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Comment by yellow_lead | Hacker News Reader

The funniest thing about this is apple's engineer claiming 8gb on apple is equivalent to 16 on other systems.

They're basically openly calling their userbase idiots to increase the profit margin by 20usd on a 1,500++ usd device. Incredible how we got to this state where the RAM market quality in consumer devices is quickly degrading because of corporate greed not because of any market or technical challenge.

That was always true. Iphone with 128gb, Mac with 8gb ram, etc.

And MacOS in some cases says to user "fuck you! Next time buy apple device instead". Like to write to NTFS pendrive.

But then in many cases the solution is to open Unix terminal to do what you want.

> Iphone with 128gb

Is 128GB of disk in a phone too little?

Depends on usage.

My Galaxy Note 8 has a 400gb microsd card in it that's pretty full. Same for my android tablet.

Tablets without microsd and 3.5mm (such as the fancy and expensive but practically useless iPad I got as a gift) are abomination upon God and man, but I'm a grouchy old geezer so take that opinion with a grain of consumer salt :)

I have s22 128GB model and it certainly is too little.

I'm fully "in the cloud" and use google drive, photos and other sync extensively and recently I started to do more photography and videography completely casually (like while I'm on a hike) and the space limitation really shows to the point where I'm never buying a phone with <500GB. The space management is just so exhausting especially since everything is just so much bigger these days.

I don't understand how these "premium" devices ship with the least premium problem out there - moving files and saving space feels like such a cheap problem that you'd expect on 100usd android not on a flagship.

Right, I guess people are different in that regard. Don't have statistics but I don't know people to whom 128GB would be too little. Could be living in a bubble though.

> They're basically openly calling their userbase idiots

But their userbase keeps buying the higher-priced models. Wouldn't Apple be idiots, if they charged less than what the market will clearly bear?

Corporate greed is arguably a market challenge

This happens to be very much the case in phones for both RAM and batteries. Although not by a factor of 2.

But it's true, in fact it's an understatement: a 8gb mac makes you look way cooler than an 32gb pc.

Well yeah, because with only 8GB of RAM you have much more free time to practice looking cool while your machine grinds away in the trenches of swapistan

Maybe to the average consumer, but here it does not.

While not exactly true, it is a fact that Apple tries really hard to make the most out of a little memory while other systems (Windows, Android or Linux) piss away a lot of memory due to inefficiency, virtual machines etc and the only answer is 'just buy more RAM', which adds to cost, battery usage and is generally frowned upon as a solution to inefficient programming.

Do you have any real hard data that lets you to claim that macOS or iOS are more efficient than Linux or even Windows?

I think it comes down to a few design decisions like not standardizing on a VM based language with GC (like Java/.NET) which leads to more memory consumption. Only allowing a single browser engine will also keep memory usage lower on iOS. Apple was also early with a good memory compression implementation.

Of course, nothing will help you if you really want to run horrible applications, but at least the base system is optimized. You can run quite a lot of workloads even on an 8Gb Mac.

In my experience desktop linux is significantly lighter than macOS though

Depends on what desktop you use. A full Gnome or KDE desktop will eat a lot of memory.

Gnome uses 2GB at most when not memory-constrained.

I let you in on a secret: If you run a docker container on MacOS, you're running it in a VM. On Linux, you don't (at least not if you don't install the braindead Docker Desktop) https://docs.docker.com/desktop/faqs/linuxfaqs/#what-is-the-...

I have 32GB on my Linux desktop. On a normal day I use 6GB of memory.

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