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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

For the life of me, I can not figure out how the 8GB models work for Apple. To be sure, I am near certain they do, I just don't understand how.

I get that they can sell an upgrade here but it's so obvious of a bottleneck that risks impacting the most basic experience of normies, who do not even wanna know what RAM is, which will just worsen the impression that could easily be fixed at a production premium of, what, $20?

Why would Apple do that? Your entire product feels bad, when you run out of RAM. It seems so off.

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> Why would Apple do that? Your entire product feels bad, when you run out of RAM. It seems so off.

One reason is anchoring - an old thing that you see everywhere, e.g. car industry.

You see a poster saying "new Tesla, 24.999$" but that model is a joke lacking everything you want. But the number is baked into your brain, so you don't feel like you paid a lot when you take out a Tesla for 49.999$.

Apple constantly does that stuff with their cheapest models - iPad Air is 599$ with puny, barely usable 64GB of flash storage. When you decide you want one, you'll probably have to get the only other model - 256GB for a massive price jump of 750$.

Same thing is going on with MacBooks - the 8GB models are there to establish lowest price for ads and marketing debates. They might even work for some people if they're careful, but you know you kinda need more RAM for it to not chug while running. And that will be an extra 200$ or 20% of the price. Thank you.

Wouldn't anchoring be damaging in this case, you anchor some number and by having to pay more by a lot, you feel the loss more acutely?

It sounds to me more like the real estate agent trick of presenting a poor house, a luxury house and something in-between but with the best markup for the agent.

Also they get to say "starting from $XXXX" in marketing material to get foot in the door.

You're actually right that it works both ways - marketers sometimes anchor something with higher price (to make it seem more luxurious) and sometimes at lower price (to make it feel for people that they paid less than what they did).

But the whole point of the effect is that it misleads your feelings around the value of the product and I guess it still works well since it's been used for century in marketing.

My thinking here is, that RAM is not a concept normies understand as a value proposition. It's like putting bad wires into something, and charging for better wires. If the devices fail because of poorly isolated wires, nobody would think "ah, that's my bad, I'll buy the wires upgrade next time".

Contrast this with a a better camera in a phone that makes prettier pictures, or a bigger battery in a car, that helps you drive further. There is a tangible value add.

In a world, where users are increasingly uninterested in tech RAM, for normal use seems to be in the wire category. It's just a thing for everything to not fail and feel like shit.

Are there really enough users who would think "of course, more RAM is required" instead of just being annoyed at Gmail crashing for no apparent reason and it being damaging to the Apple brand?

I'll be honest. I did a year on an 8Gb M1 Mini and it was absolutely fine.

I was writing Go, LaTeX, doing all usual Apple apps stuff, using MS Office, remote admin etc. Used Safari as the native browser. Was using Apple Photos for personal photo management (about 75 gig)

The only time I hit problems was when I put Adobe near it with Lightroom and Slack.

In general I have much better experiences on MacOS with 8G of RAM than on Windows or Linux. Very happy that I have 16G on my current machine, but I feel like 90% of the stuff I do (even as a dev!) would go perfectly fine on 8G.

I feel like people are using their experience with 8GB on other platforms and projecting their experience to other people. I feel like MacOS memory management is VERY on-point.

> For the life of me, I can not figure out how the 8GB models work for Apple.

Swap was intended as a last resort for avoiding OOM errors: dump to the slower media instead of terminating open programs.

Apple has seen a profit two fronts here: upselling the 16GB (which is baseline) model, and forcing 8GB users to upgrade after some years as their ssd will be destroyed or end of life due to the daily continuous writes.

Apple has supported compressed memory pages for almost a decade now. It compresses pages before it writes pages to swap (iOS doesn't even have swap). The cost to compress pages is an order of magnitude better than writing to disk including SSDs.

Compressed pages aren't magic but they let 8GB go further than you might expect.

Windows has memory compression for years too. Doesn't make low memory hardware usable.

> Windows has memory compression for years too.

You're right.

> Doesn't make low memory hardware usable.

You're wrong. It _really_ helps.

Compressed pages are not unique to Apple and are used by Windows and Linux, too.

On by default in Windows 10.

Not enabled by default in any Linux I have ever seen, and for context, in the last two years I've reviewed about 50 different distros.

And I do mean entire distros, not just desktops.

Indeed; it was one of the significant changes in Mavericks (10.9):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Mavericks

It's an option in Linux; put `zswap.enable=1` in the kernel parameters. I do this routinely now, because I like old Thinkpads and a few of mine only have 8GB RAM. It's not transformational but the difference in performance is really noticeable: open a few big fat bloated memory-hungry apps, like anything using Electron, and wow, suddenly your machine stays responsive under load.

Looking at this in a positive light, maybe Apple is rolling back the clock. As one comment said:

> The only time I hit problems was when I put Adobe near it with Lightroom and Slack.

When stuff runs poorly, users won't blame the system: only the programs that run badly. Apple is good at making native apps which they do anyway and they'll run much better than anything in Electron, or even other portable software tech. There will be pressure for other software vendors to up (or reduce) their game.

Current Apple software is not particularly good and hardly competitive in functionality with alternatives. That's before running into network effects. If we have to look at the Apple Music client, it's much worse than Spotify, funny that they achieved that... And try to make big Numbers spreadsheets for the lols; it's really not hard to see why everyone is using Excel even though it's uglier and more complicated to get results that look good. At the end of the day, looks don't make the work, but slow crashing software do make the work much harder...

The truth is that Apple became greedier they also pulled out investment EVERYWHERE, including their own software. They only do stuff if they think they can make billions out of them nowadays. Most of the interesting stuff are leftovers from the Jobs era.

> Why would Apple do that? It seems so off.

It's been a tradition of theirs to differentiate their new product lines by the amount of RAM and disk space. In the past it wasn't so painful as I think until 2012 you could easily swap both (and that's why I'm still using some of these machines for various tasks). But once they started gluing everything in, it's so much a blow in the face of customers who know they are being ripped off but can't do anything about it.

In 2012 the upgrade prices were also lower.

When I bought my 2012 MacBook Air I paid 100 euros to upgrade from 4 to 8 GB of RAM. Wasn't cheap, but still kind of reasonable in 2012.

Today it would cost me 230 euros to upgrade from 8 to 16 GB of RAM.

So in 2023 the per-GB upgrade price is 15% higher than in 2012.

Considering the evolution of manufacturing it's even worse than you make it out to be. It was 100 euros to DOUBLE the amount of RAM, now it's 230 euros for the same thing. Even if we introduce inflation, it should be 130 euros maximum.

And I think inflation is a completely bullshit argument in fast evolving competitive technology field. What is needed is comparative analysis with equivalent products at similar prices from both years. Back then Apple RAM pricing was already thought to be a bit too much but now they are just outrageous... If you look at competitors' offerings there is no comparison. They may have a fast power efficient chip but it doesn't warrant that much markup.

The bigger cost could be all the customers that would pick the lower tier model if it had sufficient ram, instead of the higher tier.

Yeah, sometimes I think they designed it this way so that people would not buy the entry level MBP. I remember when I bought one in 2019, after some time it would complain it cannot update Xcode because of lack of space. The point is, Xcode was the only additional app installed on this MBP. So yeah, it might be their strategy to give an illusion of choice with offering unusable cheaper options while for everything decent you need to pay disproportionately more.

No, it's because having on-die RAM leads to a lot of defective dies that have to be thrown away. So perhaps some can be salvaged by disabling half of the RAM because a few bytes don't work and thus can be sold as 8GB units.

I run an 8GB M1 as my main desktop for Java development and it's 70% fine. I needed a replacement for my previous PC during covid/cpu shortages and in AU, there were no 16GB versions available. (So the upsell argument is not the only part of the story).

For running Chrome, IntelliJ, Spotify, Terminal, fuzz tests etc at once, it's fine. But running YourKit profiling or Steam etc, everything else swaps out and grinds.

So: it's amazing to me that you can do so much with just 8GB,and egregious that Apple can't put in a couple of slots for an extension.

> egregious that Apple can't put in a couple of slots for an extension.

"It's great that my Bugatti Veyron is so fast, and it's egregious that it can't also be used as a boat."

The reason M1/M2/M3 is so quick is that it's such a highly-integrated design, with the RAM and the GPU on the same die and thus sharing very high bandwidth connections.

This is _why_ it doesn't have DIMM slots. It's quick for the same reasons that the memory isn't expandable.

I'm just trying to avoid Electron apps and switched from Adobe to Afinity. Somehow Blender works fine.

They compress memory a lot. It almost works on the Mx. Almost.

TBH not even 16 Gb is enough if you open more than a couple terminals and less browser windows that you can count on your fingers. Cook help you if you use IntelliJ.

Bonus, every piece of Javascript uses 1+ Gb. Look for <app name helper - renderer>. Those are the main culprits.

Eh? I have a 16gig iMac and am very lazy about closing apps I’ve never had any memory problems and don’t even think about it other then running something like Adobe Premier Pro for video editing.

Yeah, see my sibling comment. I don't know what the person you're replying to has done to their system, but I am very lazy with that too. Not at the moment, but most of the time I have 3 user accounts logged in simultaneously with their respective apps running.

Memory has never really been an issue for me, unless I try to `grep` a very (VERY) big file or something. Which makes sense, right?

I suppose you have less Electron apps open :) I'm using 12 Gb now (1.53 in swap) with Firefox and several communication apps open. Fortunately atm all my works is in Terminal.

Thing is, when I have 3 or 4 Electron apps open, they are still not using 100% "real" memory - it's all compressed if the need arises. What other apps that you use, use Electron?

MacOS treats unused memory as wasted memory. It does its best to keep memory filled. So a lot of that 12Gb is likely to be 'just in case' stuff. What does the memory pressure graph look like in Activity Monitor?

The thing is, when I run an applicaion that allocates 8 G on top of that, it compresses like 7 G, memory pressure turns brown, it goes 3-4 G into swap and sometimes the app crashes :)

So the legend has a grain of truth, but you can only stretch it so much.

I have 16GB. I have docker running 5 containers, 3 PHPStorm windows (with multiple tabs open), Orion with 17 tabs open, Slack, Fork, Sequel Ace, iTerm2 with multiple tabs (one of them running a vite server), and Calendar.app.

Memory pressure is in the green, "using" 11GB (App: 6, Wired: 2, Compressed: 3). Not swapping at all.

Slack, which as you mentioned has "Slack Helper (Renderer)" uses 250MB.

Even with 8GB this would still work perfectly fine. Biggest user is PHPStorm with 4GB.

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