Hacker News Reader

Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

8GB is still good enough for office workers and students. Heck, I used an M1 8GB Air for 1 year as a dev. Although I wish I had more RAM, it still served me well.

For $899 (on sale sometimes), the 8GB M2 Air is absolutely a steal. The screen quality, thinness, battery life, build quality, SoC, quietness, coolness, metal enclosure, touchpad, and speakers are simply unmatched by anything in the PC world at that price - sometimes any price. Those things cost Apple money. Other PC makers cheap out on them. In order for Apple to earn higher margins, they make the RAM and storage upgrades very expensive. So the base versions actually offer great values. It's the upgraded RAM/storage that decreases the value but still good value overall considering what you're getting.

I understand why 8GB is still the base. Everything except the RAM is outstanding and unmatched. Apple makes the money on RAM and storage upgrades.

Perhaps Apple will start at 12GB for M4 generation. Perhaps the arrival of local LLMs will skyrocket RAM upgrade demand such that Apple can start the base at 16GB and still have plenty of people who want to upgrade to 32GB. The problem for Apple will always be if they can increase the base without hurting upgrade profit.

On a slightly related note: $/GB for RAM hit a wall starting in 2011. https://assets.ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/historical...

View on HN

I think you missed the point - we're talking about computers marketed as "Pro" devices which should be able to handle "Pro" workloads.

8GB on the Airs is a completely different issue as these are not marketed as Pro devices.

Consumers place a lot of faith in Apple as a brand so when they go and purchase a "Macbook Pro" they should be able to assume Apple has their back and it's actually going to do what it says on the tin. It's 2023, memory demand is higher than it ever has been and selling a "Pro" computer thats destined to be living on swap so they can try squeeze another $200 out of you is pretty shitty honestly. And it's not like you can just upgrade it, you have to toss it out and get a whole new device.

I just used the MacBook Air as an example because even at 8GB, it’s still an amazing machine. I know the $1600 MBP with 8GB is strange. It shouldn’t exist. But it does so Apple opened itself up for ridicule.

Agreed. IMO the only reason why the 8GB model exists is so Apple can advertise the Macbook Pro line with a starting price that has lower margins than they would otherwise make and then charge anyone who actually wants to use the computer for a professional workload an extra $200-400.

This from the company found liable for deliberately slowing their stuff, for all their proprietary dongles, for getting rid of the headphone jack, etc. etc.

As much of a conversation killer calling people "sheep" can be, as someone who doesn't use their stuff, what is surprising about this?

"Pro" usage doesn't mean docker. There are many "pro" workloads that work just fine with 8gb ram. You can get a lot of real work done with an 8gb machine that has terrific battery life, is great for travel, great screen, etc.

If you work on large C++/Rust projects you need dedicated build servers with ungodly amount of CPU/ram. A laptop cannot possibly compete with servers that draw 2000 watts each. Desktop PCs also blow laptops out of the water in terms of raw performance. And yet many professional developers have a MBP as their main device because apparently they don't need the extra performance a high end desktop delivers.

Somehow many people here believe that:

- an 8GB MBP is not pro

- a 16GB MBP is pro

- desktop with 1TB ram is unnecessary for pro use

Somehow their preferred device is the "pro" device and should be called "pro" and less capable and more capable machines are irrelevant.

Again it comes down to the fact that 8GB means you are almost guaranteed to be on swap. Does it work? Sure. But there is nothing ‘Pro’ about that, it wears out your drive faster and gives suboptimal performance

> computers marketed as "Pro" devices

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Which is the problem in a nutshell. No one knows what it means.

The parent worked as a dev for a year with the machine and was happy with it. I am also a dev, and am still on a M1 8gb Air that I got in early 2021, and I'm very happy with it. Probably the best laptop I've ever had the pleasure to work on.

For my workload, I don't think the difference between a 8gb and 16gb machine would be measurable. Some people really would prefer the $200.

I think it’s pretty clear that Pro Max stands for profit maximization. ;)

We can talk about what "Pro" doesn't mean - a compromised, crippled machine that has to use swap memory from day 1.

https://youtu.be/hmWPd7uEYEY

So watch that and tell me again why you think the difference ‘isn’t measurable’.

Tell me after watching that video you think the 8gb machine which is performing up to 5x worse than the 16gb model is "Pro"

Imagine the reverse - if Apple had a new cpu that performed 5x better they would be screaming it from the rooftops. And yet they have absolutely no qualms selling a machine thats 5x worse performing on the base model compared to the $200 upgrade.

They are basically scamming us and people like you are defending them for it. They need to be shamed and people like you need to stop defending the trillion dollar company doing it.

It should be noted that I'm not saying they should sell the 16gb model for the 8gb price - I'm saying they shouldn't be selling 8gb in a pro model at all. Or at the very least, they need to make it CRYSTAL CLEAR to people buying these 8GB machines at the checkout page that they are far far worse performing than the 16GB machines and the SSD's will wear out quicker.

In that video, it looks like the 8gb starts swapping when running blender and processing photos Lightroom?! Those are the very definition of tasks requiring a memory upgrade, IMHO. The 8gb model is meant for web browsing, communication, watching YouTube or Netflix and the such. Light computer work.

Don’t get stuck on the Pro monitor, real Professionals simply buy more memory because they know they need it and they should be able to afford it. Apple offers the 8gb models for regular folk with light computing needs who like a nicer machine, be it called Air or Pro.

Like others here I am a dev, I'm fine with 8Gb. I skimmed through the video and the measurable slowdown was in image intensive apps like Lightroom and Blender. Why exactly should I be subsidizing those users?

This is the problem with skipping through things like this - you missed the part about real world chrome performance. It’s okay to be happy with 8gb, but it doesn’t mean you are right. Ignorance may be bliss but try not to spread it

You know, instead of being rude and berating someone who makes a good faith effort to watch an 11 minute video to try and find your argument, you should instead just go ahead and just make your argument. I don't know why you'd expect me to spend my time trying to find a needle in your haystack.

You are the one arguing in bad faith to satisfy the cognitive dissonance created by being scammed buying a computer at way too high price considering its real-world performance in the configuration you got.

If anything, you are the one who really needs to prove why he feels the need to defend the indefensible commercial choices of an extremely rich company.

At best you are like a weirdo using short in 5°C winter and telling everyone it is fine and do not understand why everyone is telling him he is crazy and that must be uncomfortable. At worst you are the used car salesman minimizing every single problem the car he is selling to keep the price high.

In any case, your behavior is not normal nor commendable, you shouldn't be the one requesting better behavior from other people...

Don't you use docker or build tools? Those are what use of all the memory on my computer.

I run a 3d printing business, design, manufacturing, CAD/CAM, designed my own marketing materials, website, etc etc from my 8G M2 Macbook Air, never once did I feel like I needed more RAM.

People understand that Apple just uses Pro to mean “better than the not pro version”.

We’ve had AirPods Pro and the iPhone Pro for years now, the days of the word pro meaning “for professionals” are long gone.

In short, "plus"

I wanted to download and local LLMs on my Macbook, but discovered that I just didn't have the RAM for this. Moreover I couldn't upgrade to handle the new use case, I'd need a whole new Macbook. But the cost of that new machine would be absurd.

To be clear I have no problem paying the Apple tax, the computers are worth it. The problem is that Apple has optimized the Apple tax in such a way it makes local AI applications impossible, which is a shame because they have such the best architectures for that use case.

No it's not. A ton of programs used by regular people (Chrome etc.) are RAM hogs, if you are a dev, then Docker is also an egregious example. If you happen to play games (a big thing for average people), that 8GB will be shared between the CPU and the GPU. Even the Steam Deck, admittedly a budget device, comes with 16GB.

It's often mentioned that macOS is more frugal with RAM, a claim which I flat out found to be untrue. I regularly saw Dock and Finder leak and eat gigabytes of RAM each.

The unfortunate reality is that base Mac models always existed as an upsell. There were a few precious historical exceptions, most recently the M1 Mac, but that doesn't change this rule.

>No it's not. A ton of programs used by regular people (Chrome etc.) are RAM hogs, if you are a dev, then Docker is also an egregious example. If you happen to play games (a big thing for average people), that 8GB will be shared between the CPU and the GPU. Even the Steam Deck, admittedly a budget device, comes with 16GB.

That's why I said normal office workers and students. I never said 8GB is enough for devs. It wasn't enough for me. It was still manageable for that 1 year before Apple Silicon MBPs got released. But of course I upgraded to an M1 Pro 16GB as soon as it came out.

I just gifted a family member an M1 Air 8GB in late 2023. I felt very comfortable that it was enough for the work this person does on the computer.

PS. 8GB is perfectly fine for Chrome web browsing. You can have 50 tabs open and it'll still run smoothly. macOS does some magic with paging. Don't know how it does it. But never had an issue with 8GB and Chrome. It was always my IDE, Typescript, and docker that gave me RAM issues on 8GB.

> That's why I said normal office workers and students.

Costing 9 hundos a piece, Air is not something a regular company would buy for their employees.

They're more likely to buy a budget laptop in the 400-500 range which you can bet will do just fine for office work, and you can always upgrade it if necessary.

If a company really does need their employees to work a Mac, they will have to cough out a lot more for the 16GB version, and this is what the article calls corporate greed.

When I was in college, I interned as IT support at a large corporation. We were buying $1200 Lenovos for normal office workers and $2000 laptop workstations for the design engineers. You'd be surprised at how much money enterprises spend on each laptop.

I happen to think that the enterprise is an untapped market for Macs. Not tech offices. Other industries that run on Lenovos and Dells.

If I'm a small business, I still wouldn't buy $500 Windows laptops for my employees. I'd buy $750 M1 Airs. They last longer, "just work", and have fewer support issues.

IBM went to macs 8 years ago.

> I'd buy $750 M1 Airs. They last longer, "just work", and have fewer support issues.

As an employee of a company that runs macbook fleets, hell no they don't. Every other year we have had to replace half our inventory because of the 2015 macbooks having faulty batteries that want to explode, and then the next generations being that terrible keyboard, where every single employee needed their entire top cover replaced at least once because the keyboard didn't even last a year.

Meanwhile at my previous company which ran those boring ugly dell "workstation" laptops with the fat ass batteries, Entire generations of older workstations were still in inventory because they just didn't die, and were stupidly easy to repair, and you didn't have to send them away for a month for something like "my N key doesn't work anymore" or "the battery we gave you will burn your house down"

I just don't get how people say "Macs are reliable", because the only laptops less reliable than my work macbooks have been a series of cost reduced dell laptops that screws would literally fall out of, except even when that happened, dell would send someone to come fix it the next day, in your home!

Nobody considers the final-gen intel MBPs with touchbar and stupid-ass keyboard to be reliable. M-series machines however, I have not heard of any issues with those aside from flaky MagSafe connectors.

Haven't heard the reports of spontaneous screen cracking? [0]

[0] https://www.makeuseof.com/m1-macbook-screens-cracking/

It's widely known that accessories like stick on camera covers can damage the screens of the new macbooks because they're designed with almost zero gap when shut. I work among a sea of macbooks and follow the macbook world rather closely and have never once heard of any common screen issue on the apple silicon models that didn't amount to someone having stuck something between the screen and the case when closing it.

There's loads of threads on Apple's own site, reddit, etc. of it happening. Some users have claimed it happened while the laptop was OPEN.

But hey, it's not like Apple has a history of denying problems, right?

Apple has definitely had screen cracking issues in the past, and I believe it has been a covered repair/replacement.

Nope, first I’ve heard of it. Nor do I believe the person “it was just sitting there, it cracked just by looking at it funny!” Uh huh. Sure buddy.

> 2015 macbooks having faulty batteries that want to explode, and then the next generations being that terrible keyboard, where every single employee needed their entire top cover replaced at least once because the keyboard didn't even last a year.

IIRC there was a recall/replacement program for those batteries as well as earlier generations of the butterfly keyboard. I'm not a fan of the butterfly keyboard, but Apple did replace it twice for free. The final revision fixed the reliability problems for me at least.

> They're more likely to buy a budget laptop in the 400-500 range

I'd imagine the TCO on those bargain basement laptops is terrible, so I doubt they're really a big sell for corporate buyers.

Not necessarily - it depends how easily you can upgrade off-the shelf NVMs and RAM, and how much RAM its motherboard supports.

(A) the actual purchase cost for memory, whether its $200 or $20 is essentially irrelevant when it comes to TCO.

(B) In my experience corporate machines simply aren't upgraded. You get enough for the job when you order it. If you need more, you get a new machine and the old one is repurposed or retired if it's remaining usable life is short.

>In my experience corporate machines simply aren't upgraded.

Yeah. It would basically be insane for a company to nickel and dime laptop purchases and then pay an IT person to do bespoke upgrades. Like a lot of things that may seem sensible on a personal level where labor is cheap/free, they don't make sense when you're paying someone $50+ an hour to do them.

Yes, you are completely right. In my experience though, the machines do get upgrades if someone insists, and the tech department prefers the easiest possible way.

I remember in a n org I worked a few years ago we got new laptops with SSDs instead of HDDs. Everybody was happy except the people who worked with a lot of data as the first SSDs were very small like 128 GB (still the amount of disk space you would get in an entry-level MBP 2019 I think). So we asked for an upgrade and they replaced our SSDs rather than replacing whole laptops. But I'm sure it's place-dependent.

$299 Inspirons these days come with NVMe storage and 6 core Intel CPUs

Still the 1366x768 displays that they were using 10 years ago?

Just a quick glance at the dell website shows me an Inspiron 15 w/ 8GB RAM, and a 256GB nvme for $279. I'm sure the panel isn't great, but it is 1080p.

It is an i3, but still... this is $279! Do some bargain hunting and you can find some pretty decent machines for <$500 now.

That 'i3' runs circles around i7 laptop CPUs from just a couple of years ago

You do know what the "T" in "TCO" stands for right? Hint: it's not the price you paid for the hardware upfront.

At work, the m1/m2 airs are exactly what we buy for most employees. The base spec is absolutely fine for most of our staff, and they’ll get 3+ years out of them.

Edit: devs get 32G pros though, and we loathe the extra RAM pricing on those. Cheap compared to the cost of a developer, though!

Sounds like you're just guessing what "a regular company" would do. The company I work for, as boring as any "regular" company, was buying M1 MBPs with 16GB and 512GB two years ago. For anyone who preferred a Mac to a PC laptop. I personally know of three companies that just buy a MBP for anyone asking. They're not cheaping out on some Latitude or Inspiron pos.

> That's why I said normal office workers and students.

What? NO. 8GB is not enough for browsing and the proliferation of Electron apps these days. The solution shouldn't be constantly swapping, which is what all 8GB Apple devices do. This will lead to early SSD death and since the SSD is soldered on, that means the entire device is useless.

Well, Apple has been using SSDs for a long time now. Do you know Mac users personally where the SSD died before something else in the computer?

Yes I have seen this. The disk write speed randomly gets super slow and tons of stuff just locks up at random as many many programs assume it'll be fine to do little writes synchronously. The whole machine becomes totally unusable.

I see it on computers (and phones too) whose owners bought the smallest capacity to avoid spending money on something they didn't think they would use.

That's not what happens when an SSD reaches the write limit. It'll simply not let you write more data and becomes read only.

I have personally experienced this issue. It just gets very slow before slowly dying outright.

On a Mac?

Yes I have seen this occur on multiple MacBook.

What on earth are you doing to make that happen? Either you’re use case is thrashing the SSD, you have a faulty part or you’re exaggerating.

Um, I don't know. Exaggeration? No, I only wish. Faulty part or not, it happened years after the purchase.

I've never had an SSD that just stopped allowing writes and returns an error. Instead it gets slower and slower until at some point attempting to write anything will just block forever. The process trying will be stuck in the I/O wait "D" state in Linux and be basically unkillable.

Edit: I should clarify this is what I've seen with nvme devices in particular.

You can search this very forum where we posted stories when the M1s first came out, that they were churning through several percentage points of the life of the SSD within just a couple months. I think that was caused by a bug however

This article is about the PRO model. I doubt that normal should use PRO model. PRO model should have enough memory for a PRO person.

To be completely fair, base 14" MBP is only Pro in the name. That laptop has only 2 ports, supports only 1 external monitor, has a low core count CPU, and a relatively weak GPU, disqualifying it for any "Pro" work well before RAM (or storage) even enter the discussion.

On the flip side, the very same laptop has a much better display than competing MacBook Air, and better in a manner that is observable in its entirety in non-professional casual use: visually better scrolling of web pages and documents; easier to see in bright sun; much more superior HDR movie watching experience.

It also has much better laptop speakers - completely irrelevant for professional use (like music production), but very relevant for movie watching.

Base 14" MBP is merely a better Netflix machine than MacBook Air is.

What you said about Pro, and what the article says about Pro, is very fair and quite excellent in fact for, uhm, actual Pro laptops, which is Mx Pro/Max based machines, not the new base 14" MBP on an Mx (small one) chip.

What I indeed find perplexing is the fact that 2 default 14" Mx MBP configurations that do not require any changes (they often ship faster, being default is a tangible difference) aren't 8 GB 512 and 16 GB 512, but 8 GB 512 and 8 GB 1TB. That I find odd, because I think yes, a small subset of office users might find a low core count but bigger RAM version useful in practice (I'm thinking some very heavy spreadsheet hitters kind of office power users, managers probably), but virtually no one in that category would actually care to have 1TB of SSD with everything being web-based and/or stored on company's servers in corporate environment. That is indeed odd. But maybe I'm wrong in my assumptions for this one - it's easy to be lacking any actual stats or data - and it's appropriate as well. I don't know.

I think Apple knows what they are doing. The 13" MacBook Pro with touchbar was another odd machine that "shouldn't exist" but it was their second-best selling laptop, presumably because of its form factor, features/performance, and price.

Thing is, for regular office use, the M1 Air is perfectly fine, there's very little you gain if you go with the M3 Pro instead of the M1.

Funnily enough, I'm typing this from a 3 year old Thinkpad that I use for work, which has in all likelyhood a slower CPU than even the M1, but it's perfectly usable for dev work, because it has 64GB of RAM.

As Android dev (yes I use Android Studio) who works with MBA 2017, I think it's enough... to a certain degree. As long as you don't open >20 browser tabs and running Android emulator on the same time, which is pain in the a*.

Of course, 16 GB (or more) is nicer.

If Chrome is the only reason someone feels they need more RAM, maybe what they really need is a new browser. A web browser should never even enter the conversation when talking about hitting hardware limitations.

Once upon a time that was a reasonable position to hold.

But nowadays full dynamic applications are shipped in a browser tab, and a huge number of "desktop" applications are written in JavaScript using electron, so they're essentially an isolated chrome instance for running that app.

People talk about chrome being a resource hog, and maybe it is, but if you have dozens of JavaScript applications running in different tabs, then chrome is just taking the blame for the fact that it's essentially serving as the user application layer of your OS.

Putting applications in the browser was a huge mistake that we're still paying for today.

I used a M1 with 16GB, and regularly had ~12GB in swap without noticing anything.

Once per day, I maybe got a slight 600ms hang when something was unexpectedly swapped in.

So I can imagine that 8GB will work okay, even if Chrome eats 30% of it.

> if you are a dev, then Docker is also an egregious example

I'm glad I stuck with embedded development. The biggest resource-hog I interact with regularly is GCC.

I can be productive on a P3 with 256M of RAM.

> I regularly saw Dock and Finder leak and eat gigabytes of RAM each

Make sure to view "Real mem" in Activity Monitor. That's the amount of data actually stored in your RAM, the rest being swapped out. That number can be quite small, even for apps that theoretically use a lot of memory.

I have found Docker to be an "actual" memory hog with not much of it being swapped out, but could imagine that it would be possible in the case of Finder.

I don't know how macOS manages memory or reports its use, but how does the data having been swapped out change anything? If N pages of data of those processes have been swapped out, that means those processes have allocated and used that many pages of memory (plus any that are actually in RAM). The OS heuristics just decided it wasn't worthwhile to keep those particular pages in RAM under current circumstances.

If the processes just allocated a lot of memory and never touched it, it might be reasonable to say they don't actually use it because the OS might never actually reserve any physical resources for it. (Happens a lot e.g. in Linux with memory overcommit allowed by default and some processes allocating dozens of gigabytes of virtual memory, most of which they never actually use.)

But would those pages then count towards swap use either? Only dirty pages end up in swap. Unless macOS counts allocated but untouched pages towards used swap as committed resources.

edit: better wording

Swap memory use is worse than actual memory use. If it just reserving a big block and not using it then fine whatever but if it's using a lot of swap that means ram is probably bottlenecking you since swap is slow.

It's of course slower than real RAM, but Apple are using pretty fast SSDs and possibly a novel model of swapping, making it effectively pretty good (certainly not perfect!).

Doesn't swapping to SSD make the laptop EOL come even quicker?

Do you know of any recent benchmarks to back up this claim? It's entirely quantifiable.

Also, it's such a controversial thing you would think if the difference was so stark The Verge, Linus Tech Tips or Max Tech, etc. would, you know, actually measure it.

The only kinda objective side-by-side test I could find, on typical workloads, was this 2 year old video on the M1 which stated the 8gb did well on typical multitask workloads. For Chrome tab test the bottleneck was the internet speed, not RAM. Lightroom and Final Cut Export was slower, but typical multitasking workloads basically matched.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h487I_5xOZU

Obviously things change so where does this stand today?

The reality is that the exact same hardware uses less RAM on a base install of Windows than it does on a base install of macOS. Having used both hackintosh and real Mac booted on Windows (without bootcamp, as a "real" PC) I am certain of that fact.

And in usage I also find macOS and its Apps to more often than not actually take more RAM. It isn't a bad thing pe se, it often means more speed because more things are cached, available fast and the like.

However, it is quite annoying when Apple simultaneously pretend the contrary and at the same time upcharge for their soldered RAM in a greedy way. If anything, a "Pro" PC laptop in this price range will have not only at least 16GB as default but is highly likely to have 4-8GB for its dedicated GPU when with Apple Silicon, the RAM advertised has to be shared and any GPU activity lower even more what can comfortably be used as system memory.

The more time passes, the more Apple Silicon feels like the ultimate scam. At this you better have a very real need for battery life because it really does not make a lot of sense otherwise. In fact, if it is only autonomy that you need and not true mobility, it would be better to buy cheaper performance equivalent PC and buy one of those large carriable battery.

It’s not in my experience. “Normal users” are starting to run into this issue as I can anecdotally pass along (browsing, google suite, slight photoshop use, etc). I actually had lots of reservations before I “green lighted” those first gen M1 MacBook Airs at 8GB across family and friends. Unfortunately I unreasonably fell for the rather over hyped reviews across the board (“I want to believe”). It’s especially on me as my last private intel MBP before my “maxed out” M1 MBP wore out its on-board SSD after only 4 years and that one was large (1TB) with ample memory for the time (16GB). It’s running my personal “hack on Linux” from the SD card slot since so it’s somewhat cool but yeah..

My current work machine, a M2 Pro MBP at 32GB actually has less usable memory than my sluggish i9 MBP had - due to unified memory. We know the CPU/GPU is great but the memory story really isn’t, my system is palpably less responsive with a couple of documentation / bad web interface Safari tabs too many… RAM configurations are just prohibitively expensive even for “well off” companies / purchasers at this point so it’s often a struggle to fight for more.

I’ve been a big Apple / Mac fan and loyal customer since Panther but we shouldn’t turn a blind eye here.

These constrained memory configurations - even when streamlined OS / system software optimizations are in place (are they? still?) - are probably playing a good part in their great margins but they do need to go with the time (bloated websites and apps) as well of course their own stacks running on top.

> It’s especially on me as my last private intel MBP before my “maxed out” M1 MBP wore out its on-board SSD after only 4 years and that one was large (1TB) with ample memory for the time (16GB).

I wonder how that's possible, and whether that's an outlier rather than a case of probable risk to SSDs. I've got the impression that it shouldn't be likely to wear out a modern or semi-modern SSD with any kinds of typical laptop workloads.

I daily drove a 500 GB off-the-shelf SSD in a 8 GB ThinkPad for ~8 years, and while it was for personal device, I used it a lot and even played games on it, often ran into swapping, even hibernated semi-regularly at times, etc., and there were never any signs of problems with the SSD.

4 years sounds like pretty bad luck.

It’s probably fully deterministic in that case. It was bought summer 2015 and the SSD intermittently started to have write errors end of 2019 so 4.5 years. Were you running a “hackintosh” on that one? macOS is way more memory intensive than Linux on desktop in my experience / usage pattern.

No, no macOS. I just wouldn't expect that the software would make such a difference. I also wasn't sparing with that machine, went gigabytes into the swap regularly, the SSD was often at 85-90% capacity, and yet I was nowhere near depleting the reserved blocks and had zero problems after years of use. (I can't remember when exactly I bought the SSD but I think it was 2015 or 2016 and I used it until 2023.)

I guess it's possible, it just sounded like individual bad luck to me. My impression has been that you really have to write a lot to wear out the expected life of a non-ancient SSD.

Thank god I'm not the only one to know the truth. My experience is similar to yours and I agree on everything.

I started using Macs with Mac OS 9.2 but now I want out. The pricing is absurd and there is no way to circumvent that since no upgrade possible.

I don't care much about battery life/power consumption and the actual use case is overblown, if you get one of the powerful chips and push it, you are looking at 30-50W power consumption; so even with a 100kWh battery, we are talking 2-3H at best.

In other words, if you want to game, compute, encode, render, or whatever high performance task you are still going to need a cord anyway. The rest of low power task is actually done very nicely on much cheaper devices that have more than enough battery life (from cheap tablets, including iPads to Chromebooks).

Also macOS currently has a software problem in my opinion and Apple stupidly push for subscription out of greed. If I have to subscribe for my computing needs I might as well get the cheaper devices and use software that can run anywhere, including sub 500$ potato.

Apple has made a terrible mistake strategically; you can't have your cake and eat it too. If they want to sell expensive, limited hardware they need to have cheap non-subscription software that is best in class in enough categories. If their hardware is only useful to run competitors' software and subscription stuff they have to be competitive on the hardware price...

The lifespan of a Macbook Pro will be increased if the RAM is upgraded from 8GB to 16GB, which is very unfriendly to the environment. Ironically, Apple's official website makes a big deal about how low-carbon they are.

Note: Customers cannot upgrade the RAM by themselves.

I talked about that point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38215666

I have a 2011 Thinkpad T520 which still works fine, upgraded it to 16GB of RAM. There are high quality Windows laptops out there, but of course they cost as much as a Macbook.

I'm okay with laptops being sold with 8GB of RAM, but I'm not okay with artifically shortened lifespan caused by lack of upgradability. Manufacturers should be regulated to force them offer upgradeable RAM. I don't care what new technological innovations that may require to offer same speeds as current soldered RAM does, it's simply the right thing to do.

>Manufacturers should be regulated to force them offer upgradeable RAM.

Disagreed. You can't make RAM upgradeable and have unified memory architecture that makes Apple Silicon good. Let's not regulate technology like this.

There were studies done that showed most people do not upgrade their RAM/storage even though they could. They just bought new computers. I can't find them now but you could probably find them if you dig around.

> You can't make RAM upgradeable and have unified memory architecture

Silicon Graphics did it in the 90s, x86 laptops do something similar but it's not true UMA AFAIU mostly due to software / graphics API limitations.

> that makes Apple Silicon good.

Good interplay between CPU and GPU, the major advantage of UMA, does nothing for raw CPU performance. What I find attractive about Apple silicon is that it has very high performance, high efficiency CPU cores. Nothing to do with UMA.

Soldered RAM can be somewhat higher speed and lower energy than replaceable, I think that's the main real advantage. Still, I wouldn't want it.

>x86 laptops do something similar but it's not true UMA AFAIU mostly due to software / graphics API limitations.

They don't. They pre-allocate a portion of the memory to the iGPU and the CPU can't access that memory. It's not nearly the same unified memory we're talking about.

>Good interplay between CPU and GPU, the major advantage of UMA, does nothing for raw CPU performance. What I find attractive about Apple silicon is that it has very high performance, high efficiency CPU cores. Nothing to do with UMA.

I didn't imply that unified memory is the only thing that makes Apple Silicon good. Of course everything else has to be good too. But unified memory is a big part of Apple Silicon. Furthermore, going forward, UMA has real advantages over non-UMA architectures for LLMs.

> They pre-allocate a portion of the memory to the iGPU and the CPU can't access that memory

I don't recall the details, yes there's a BIOS setting to assign memory to the GPU, but that doesn't actually limit the memory used by the GPU. With any current OS and driver, the actual amount of memory used is set dynamically at runtime. The rest is as I said an API (OpenGL / DirectX pre 12) limitation.

https://docplayer.net/88302897-Memory-management-in-vulkan-a...

Page 20:

Memory types: AMD APU

● Memory is really unified – all heaps are equally fast.

Meaning the application can allocate a buffer on such a heap, load/generate some data into it, and "hand it over to" (just means promise not to change it concurrently without notifying) the GPU. No copies, the GPU can now use it. [In contrast, different memory types on non-UMA systems are best for uploads (to GPU), downloads (from GPU), frequent use, one-time use... of buffers]

So, what's left of Apple's UMA advantage is, I don't know? Maybe a unified cache. Not a big deal, graphics working sets are much larger than any L3 cache. Oh, and marketing language.

> Soldered RAM can be somewhat higher speed and lower energy than replaceable

Can we have one piece of soldered RAM and one slot to add more RAM later on though? (at the cost of possibly unmatched speed and other stuff that happens when you mix and match RAM as you like)

You can. My Thinkpad T14 Gen1 AMD has that. I'd prefer two sticks over soldered + stick. Also, memory bandwidth is usually kind of crap unless you add that memory stick in the slot. Typically 25-40% (GPU) performance difference in games between stick and no stick. At least the 16 GB -> 32 GB factory upgrade was cheap, they can't charge crazy prices because people would just buy the RAM separately.

> Manufacturers should be regulated to force them offer upgradeable RAM

Or just don't buy LUXURY Macs. Yes, they are luxury goods, they are Louis Vuittons of the laptop world.

You and a bunch of people don't buy Macs with 8GB and complain a lot and Apple will start selling them with 16GB.

But this will never happen because people will keep buying Macs because of the panache and swagger that owning and using a Mac give them.

Bizarre bitterness. You really think nobody is buying Macs on their merit?

Maybe you're European and apple products cost a lot more where you live?

In the states, base model MacBook Airs are frequently ~$800 on sale.

You can get an official refurb MacBook Air or Pro with 16GB/1TB for ~$1300 from Apple's website right now.

Those machines are priced competitively when compared to Dell XPS, new ThinkPads, etc.

They also have much better battery life, screens, and overall build quality compared to those machines.

Also MacOS is, for all its faults, normie-accessible unlike Linux and ad-free unlike Windows.

macOS market share is actually 20% on desktop/laptops despite Macs selling only about ~8-10% of total PCs worldwide. ------ So that's older Macs still in use and doesn't mean that the current 8GB Macs is still trending that way.

Yes, there is no guarantee that Macs are trending that way. However, I have a feeling that Apple Silicon Macs, even with 8GB, will last very longer than Intel Macs with the same amount of memory in the past.

Ten years ago, Macbook Pro was equipped with 4GB RAM. Back then, the Macbook Pro hardware led the PC industry. Pro is a real Pro. today, you’re saying that it’s enough.

Macbook Pro hardware still leads the industry in my opinion. And has a bigger lead than ever.

CPU benchmarks will tell us the fact. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Maybe there's just a lot of Hackintoshes

How is increasing the lifespan of the MBP more unfriendly to the environment??

No it isn't, because of lazy developers that keep pushing Electron apps for those office workers and students.

I use Electron apps (VSCode, Slack, etc). They are bloated compared to native apps, but that running a few of them somehow makes 8GB "not enough" is overblown. You get by just fine.

It's wanting to run big VMs that is the real pain point with 8GB.

Getting by today, doesn't mean one gets by tomorrow.

Why, are we waiting something drastic in the next 4-5 years before the users gets the new model?

Because that is forced obsolence and damaging for the environment, the computer from today should be perfectly usable in 4-5 years.

The upgrade treadmill from the 20 century computers is no longer relevant for most users, besides storage.

>Because that is forced obsolence and damaging for the environment, the computer from today should be perfectly usable in 4-5 years.

And for most users it will be. If we're talking "forced obsolence" Apple is probably the last to blame, given their stuff retains high ratio of original-vs-resale value (meaning they have long second hand careers).

That used to be true. It is not at all true for the recent Macs. The Intel Macs with soldered everything already old a worse value but the low-end Apple Silicon Macs seems to be even worse. It is unsurprising considering the limitation, the configuration is set in stone and any problem, especially on the storage means the end of the machine.

If you believe that will not make their second-hand value and their longevity much worse, I don't know what to tell you. It is already happening. Even relatively recent Intel macs are worthless if they were not top of the line with lots of storage and RAM. The only thing keeping somewhat of a value is what Apple does not want to sell anymore: big display iMacs (27"). But that's really not surprising since half the value comes from being a good display in the first place...

On top of all that, even low-end hardware is good enough for basic task, so second-hand inventory is piling up, especially at the low end. Macs are nice but old Macs not that much nicer than cheap Huawei's and the likes...

Native apps aren't automatically less bloated, take Xcode vs VSCode for instance. Native apps might just have more optimization potential, but that doesn't mean that the potential is realized. The most efficient applications are 10 or 20 years old, running on modern hardware ;)

>Native apps aren't automatically less bloated, take Xcode vs VSCode for instance

What about them? XCode is quite efficient with memory, and it by definition doesn't pass everything through a interpret+JIT for a higher level language.

IME (and I work with both every day), Xcode is slower for almost every UI interaction than VSCode on the same machine. It already starts with Xcode's extremely slow startup, just now it took 15(!) seconds for Xcode to cold-start. And that's on a 32 GBytes M1 Pro.

It really depends on the size of the workspace your loading.

Try opening some heinously large project with 100+ dylibs (react-native) compared against a lean, statically linked single module workspace. You can have them open side by side and it’s like experiencing hell and heaven simultaneously.

> 8GB is still good enough for office workers and students.

The article specifically talks about the _Macbook Pro_, which shouldn't target office workers and students.

Why not?

I don't really have a problem with 8GB for the base model. There are plenty of people buying Macs, including Pro versions, that won't need more than that.

My issue is the heavy price increase for higher RAM amounts. A $2500 machine should come with at least 64GB.

Exactly. They wouldn't be selling it if people weren't buying it.

The fact is, 8 GB delivers perfectly speedy performance for many Pro workloads.

It's not enough if you're a dev running VM's, but Pro doesn't mean it's for developers only. There are a lot of other types of professionals out there, where their needs are e.g around CPU not memory.

Actually, I don't even have a problem with $2500 coming with 16GB. I have a problem with most higher memory options not being standard retail SKUS, which means they rarely go on sale and have to BTO with longer wait times.

8GB is way too little for office workers. Outlook, MS Teams and the Office 365 integrations consume a lot of memory. Especially if you are collaborating in big presentations with a few people. My previous Dell 16GB office laptop frequently ran to its limits with regular office work.

Apple geeks eating up and justifying anything and everything that apple throws at them is hilarious to see. It takes 50-60$ for a 8GB stick and people justifying that 200$ markup because Apple needs to make profit too. Is it Stockholm syndrome I dont know.

It probably costs Apple way less than $50-$60 for 8GB. The margins must be very high.

I understand the business aspect of this for Apple. I'm not mad at them. I'll pay $200 to upgrade the RAM so that I can keep using macOS and have a well-built laptop that makes no noise. Apple knows this. It's just good business in my opinion. But I guess to you, I'm an Apple geek who has Stockholm syndrome.

Well... yeah, your behavior is that of someone who has Stockholm syndrome. I'm not saying this to be hostile, but there's a world of difference between "I accept this because it's the best option for me despite the drawbacks" and "I don't mind getting price gouged because the big tech company has to make money somehow". We all make business decisions that aren't ideal (because we have to), but you don't need to lick the company boot while you're at it.

So disagreeing with someone else’s behaviour when choosing their tech means they have Stockholm syndrome? No, you may not think you’re being hostile, but you are.

> So disagreeing with someone else’s behaviour when choosing their tech means they have Stockholm syndrome?

No, they perfectly explained why that isn't the case. Please read the post carefully instead of knee jerk responding.

> but you don't need to lick the company boot while you're at it.

That’s hostile. It’s obnoxious as suggesting a difference of opinion is “Stockholm syndrome”. It the same as saying “I’m not being rude, but you’re an idiot”. Yeah, you’re being rude.

At its highest point it wouldn't even be $50 for 8GB LPDDR. At its lowest point it would be close to $20. You can add a maximum of $5 for testing and packaging within SoC.

Their argument seems like CPU binning for me, except less crazy? (lesser CPU takes more procedure to fuse out the disabled cores)

I dislike Apple - especially the way they rewrite history to remove Commodore/ Spectrum/Acorn/Atari - is disgraceful.

HOWEVER, my M1 Air (with 8GB RAM) has and continues to be a great little machine for web browsing, email, Discord and writing. It can comes in clutch occasionally for coding.

Value? No, it's not great value. I bought a $500 Lenovo with 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM as a backup machine and the only areas where the M1 Air beats it are in the trackpad. The Lenovo even has a sleep mode which actually works and the battery life is fantastic. Even the screen is a toss-up - the OLED screen on the Lenovo is in a different class to the Apple screen in some ways but it isn't as bright so less good if you're working in direct sunlight.

You are off in a parallel universe if sleep mode on your Mac is a failing comparison point here.

Well, on the other hand, they got AS great performance, amazing battery life, tremendous snapiness, no noise, and so on, first - which you didn't get for a while on the Windows laptop world, even for comparable priced machines, even if they had double the RAM. Not even getting into the trackpad, build quality and materials over cheapo plastic, and so on.

For personal and work purposes I use both Apple and Windows laptops and its no comparison on those areas really, even if you go for the nice one's (Lenovo, Dell Latitude, Surface, etc). And if you add the other configurations, you get closer to the MBP price.

Eg. Latitude 7440 laptop was the one left after filtering for all the "high end" attributes (> 8GB mem, highest intel processor available for the series, FHD+ etc). Configured at: 14", 16GB, the highest processor configuration they offer, 14.0-in. display Full HD+ (which is just 1920X1200, way worse than "retina") goes for $1,659.00 on Dell's website.

I'd get the M1 over that anyday, even if I had to pay $100-$200 extra for the 16GB option. Especially since it will keep its resale value way better.

The difference is that you got an Intel CPU instead of an AMD one that's built on a smaller node and has a far more efficient GPU.

Those AMD CPUs are still not as efficient in those aspects in PC laptops

I like my mac book pro but I'm not eating it up or justifying it. I'm just biting my tongue and paying it, knowing I get roughly 2x as much time out of my apple devices as I do out of cheaper PC/Android stuff. Plus I need a mac for some of my work that is proprietary.

I bought a think pad just a couple years ago. I had to upgrade it to 16G. I had to upgrade the screen to actually be readable. The whole thing was deceptively priced as being on a permanent sale. I don’t get why Apple is the target here, they’re way better than other companies. 16G is starting to be standard for sure, but Apple is only a little behind the times in that regard.

The M2 Air 8Gb starts at $1100, not $900. And it's €1300 in Europe. It's not a cheap laptop at all.

> are simply unmatched by anything in the PC world at that price - sometimes any price

Technically, comparable Windows laptops do exist, but hardware vendors don’t want to sell them.

For some reason, hardware vendors really want to sell Intel CPUs, and discrete GPUs. Both choices are suboptimal for most people, because modern AMD chips are more power efficient than Intel, and their integrated GPUs are pretty good by now.

If I wanted a new laptop today, I would look for a model with Ryzen 7 7840U. The chip has 8 Zen4 CPU cores, 12 RDNA3 GPU cores, and 15-30W TDP. Quietness, coolness, performance, and battery life should be very comparable to Apple’s M1 laptops.

Sadly, most laptops which have Ryzen 7 7840U include soldered LPDDR5[x] memory, but there’re couple models with DDR5 SO-DIMM slots: Framework 13, and HP EliteBook 845 G10.

BTW, I have an older laptop with Ryzen 5 5600U. It’s a generation older, but CPU performance and power efficiency are already good there. GPU performance is not great as GCN5 cores are way slower than RDNA3.

> 8GB is still good enough for office workers and students.

That's not the target users for the "MacBook Pro" series.

The 8GB 14" MBP M3 is a strange one. I personally don't think this SKU should even exist. I think the 15" MBA can replace the now-deprecated 13" MBP Touchbar in the lineup.

Apple did open themselves up to ridicule for putting 8GB on a $1600 "Pro" laptop.

I don't see why a user who only did light tasks on their Mac wouldn't want a 120hz screen.

I'll never understand the Apple effect. Neglecting core components of their hardware that would not hurt their margin to spec acceptably from the start, ripping off their customers to upgrade to bare minimum ... and their customers keep defending them for that?

8GB on MBA may have been fine. But 8GB on MBP?

> On a slightly related note: $/GB for RAM hit a wall starting in 2011

Now that's just disingenuous, it's a log scale and it shows that memory prices fell 40% from 2012 to 2022.

Apple charges $200 to upgrade M1 Macbook Air from 8GB to 16GB.

A comparable 8GB stick of DDR4-3600 costs $25 retail.

You’re comparing apples to oranges. The RAM is (or extremely close to being) part of the package. A stick of RAM is a commodity part. The M-series package isn’t.

You can bend over backwards all you want, but if you're going to claim that Apple's Unified Memory costs 10x as much as commodity RAM in terms of BOM, you better bring some receipts.

It doesn't cost apple $200 to go from 8GB to 16GB, it's likely 1/10th of that since they are ordering processors in the millions at the lowest point available in silicon manufacturing. I've never had an apple product fail either and I can't say that for other laptops (hp/dell) I still have my MacBook pro from 2011, using it as a NAS (running linux tho) my Dell from that year is long since dead.

Which explains why they had the exact same RAM upgrade pricing since the mid 2000s when they were using off the shelf Intel processors right? It's basically always been $200 extra dollars for the next step up above base for Apple RAM, even when they were user replaceable sticks that you could find compatible commodity versions of!

the point is that pure greed keeps them from doubling it and giving people a bit more power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com