Apple insists 8GB unified memory equals 16GB regular RAM
appleinsider.com
appleinsider.com
>>> 8GB: Great for browsing online, streaming movies, messaging with friends and family, editing photos and personal video, casual gaming, and running everyday productivity apps.
That’s not wrong. Someone only doing that stuff can get by just fine with 8GB of RAM. The only thing wrong about that is that the people who fall into that category aren’t pro, so shouldn’t they be getting some other Macbook that isn’t pro?
The thing we should be mad about are the prices. They’re charging $200 or more for each step-up in RAM. I understand that their RAM is integrated and special, but an 8GB stick of SD RAM for a PC is like $30. $100 might be understandable, but $200 is obscene.
The storage is even worse. Even the M3 MAX defaults to 1TB of storage. To upgrade to 4TB is $1000. A Samsung 990 Pro M2 SSD with 4TB of storage is under $300. I understand the apple storage is different, and that justifies some markup, but over a 300% markup is absurd.
AirPods Pro aren't meant for people doing professional audio production. iPhone Pro isn't for people who are professional... phone...ers???
And allowing an 8gb option lets them snag more of those.
Of course, the sneaky people wait for the refurbished units.
"Max" and "Ultra", so max isn't the max? I think the serious people at Apple have given up on naming, and whatever happens at normal corporations is happening. Part of it in genuine confusion in the product lines though. They need another Jobsian reset.
An 8gb MacBook Pro can run stable diffusion.
Find me a PC with a total memory footprint of 8gb that can even boot windows?
Pro is a hardware distinction. If that wasn't true, there would be the same hardware in normal Macs and "Pro" ones alike.
2. You're inventing categorisations to suit your argument. The MacBook pros all have a common design. That changes the moment you switch to another Apple computer
3. This is a lot of bitching and whining about making an affordable entry point, how dare they!
4. The computer works and runs well. Your expectations are driven from different computing platforms. Why not actually go to an apple store and try one, they're on display.
It's going to be a subjective matter regardless of how either of us frame it. I've played this game before, I know how it works. The base-spec Macbook Pro 14 is more insulting than both the 13" it replaced and the 14" base-model it undercut. That is how I feel.
> Why not actually go to an apple store and try one, they're on display.
Because I spent the first half of this decade porting software to Apple Silicon, and before that I daily-drove Mac for years. Compared to 10 years ago, the amount of respect Apple affords me is nonexistent. If you don't remember the times when we took functionality for granted, I really do pity you.
You pretend to know what you're talking about, but you are yet to put forth an argument in good faith.
"You pity me" - fabulous. I recognise that you're on a baseless crusade. You're transparent.
I don't know what to tell you. I address your opinions and you frame it as bitching. I express my own opinions and you insist it's bad faith. As I said in the last comment, this is going to end subjectively regardless of how we both feel. Approach this sort of conversation from any other perspective and you'll end up disappointed.
If you want to expand on your original comment and "Pro is a feature level" argument, I'd be interested to hear it.
I would tend to agree that needing 16gb just to browse the web is insane, but it’s where these apps are at right now and we should expect it to only get much much worse at an escalating rate.
A similar problem existed in the base iMac intel a few years ago. My cousin has issues with it precisely because of that. He finds ludicrous that a computer that was sold for over 1.7K euros had 8GB of RAM and an absurdly slow "Fusion Drive". The actual SSD in those is stupidly small, something like 24GB I think, all in the name of profits. He solved the disk issue by booting on an external thunderbolt SSD.
Funnily enough booting on an external SSD has a lot of caveats with Apple Silicon, but I guess we should be happy they allow it at all. Next step is making sure you have to pay a special price to access more than X amount of external storage to make sure you are forced to buy the Apple upcharge.
For some reason, current Apple fans seem to believe their entry level models were/are good. But they are an unbelievably bad deal and always were. When you have to make an effort of a 100 but going to the next much better step only requires 20 more, stopping your effort at the first step is a bad idea, you should only do it if you have no other choice. You went most of the way and then stopped instead of maximizing your payoff. Apple stuff was always like that, the interesting hardware started in the mid-range, and you would buy with the assumption that you would upgrade the RAM/SSD later on to avoid the Apple tax.
If you want a cheap and weak computer, Apple hardware makes no sense; you can find comparably useful computers for half the price, they are just not as nice but that's it. It is just like their SE line, where they sell you a phone with technology/design/build of a least 5 years ago. If you just want to buy a cheaper (500 euros) brand new phone there are many much better options, they won't win at chip benchmarking, but they will win at everything else (because they are not challenged with 2GB of RAM and have 8GB instead). They sell this to milk the customers who have no option because switching would be too complicated. This way they can say that it's ok if they sell a phone at a decent price. But in reality, the competition for that is either a secondhand phone or 200 euros phones and then you realized the update argument is pure nonsense; you could buy at least 2 comparable phones for the same amount of time your basic iPhone gets used. Funnily enough even if you use it for 5 years, you will need to change the extremely small battery that will undoubtedly be bad at half point even with very low usage.
Apple entry level hardware sells for a premium price but does not offer a premium experience because of the limitations they put into them to be able to upsell, to make more profit... And if you go for the mid-high-level hardware with the necessary options for a confortable experience, it is not a premium price anymore but luxury pricing.
I think what happens is that people mostly have belief, and when they buy their expensive but entry level hardware, they believe it is working good for the price, because they don't know what they are missing on. They don't understand how much they are getting fooled for the price. And I am fairly sure Apple knows that (considering the behavior of Apple salespeople I have encountered in Apple stores) and its even part of their strategy. If a customer comes back complaining about a slow computer, they try to upsell him and make it "his mistake". They are going to say he chose "wrong", and he should have spent more money. In other words, they are psychologically abusing people, thanks to their brand image of great performance hardware. In practice the hardware is voluntarily weakened at the entry level to upsell the bigger version where they make more profit.
As an old school mac user (started with System 9) I'm pretty sad to say it but people need to stop buying Apple crap. It is not worth it, at all. macOS is nice, but Windows is fine really, and there are tons of Linux option that are largely sufficient for a personal computer.
Their whole game is hitting their margin, this is how they choose to do it, and a more "fair" memory and storage pricing scheme would merely result and higher prices across-the-board. The power users are subsidizing the low end users, look elsewhere for great deals on memory.
It's getting to point where it's pretty insulting to sell a $1300 computer with a 256 GB SSD that has a street value of not even $30 and ask $400 to bump it to a 1TB when you can easily find name brand high quality fast 4TB SSDs for less than $400.
And it is really shortchanging. Don't give me that crap that 8GB "is like 16GB", because quite obviously isn't.
And I can see it in a MacBook with upgraded memory that even if I close most apps and try the most basic use it doesn't fit on 8GB
Sounds like another case of the Apple Reality Distortion Field
> ...
> The thing we should be mad about are the prices. They’re charging $200 or more for each step-up in RAM. I understand that their RAM is integrated and special, but an 8GB stick of SD RAM for a PC is like $30. $100 might be understandable, but $200 is obscene.
This is the crux of the issue. The way Apple prices, the only good values they offer are the base models for each product/processor combination[1].
Apple could fix this by offering better base models or by offering reasonable upgrade pricing. They've really gouged customers on ram for as long as I can remember - even when they had user serviceable ram slots, so that's unlikely to happen IMO. I think that's why people are pushing so hard on better base models - that feels more achievable.
I'm not nearly as concerned by the storage costs; mostly because it's much easier to add storage to the system as a user pretty easily. Although I will admit that external storage on a laptop is a little clunky.
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1. I don't follow their offerings closely, but from what I recall, the vanilla processor comes with 8 GB, the Pro with 16 GB, the Max with 32 GB and the Ultra with 64 GB of ram.
256gb is fine for my line of work for Linux and Windows, if you don't need too many VMs. It's a non-starter if you want to use multiple XCode versions.
People are not mad about Apple offering an 8GB model, but about making such absurd statements.
To play Devil's advocate (and shill for Apple for a moment), probably from a marketing standpoint the 8GB model doesn't quite hit the profit margin they would like. Not that I'm claiming it's a loss-leader, but it might be on the low-end of what Apple expects when they mark up a device. But they'll take it because they want to have a model "mainstream" enough for the user with somewhat-modest disposable income.
It is with the upgrades that marketing leans in and ramps up the profit margin. They recognize the "power user" that is maxing out the hardware options and deduce they can stick them for it. And this in fact affords them the softer margins on the entry model.
Your argument is akin to "Porsche should lower their prices. They could do better. Competition should force that."
Apple has a particular niche in the market similar to Porsche. Steve Jobs even tells the story of that (sorry, don't have a link handy for that story at the moment).
Apple is a premium company. They have premium prices. I can complain about their prices all day long just like for Porsche, but I'm still going to buy their products if I think they're worth it. I just make sure to keep them for a long time - iphones for 4 years, and computers for 6 - which makes it worth it to me to spend on larger ram and storage.
Side note:
Take a look at Louis Vuitton handbags [1]. They're way overpriced. But there are tons of them out there if you look for them. Most of the bags on that page are more expensive than most Apple computers. That tells me that Apple knows what they are doing, and the rest of the PC market does not.
[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/269703/global-market-sha...
[1] - https://us.louisvuitton.com/eng-us/women/handbags/all-handba...
There is a lock-in with computer technology around software/data that doesn't have an equivalent in the analog world. Because of this I believe tech companies have a responsibility and should make their stuff available at a competitive price or we need to force them. Apple locked in their software to their hardware in order to increase their profit. Now that they have a lot of people tied to their software and that the switching cost are extremely high (require lot of time, knowledge, and skill) they go and abuse their position by overcharging for stuff that are much cheaper in the competitive market (RAM/storage).
Defending this behavior, coming out of a company worth trillions of dollars and making about 100 billion in PROFIT per year not only makes no sense (whether you like them or not) but also makes you look very suspicious.
I'll add that we are collectively paying for this milking, since ressource are not infinite, and Apple collecting so much surplus money is a problem for society, it points to an extreme inefficiency that needs to be solved.
On top of that you seem to be confused between premium and luxury. Premium is fine, you can have premium tools/technology that are basically the same as cheaper products but simply better built, nicer and all that. Nobody would argue against that, and premium prices reflect the needs for better manufacturing and everything related.
But then there is luxury, where the price is largely disconnected from what the item cost to make. Unlike premium, that is just a small markup allowing better manufacturing and slightly better margins, luxury is just a random number to convey exclusivity. The price is whatever number seems to work to limit the amount of customers so that the products become uncommon enough to be notable. It creates rarity out of nothing and is largely a game that should only be played by the most well-off of any society, but it sadly also attracts many who cannot really afford it. Luxury is for the most part undesirable; because human psychology makes it so that the ones who could the least afford it are the ones most likely to want it. A Louis Vuitton handbag is a dumb purchase to anyone who isn't a multimillionaire already, and even then, it doesn't make a lot of sense since you could basically pay a skilled craft person for a month and have them do multiple items for cheaper than the price of one bag. It is an extremely poor allocation of ressource and mostly preys off the most basic desires of peoples (to look a particular way). It just is an inefficiency you have to accept in an economy but shouldn't be encouraged and revered in any way.
And this is precisely what is reproached to current Apple. They pretend to be a premium technology company; yet they price their stuff like luxury fashion. Even though it feels wrong, it's ok to do that with secondary items that are close to fashion, like accessories (their headphones line, I would argue even the watch, many other things). It is not ok to overcharge for a computer system that many people have to rely on for their work, the fact that there is not an equivalent is PRECISELY the problem. If they keep up that way, I think they should be judged for bundling and forced to sell the OS separately of their hardware if they are unwilling to sell hardware at a competitive price.
The choice argument is very weak when switching is an expensive and sometimes impossible option. It is like a supplier raising their price 500% and saying eat shit, it shouldn't be allowed especially if there is no actual alternative to the supplier because of various market dynamics or technical incompatibility/limitations. It is basically like the Shkreli case.
A car weighs around a ton or more, while a modern computer weighs only a few kilograms; I'd expect the raw material costs alone to be enough to make the car much more expensive. And that's before considering that a modern car has several computers in it.
So assuming Apple’s disk isn’t much worse than an 870 Evo, that’s around 7 years. Probably increased a bit if your weekend workload is lighter.
The 250GB model of the 870 EVO is warrantied for 150TBW. Many of the laptops Apple sells with 8GB of RAM only come with a 256GB SSD. Surely nobody is buying an Apple laptop with 8GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD.
Is 5 months a good enough lifespan for a computer?
I am personally skeptical that most people would be seeing 1TBW per day, but I firmly believe that 8GB is unjustifiably low. Apple offers 24GB as an option, so they could (and should) offer 12GB as the base spec if they're unwilling to make 16GB the base spec.
"Warrantied TBW for 870 EVO: 150 TBW for 250 GB model, 300 TBW for 500 GB model, 600 TBW for 1 TB model, 1,200 TBW for 2 TB model and 2,400 TBW for 4 TB model"[0]
[0]: https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/intern...
I actually don’t understand their memory system at all, the typical trade off is high latency, high bandwidth for graphics memory, and low latency, relatively low bandwidth for CPU. They get those high bandwidth numbers, so it must be more like GDDR. But nobody seems to be complaining about memory latency on these chips?
Maybe they need some cheaper RAM, to get swapped into; a RAM disk formatted to swap, haha.
Its LPDDR5 so not slow but nowhere near gddr either. Best as I can tell its just more parallel than usual setups - potentially made feasible by arm. If you look at altra etc they also seem to support loads of ram
My M1 is normally under memory pressure with 16GB RAM, if I was buying a new MBP, I'd be looking at 64GB RAM.
Maybe Xcode makes spectacular use of their own hardware, but do we believe that these optimizations are present in Chrome and Photoshop and Docker and Emacs (hahaha) and whatever NodeJS tooling and probably more that many developers are using at all times? I really, really doubt it. Unless the memory compression discussed here is capable of 50% reduction on average, then it's just a dumb thing to say.
Ultimately your programs all want to have some readily-available bytes in RAM, and most of them don't just cycle out constantly. 8GB is a hard upper bounds on multitasking, and while it might not be our grandpa's 8GB, I really have a hard time believing that it's comparable to 16GB. All this is is beside the point anyway: I switched to desktop like 5 years ago so I could affordably have 64GB and I could never go back. Turns out I don't actually want to take my work home with me, too.
Docker on mac uses emulation and is a gigantic resource hog.
It was horrible trying to run emulated, but I was sorting this out using the older version before Rosetta 2 was an option - does that make any difference?
But generally I'll have zoom sessions, citrix, IntelliJ, vscode, Safari with a lot of tabs, etc.
On M2 16GB I recently accidentally ended up with Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, Spotify, Intellij, GoLand, VSCode, and Docker doing heavy builds in a cross-platform VM. Obviously unreasonable, but interestingly the system crashed with an SSD error.
Yet you'll still have the usual zealots on HN claiming that they have this exact device and it's horrible and worthless and swear blue that their experience is representative.
If the 8gb Air and Pro were a problem: you'd have heard it loud and clear. It would be on the news and called MemoryGate. TheVerge would dedicate a week on it, then bring it up every time apple launch a new laptop. Android9to5 would ring the figurative Apple deathknell and a flurry of lawsuits would be aiming for class action status.
This entire thread is a laughable nothing burger and it's only served to bring out the liars and those on an anti-apple crusade. Some people here have a brain disease that flares up the moment the word "Apple" is muttered.
>No one is saying that the mere existence of the 8GB Macbook is a "problem".
This very thread is saying it ad nauseam - their issues being that (i) an 8gb computer shouldn't be labelled "pro", and (ii) that the 8gb models are irrelevant for serious work.
But onto the meat of the discussion:
While 8 is clearly not 16, Apple are obviously aware that the two numbers are not equal. Instead, what we have here in HN today is a disturbing number of disingenuous commenters who want to take that most absurd position on the statement.
The claim is evidently about how the user would perceive the performance and memory usage of the newer 8gb M-series macs versus apple's earlier 16gb intel models. It's not an unfair comparison and the article made numerous direct quotes about how apple make this claim; those points are being discussed by exactly zero people in this thread. It's also trivial to prove such a claim, so I doubt the majority of the commenters submitting their thoughts even clicked the article.
On a related topic:
A common speed test for smartphones is to simply run many 3rd party apps and multitask between them. These tests aim to demonstrate the real world performance of the device. Now despite having less ram that comparable flagships iPhones perform fluidly and outpace their Android counterparts, often significantly so.
What this underlines is that the performance of a device is not a mere sum of its basic parts. One can't look at a ram figure across different architectures and have an idea about the memory management of the device, or even its performance. A generation of computer users have grown up in a PC-monopoly and fail to grasp that different architectures lend to different efficiencies. Apple's approach here is enough to revisit that thinking.
First of all, there are exactly zero comments under the root comment of this thread that discuss the "pro" naming convention. There are comments discussing this in an adjacent thread but they account for only 10% of the total comments on this post.
Nor are there many comments regarding "8gb models are irrelevant for serious work". They exist, but make up only a small percentage of the comments on this post.
HN is really not as harsh on Apple as you think.
> While 8 is clearly not 16, Apple are obviously aware that the two numbers are not equal. Instead, what we have here in HN today is a disturbing number of disingenuous commenters who want to take that most absurd position on the statement.
Honestly, these people frustrate me too, but luckily as mentioned previously, they are really not all that common.
> The claim is evidently about how the user would perceive the performance and memory usage of the newer 8gb M-series macs versus apple's earlier 16gb intel models. It's not an unfair comparison and the article made numerous direct quotes about how apple make this claim; those points are being discussed by exactly zero people in this thread. It's also trivial to prove such a claim, so I doubt the majority of the commenters submitting their thoughts even clicked the article.
Nobody is discussing this because as you mentioned, the claim is trivial to prove. There is nothing to discuss, we all know the M1/2/3 is amazing!
> A common speed test for smartphones is to simply run many 3rd party apps and multitask between them. These tests aim to demonstrate the real world performance of the device. Now despite having less ram that comparable flagships iPhones perform fluidly and outpace their Android counterparts, often significantly so. > > What this underlines is that the performance of a device is not a mere sum of its basic parts. One can't look at a ram figure across different architectures and have an idea about the memory management of the device, or even its performance. A generation of computer users have grown up in a PC-monopoly and fail to grasp that different architectures lend to different efficiencies.
This is all very true, but it still doesn't mean 8GB == 16GB. Look, if you want to say "my device performs better than the other device even though it has less RAM", just say that, because it's true!
To know if 8GB is enough, you often need to just try it and see. So that’s why I don’t want to put myself in that situation (that I’m running out of memory and the only option is to upgrade an entire machine.)
(It is because there’s many things aggressively using more memory to make things faster or more responsive by cache things. But those can be released under high memory pressure without much apparent performance loss. That makes use the memory more opportunistically but making it hard to gauge how much really is needed.)
However. An 8gb mac with Apple silicon does have higher subjective performance for lightweight office use than a standard 16gb windows machine. I personally would rather have an 8gb Macbook Air than a 16gb Lenovo.
I wouldn't expect lightweight office use to be primarily limited by the amount of memory available so perhaps that isn't a fair comparison still.
You just need to be able to load all the apps at once in RAM and let them sit there as long as possible. The actual computation needed for those workflows is pretty low once the apps are loaded. It's all a trickle of mini task depending on the user interaction. Sometimes you need to export/convert something, and it takes longer but it is not very problematic.
In fact, RAM is a pretty big determining factor in your experience, especially if you use the office suite or google tools. Apples knows this, and it is exactly why they sell such a low amount of RAM at entry level. They want people to pay up or use their (inferior) tools. Their entry level MacBook are a terrible choice for office, in fact you are unlikely to either need or use all the computer power they sell in the marketing, but you are highly likely to feel the pain of too little RAM with the relentless message asking to close some apps.
The fact they came out to justify their choice is just the hammer driving the nail. It is all expected behavior from the greediest corporation on earth...
Personally I’m not worried and if you take decent care of your data you should be fine.
This is the real bottom-line, regardless of what OS you use flash storage on. Make sure you have duplicated backups, because hardware failure is real and it can hurt you.
And that is where the FUD comes into play. Making people worry that something is wrong with their device, when in fact there is a high probability that their device will be in a landfill before it is a cause for concern.
That's not very environmentally friendly.
Yes if you run docker as part of your regular workflow you probably want more than the base ram config, not sure why this is surprise to anyone unless they don't know how docker works.
If you’ll recall, the Pentium 4s were bumping against 4.0 ghz clock rates and the core processors came along and frequencies dropped to 2 while gaining mucho performance.
There are tradeoffs, and the energy efficiency of the M* processors was a huge win for laptops obviously, but anytime there’s a trade off there’s something being traded.
“Analogous to” is not them saying it is equivalent. Now why are they shipping computers with such little ram in the first place? Is that still such an expensive component that they can’t stick in a more reasonable amount? It definitely seems like this is done as a way to put a lower more competitive price on something that anyone who actually needs to do “real” work on these computers will recognize they need a lot more ram than that. Easy way for them to squeeze more profit from their consumers.
That said, their iPhones are 6gb of ram and the pro models are 8gb, and this is not configurable. So is it enough for basic day to day tasks, running the software that comes with the Mac out of the box? The answer is clearly yes.
HN gives Apple sooo much slack, they are the Nintendo of the Tech industry.
Anyway, I'm sure these computers are just fine. I got a $100 craigslist laptop without a video card 6 years ago, and my kid is still able to play minecraft at ~15FPS. Internet and Office are perfect. What else could I need?
My $800 laptop has a 3060 for things that actually need power.
Are you reading a different HN than I do? The Apple Hate is very, very strong here.
... then why can't they buy more RAM?
"I wish Apple charged me more for more RAM by default, instead of my having to choose to pay more for more RAM" ?
It's always been like that but of course now it's no longer possible to just add your own.
I recall a few years ago calling out a journalist on Twitter who openly stated he was getting a 8GB machine because Apple's new innovations means it was as good as 16GB.
That still doesn’t make 8=16.
Now if they had some argument based on system reports showing that RAM use excluding cache is below 8GB for x% of users, that would be a different thing.
Enough to claim 2:1? That seems fishy. But! I bought this machine with half the RAM of its Intel predecessor, and I haven't noticed a problem despite my ongoing tab-and-app packrat tendencies.
As in the 90's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
The absurdity of saying 8GB is the new 16GB, I mean.. What's can we say other than: no ?
It depends on the file. With memory compression (which the article says they have), as long as the file is compressible enough (for instance, a repetitive text-only log file), you can. If the file is not compressible enough, however, like an already compressed video file, the true memory size is more relevant, and you'll only be able to load a bit less than 8GB (a bit less because the operating system needs some memory for itself).
Memory compression is also available in both Windows and Linux, so it doesn't justify the statement 8GB on Mac = 16GB elsewhere.
(paraphrasing the famous car industry’s slogan "There is no replacement for displacement")
Simple declarative sentences with pictures will do.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38202871