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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Apple selling 8GB of RAM laptops is both wonderful for tech support people and horrible. Pretty much every non-technical person I know who bought an 8GB M* device has run into problems. But pretty much every technical person I know says they have no problems. I wonder what the difference is? Regardless, I get lots of calls for help with M* macs re: running out of ram when running Adobe Creative Suite + darkroom/lightroom, etc, or the normal mac problems of having no storage (ie, 256GB/512GB) and the octopus of external drives and dongles not working right because externals/dongles are incredibly fragile and problem prone.

It's horrible because there's actually no "fix" I can offer these normal people who made the mistake of buying an unupgradable 8GB computer.

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> I wonder what the difference is?

Technical people understand the limitations, and work within them, and aren't disappointed when they know they're hitting the upper limit. Normies want a cheap laptop, but don't understand why their bottom-tier Apple laptop can't run everything at once.

Exactly this. I enjoyed the 2015 MacBook for its size and weight and still having usability, and find it a pity that there wasn't really ever a followup to it. It makes the airs look bulky.

But most users are probably disappointed and expected more from it, so I understand why they weren't able to continue that line

I got an M1 macbook pro from work, who through several layers of bureaucracy got me a 16 inch instead of the requested 14 inch, and with 8GB RAM instead of the requested 16GB. For running a huge data processing platform in containers, BI tools, powerpoint and excel, etc.

I would describe it as "no unexpected problems that aren't natural consequences of choices": Apple's memory and swap management is actually shockingly good under the circumstances, it does thrash the SSD a bunch, and it locks up hard if put to sleep under heavy memory pressure. One mitigation is just leaving it awake overnight before any critical demos, etc.

EDIT: I was wrong; it is a 16GB model, 32GB was the ask, performance is as described, it feels smaller; 8GB would probably be totally unusable.

> who through several layers of bureaucracy got me a 16 inch instead of the requested 14 inch, and with 8GB RAM instead of the requested 16GB.

The 16" M1 Pro came with a minimum 16GB of RAM.

https://support.apple.com/kb/SP858?locale=en_US

So did the 14".

https://support.apple.com/kb/SP854?locale=en_US

Sorry to ask, but are you sure about the exact specs? I wasn't aware of a 16" MacBook Pro M1(Pro|Max) with 8GB of RAM and Wikipedia [0] seems to confirm this.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro_(Apple_silicon)

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