model Has Only 8GB RAM | Hacker News Reader

M3 MacBook Pro: Base Model Has Only 8GB RAM

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25 pointsbehnamoh71 comments

Enough to use iMessage, Mail, FaceTime etc. What else do you need in a so affordably priced $1600 Mac? Do you want Apple to go bankrupt? Or you’d want people to not be able to buy an “8GB base MacBook Pro”[1]. Oh, that would be unreasonable.

[1] Yes, I swear it was a comment on another post from yesterday. HN is either that disconnected or desensitised when it comes to this company.

As for why they do/did it? Because they can. There’s really no other reasoning here. Yes, the first part of my comment is rather snarky/sarcastic and maybe in poor taste but this is just pathetic and tomorrow I’d love to see the comments explaining how it makes sense and that maybe it is actually a price drop.

And this post is from 2.5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27096022 (about 8GB RAM, yes)

Most of the empirical comparisons I've seen of the 8GB vs. 16GB models show that you have to push the 8GB models pretty hard before they're noticeably slower. Most of the complaints seem to come from people who are obsessively checking memory usage and have a rather over-simplistic mental model of how RAM is allocated in a modern operating system. (For example, many apps, such as browsers, will happily use more RAM if you give them more RAM.)

Strange. I’ve got a 10 year old Intel MBP with 16GB of RAM. Even 10 years ago I didn’t think 8GB was enough.

You don’t buy a Pro model and let it swap with only 8GB

Yeah, I think a lot of people are assuming that 8GB will work as poorly on an Mx system as it would on an older Intel Mac. But it's widely reported that this is not the case. (The faster SSDs help, and I suspect that memory compression may work more effectively too.)

See various anecdotal reports such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38103103 in this very thread.

I buy the extra memory with the hope that it extends the lifetime of my computer. I can still use my MBP 10 years later.

I bought a 15” Air two weeks ago with 16GB and I expect I’ll still be able to use it a decade from now.

Have barely used the Air because my software is set up on my Intel. Will transition soon and will be able to compare performance.

Why would you want RAM to swap to fast SSDs when you can avoid it with more RAM in the first place, though? Sure it's not a molasses-slow spinning HDD..... but SSDs are still far slower than RAM, and having swap hit the SSDs means unnecessary writes/wear... especially on systems where the SSDs can't even be replaced

I think whether or not people always encounter it "feeling slow" is a different concern as to whether or not 8GB of RAM should ever even be offered by Apple on a system that will for sure eventually swap to disk for users. Adding Apple's huge margins on RAM upgrades on top of this just makes it even more disgusting... they should start their models at a higher baseline- it costs them next to nothing (8GB RAM vs 16GB RAM is not a cost-to-Apple issue, it's an extremely cheap component), but then of course they can't squeeze customers for ludicrous amounts of upsell margins (their cost-to-consumer RAM upgrade margins are absolutely appalling)

Selling suboptimal hardware configurations might be a good business decision but I wish our standards weren't so low for companies, especially ones selling $1600 machines with 2013-amounts of RAM in them

I don’t really care if it swaps to disk if there’s no noticeable slowdown. I understand that some people just take it as axiomatic that 8GB isn’t enough, but I think it makes more sense to look empirically at whether the majority of users would notice a significant improvement for their workloads. Some users do need 16GB (or more), but I suspect they’re a fairly small minority. So why put it in the base model? That’s money Apple can spend on more important features of the base laptop (e.g high quality display, speakers, trackpad - all the stuff that 90% of plasticy Wintel machines at the same price point fail on).

I’m puzzled by the idea that there’s something inherently bad about swapping. It’s a natural consequence of virtual memory and is pretty much required for optimal exploitation of available RAM. Let apps allocate as much RAM as they’d ideally like to have, and then leave it to the OS to keep the most frequently used pages in physical RAM.

> Some users do need 16GB (or more), but I suspect they’re a fairly small minority. So why put it in the base model?

Most users don't need 3 whole Thunderbolt ports either, why put that on there too?

More RAM in the base-model Pro signals that it is a higher-end product. It raises the bar for the entire product category and makes it easier to not depreciate an entire year's worth of functional computers (you know how Apple is). It decreases the write pressure on the soldered SSD, and ensures that future MacOS releases, AI features and games don't get bottlenecked by a $15 component. It reduces the friction when casual users want to use their current Mac for more demanding workloads. It future-proofs against needing a newer machine and increases the value of said laptop secondhand.

In every way, the old Macbook Pro 14" pricing model was a more sustainable, attractive and user-friendly. This spec drop is a sad excuse to direct would-be 13" owners to a more expensive alternative.

> I’m puzzled by the idea that there’s something inherently bad about swapping.

If you're doing it to non-replaceable flash storage, then yeah there is something inherently wrong about relying on swap.

>Most users don't need 3 whole Thunderbolt ports either, why put that on there too?

At a guess, because varying the number of physical ports between models complicates production more than varying which RAM chips are soldered to the board. (Apple has generally shunned having physically identical USB-C ports with differing capabilities.)

>If you're doing it to non-replaceable flash storage, then yeah there is something inherently wrong about relying on swap.

All modern multitasking desktop OSes rely on swap and have since the mid 90s.

SSD lifetime concerns are way overblown in my opinion. The first MacBooks with soldered SSDs came out in 2016. I'm sure there are individual instances of SSDs failing, but the much-heralded SSD lifetime apocalypse seems not to have materialised.

What you really want with an SSD isn't the theoretical highly-conservative estimate of its lifetime write limit, but the probability that it is going to be the thing that fails on your laptop after n years, in comparison to all the other things that could fail. My guess is that by the time the SSD has a significant probability of failing (which is going to take many years, even with heavy usage), then many other components are going to have a higher probability of failing.

As someone in possession of a perfectly functional 15+ year Macbook, what other components do you expect to fail?

Sorry, I don’t completely understand the question. Lots of things could fail. I don’t have stats on the relative probabilities.

Then you can buy a MacBook or MacBook Air. The pro line is meant for people doing more than browsing and zoom calls. The probability that a person buying a n 8Gb pro will find it limited is very high. I can’t see how Apple would be in the right here.

>The probability that a person buying a n 8Gb pro will find it limited is very high.

Perhaps, but I would like to see evidence for this based on actual tests. Most of the commentary here just takes it as axiomatic that 8GB won't be enough and isn't based on actual comparisons of the 8GB and 16GB models.

My employer provided 8GB mbp has a hard time running some nodejs container workloads. The build step is particularly resource intensive to the point it slows down the whole system. So if you're developing with auto reload enabled, you're in for a hard time. So my solution is to use a separate intel server I have around, with VS Code remote extension. So now I'm tied to that server and my MBP is reduced to being an expensive terminal. If I travel, I can't work without a stable connection to that server. But that was exactly why MBP exists, to allow professionals to do their work. Had I not had the server, that'd be impossible.

Ok, it’s definitely believable that container workloads would be difficult in 8GB, but have you ever tried the same workload on a 16GB model?

I obviously don’t have stats on this, but I suspect it’s a tiny minority of base model MacBook Pros that ever run a container.

Seems like you’re putting a lot of effort in stretching the definition of pro to defend Apple. I have a personal 16GB mbp, they both struggle. Still don’t see your point.

I don't have a definition of 'pro', and my point is not based on any assumptions about what the word means. I don't care how the Apple marketing department decides to name their laptops, and I can't imagine why anyone else would either.

Honestly I think a decent chunk of the complaints are from people who are used to windows which would be using 4-6gb of that ram just on the desktop.

That said I still wouldn't recommend 8gb to anyone.

SSDs and zRAM help too, but seriously 8GB of RAM on a $1600 laptop is ludicrous.

I agree, I'd recommend 16GB if someone asked for my advice (not that they ever do!)

My only quibble here is that I think people are a touch too cynical about Apple's motives for putting 8GB in the base models. I suspect the reason is just that their research shows that most people wouldn't notice any difference from the extra 8GB of RAM. That makes it difficult to justify putting it in the base model. We tend to focus a lot on specs on HN, but the money saved from the 8GB potentially frees up additional resources for features that a typical user might well care about much more (e.g. speaker and microphone quality – often neglected by competing manufacturers).

I doubt people would have as much of a problem with the base model were it not for the large prices on each tier of RAM. Each 8 Gb is somehow $200.

It seems like a scam to list at $1,600, but then, surprise, you need an extra $200 to get to the level of RAM you expect in a professional device.

I assume you are right if they only go up to 24 max, but they should explain better why 8 Gb is acceptable.

I had 16gb on my work laptop (dell latitude 7390) four years ago…

The thinkpad x220 from 2012 could host 16gb ram already.

I really can’t understand why 8gb ram is still so common. A lot of performances issue would just disappear with more ram.

I thought the same until I noticed a lot of choppiness one day while my Mac was running a bunch of containers, OBS, Krisp, Zoom and Safari windows and saw on htop that nearly all of my physical memory was reserved and the memory manager was working overtime to prevent swap from being hit.

Things have been much better after updating to an M2 with 16GB of RAM.

MacOS swaps aggressively to keep up the performances.

Which is fine, but this wears out the disks quite a bit.

So of you’re pushing past the 8gb memory size… your macbook will die earlier. And since the flash chips are not replaceable… you get the point.

The M1 macs came out three years ago, and the predicted SSD lifetime apocalypse shows no sign of materialising so far. I suspect that it won’t turn out to be a problem, though we’ll have to wait and see.

Yep, these are the same people who dig around iPhone internals to check the amount of RAM and compare it to a similar Android model. Then they are all O_o when iPhone doesn't have 32GB of RAM.

They completely forget that the OS memory management is _totally_ different. iOS doesn't need multiple gigabytes of RAM, because only one piece of software can be active at a time, the rest are suspended and can just get limited activations - and the OS decides when.

> affordably priced

> $1600

Dude.

I think he is being sarcastic.

I paid that much for a spec'd out frame.work at the start of the year. Just ordered an M2 with 24G for $2k last night. I'm hoping the mac will be faster and quieter. It doesn't take much for my frame.work fan to start, watching one video can be enough. What really got me was the minor component fittings, they don't really. The plugin modules and camera/mic physical buttons are so difficult to move / swap. Then the right angle power cable frayed... I fully expect the mac to be much higher quality. That is part of the premium. We will see if the 25G of mem is enough. I have some workflows that will definitely reach beyond that limit, curious to see what happens

My $150 used Thinkpad has a high quality build, 16gb of ram, and can play a YouTube video while talking to people on the webcam. It has an 8th Intel cpu, which is about the same speed as a 10th Gen Intel CPU. The M2 is about double the speed in single core and multi core, but that isn't required for most simple tasks.

I'm planning to do dev work while in the Immersed app

I am currently typing this from an M2 Max with 64gb of RAM and I have an M1 Pro with 16gb of RAM for personal use.

In-between, I got a base M2 Mini with 8gb/256gb SSD.

I did extensive dev work, played video games like WoW, and did lots of stuff on that Mini. It never once felt slower than my M2 Max except for the things it simply can't run (high end models, etc).

I think people really underestimate what Mac can do with 8gb of RAM. I would obviously prefer 16gb as a base, but I was very pleasantly surprised.

RAM was rarely about what you can do today but rather how long your device will last.

Soldered on RAM and expensive upgrades are defacto planned obsolescence.

There are benefits to Apple's implementation of soldered RAM. Unified memory uses less power and helps to boost battery life. A thin chassis is also one of Apple's priorities and soldered memory helps them achieve that. SODIMM slots are relatively thick. Additionally, Apple's unified memory enables bandwidths 4-8x traditional DDR4. It's a matter of tradeoffs, and there are valid points on both sides; it is not merely "defacto planned obsolescence."

WoW was released in 2004, and its modern system requirements (including 8GB of RAM on Windows) are extremely modest.

And either way, OSX being RAM efficient is no excuse for Apple to release a $1600 machine with 8GB in 2023. Thats just plain planned obsolescence/price discrimination.

Yes, it does, and it's one of the very few system metrics that Apple still feels worthy enough to list on its store page, so... Praise Be, I guess?

It's quite obvious that RAM capacity in the M# world is closely tied to die space occupied by the CPU/GPU cores, and... it's not entirely obvious that this is unreasonable? (unlike, say, an iPhone with 64GB flash)

My lowly 2020 M1 MacBook Air has 8GB as well, and it runs Outlook, Teams, Firefox, Xcode and JetBrains Rider just fine, concurrently, for up to an entire workday, on battery, without fan noise. Is that a "Pro" workload? Maybe, maybe not, since that moniker doesn't exactly have a fixed meaning, but it's definitely competitive with laptops in the same price range.

If you want to run VMs/containers/whatever, or do heavy AI processing, you know you need more RAM, and, guess what, you can conveniently order an SKU containing just that from Apple. Or, you know, from MSI, Alienware or Lenovo in case 'RTX 4090' is the key to unlocking your "Pro" workflow...

> It's quite obvious that RAM capacity in the M# world is closely tied to die space occupied by the CPU/GPU cores, and... it's not entirely obvious that this is unreasonable? (unlike, say, an iPhone with 64GB flash)

That has nothing to do with the 8GB base.

There are 3 different M chips each generation, and each one has a fixed number of memory channels that goes out to seperate RAM chips specced/packaged in a way similar to smartphone RAM.

The base M3 is not capped at 8GB. Apple chose to use low capacity LPDDR5X chips in the base config. It was a business/marketing decision, not a technical one.

At first it was pretty cool to see the price drop, but the more I looked into these models the weirder it got. Why does a $1600 Macbook Pro ship with half the memory of a $400 Steam Deck? Why are the core configurations so weird? Why can't I get a Space Black laptop without buying the Pro models?

It's... certainly an interesting decision. I'm doubtful most consumers would notice, but I am left scratching my head here.

Yes, this year's M3's are certainly kinda odd. Makes me wonder what M3 Ultra will be like (probably not a significant improvement over M2 Ultra).

The might even skip it? Or rearchitect it.

The M3 Max would need to have the silicon space to turn into an ultra right now, and thats a lot of die area to spend.

My bet is a rearchitecture. The M1/M2 Ultra feels constrained by the thermal limitation of the Mac Studio. That's fine, but the current Mac Pro is a testament to how this doesn't really scale up very well.

If you want my perverted guess, I think Apple has a skunkworks Mac Pro with a disabled/removed iGPU for testing dGPUs on Apple Silicon. If the eventual goal is to reprise the size, memory capacity and IO throughput of the old Mac Pro, you can't really keep scaling a mobile architecture. You can get pretty far, but the Mac Studio marks a line in the sand where Apple decided to go no further.

If Apple sees that market as a valuable one to capture (which I think they do), I think they'll introduce a new Mac designed around the thermal envelope of the current rackmount Mac Pro. The desktop case would get a slight reworking to match it's capacity and specs. From there, I'd expect them to invest heavily in on-die PCI controllers and external GPU support on the software side. If they know what's good for them, it would also be cool to see them extend these features to lower-end Macs with eGPU support over Thunderbolt. Remove the VM limitation, document iBoot for the hardware owners and you've got yourself a surprisingly attractive Apple Silicon server/pro offering.

It's a bit of a pipe dream, but it wouldn't shock me to see Apple reintroduce a proper Mac Pro as a "one more thing" moment for us frothing nerds.

I have heard rumors about a discrete Apple GPU actually. I was thinking its something VR related...

But also, its possible that Apple does precisely none of this and just makes huge GPU tiles when their SOCs go tiled anyway. With their margins, they could sell something akin to a MI300A right now.

A new lineup of Macs with Apple dGPUs would be an interesting development. Here I was, insinuating they'd bury their hatchet with Nvidia.

Personally speaking though, I struggle to imagine anything other than a greenfield approach to the Pro/server space. Apple has their work cut out for them with the new Ampere and Grace systems hitting shelves, and I don't think "M4 but we glued 8 of them together" will scale up to that point.

My biggest hope is that they do see this market as worthwhile, and use it as an excuse to make MacOS feel like a regular OS again. Me and my wild imagination, huh...

Notably, its $1600 for 8GB/512GB.

The iPhone 15 Pro Max 512GB is 1399. With a better camera but smaller screen.

Which also has 8gb of dram. Funny how close these devices are becoming spec-wise

I wonder if an iPhone having 8GB of DRAM is a testament to how far we've come, or how stingy Apple is when it comes to the desktop/laptop lineups.

8GB is good, but not a technical limitation for mobile chips anymore. More LPDDR5X is peanuts in a $1400 phone.

16gb of ram for PC laptops that still have upgradeable chips costs around $30 retail. Seems pretty crazy for Apple to severely cripple such an expensive machine with no real savings to them.

I'd probably be ok with 8GB on a MacBook Air (but I'd still nag about it). But to put 8GB on a "Pro" model...

It's not "pretty crazy": it's price discrimination. By making their base model almost unusably underspecced, even with almost zero cost savings, they make sure that nobody who can afford a really expensive one will buy a "cheap" one.

I don’t see how that could work in practice. Most people I know are confused about the difference between ram and storage… they are going to trust that “pro” means it will be fast for normal “non computer nerd” use cases, and when it isn’t they won’t buy from Apple next time.

Many single apps used by non technical people like Adobe Photoshop require 16gb nowadays.

The iMac shows this off in so many ways. First there's no 27 inch option because Tim Apple wants to sell Studio Displays.

But then the specs. Base model has 2 USB ports, no Ethernet, and a 256GB SSD. Given that I can go buy a pretty excellent 512GB PCIe 3.0 for $25, it just seems insulting to start so low. And then look at the frigging price of upgrade! It's $200 to upgrade to 512GB! Holy shit, I could go get a great 4TB Crucial P3 Plus for that. Ditto for $200 for 8GB->16GB.

It's just wild what this company does.

Well at least that is the theory. They are losing sales from people who could reason around compromising performance (speed mostly) but making the effort to get a "better" made computer with a system they like, but absolutely cannot work around the low storage and ram that are just handicapping for many workloads. Someone who just runs graphic software (either adobe or affinity) with a few other things will get severely limited by 8GB. And it is not a "pro" use case, enough to spend so much money on a computer. So, they get a 1K laptop that has all those things standard and will forget about Apple...

Add to that the unhappy ones about their experience with the base model and the long term is not looking good. My cousin routinely tells me he is so upset about the 1.8k he had to spend on a base iMac that is extremely limited and terribly slow for many things because Apple was stingy about the SSD (stupid fusion drive with exceptionally low amount of actual SSD). When he needed a computer for video production (the irony) to cover sports competitions he went with a PC and a cheap video card. Even though the Mac Mini would be a good fit for that I doubt he would even consider it. Right now, what makes him angry is that he has all the data and software on Apple land and the switching cost is tremendous (especially time he does not necessarily have). But when his iMac becomes obsolete, maybe he will try when he sees the base price and remember his unfortunate experience...

Apple has loyal fans more than ever, but it is not rosy at all ; the experience of common people does not match what the geeks are saying...

Are Apple's RAM chips made of solid gold? I can buy a 16GB DDR5 5200MT/s for $50 on amazon.

Someone explain to me why this isn't the case with Macbooks?

M3 Pro 14 is $1999 and has 18 Gigs of RAM. AFAIK M2 Pro 14 cost the same with 16, so at least there's a small improvement

> so at least there's a small improvement

Not really. the M3 line has less bandwidth and fewer P cores compared to M2.

We'll need to bench for waitmarks to be certain, Apple showed some good performance improvements for the new cores. And the GPU has ray tracing acceleration now

> Apple showed some good performance improvements for the new cores.

Compared to "Intel" and M1 Macs...

Well, there were M2s in the comparisons too, I'd say the improvement is still good, but again we should bench for waitmarks before jumping to conclusions here

I bet the M3 has lower task energy (which is important on battery), so we will see.

No, only the M3 Pro processors have fewer P cores (5P+6E/6P+6E on M3 Pro vs 6P+4E/8P+4E on the M2 Pro)

The entry level M3 has the same number of P cores and bandwidth as the M2 (both are 4P+4E (100GBps))

M3 Max has more P cores than the M2 Max and only the lower P core M3 Max model has less bandwidth (10P+4E (300GBps)/12P+4E (400GBps) vs 8P+4E (400GBps)).

I don't know if this is more of a testament to what MacOS can do with so little RAM, or a confidence that their PCI-e SSD access is so fast you won't feel much difference.

Or an illusion of a choice. Frankly, a machine with a "pro" in their name and 8 GB RAM is an oxymoron. When you look at the apps Apple advertises as playing nicely with their M chips, most of them are memory hungry.

Wouldn't there have been widely circulated press about how those apps are unusable with 8GB RAM in the past however-many years it's been the base model? Do you think Apple would advertise that it is suited for those "pro" apps and workloads without having tested it with that model? Imagine the mountain of negative press if it were true that it can barely run Final Cut Pro.

You can edit video on an iPad with 4gb of RAM, for all the power and comfort it's worth to you.

For $1600, in 2023, a Pro machine ought to treat the user better. This thing is like those 4gb Macbook Pros, with the cruel twist that you can't upgrade the memory and make them usable again after an upgrade brings it to it's knees. If your "Pro" machine cannot upgrade it's storage or memory, it ought to ship with all the storage and memory you're going to need for the lifetime of the device. The old Macbook Pro base models did reflect that, even with the paltry phone-sized SSD they shipped. The 13" Macbook Pro had outdated specs that cannot be expected to last into the next decade. Replacing it with an even more expensive, even more outdated model is setting up their customers for regret.

Without a doubt in my mind, I am certain that Apple could sell a 16gb Macbook Pro 14" at $1600 and still turn a profit. Their BOM is not tight, Apple margins are not like a console manufacturer.

It’s more the former: I used an 8GB M1 for a bit over a year as a development box and it was fine even with Java stuff running in a Podman container. I was expecting it to swap but very rarely saw that –the base OS is pretty lean and Apple Silicon has hardware accelerated memory compression.

One factor: I don’t use Chrome. They have reportedly made some improvements but using Firefox or especially Safari is going to save a lot of RAM.

same meme as with iphone 6s having 16GBs of storage

I basically lost an otherwise perfectly working iPhone 6S+ because of that. Between OS and the apps getting ever larger, it became unusable, until the point I gave up and had to get another phone, and this one was added to the mountains of e-waste.

Similarly annoying, yes (though some will prefer more SSD space and less RAM than vice versa)

I have a laptop computer with 8 GB and it's fine. Obviously it's rubbish to sell a laptop with 8 GB nowadays for that price, but let's not pretend it's unusable.

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