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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

> A M4 with a terabyte of RAM will run GPT-4 level models locally.

Perhaps, but a 1TB RAM upgrade would probably cost about as much as a new car. This is Apple we're talking about.

I recently needed a computer to run fusion 360. Options were Mac vs Windows.

I could do a SFF PC or a Mac mini. After looking at the paltry memory/storage Apple chose to give with the mini, I ended up going with an AMD system with 96GB of ram and 4TB of SSD storage for less than a 16GB Mac mini.

For context, if you get the beefiest MacBook Pro right now you'd pay an extra $1000 to upgrade from 48GB to 128GB RAM. For lower end machines you pay more for RAM, $200 per each 8GB you add on top of the 8GB baseline.

But that's if you want Apple to do that for you. What if you buy the memory separately and put it in yourself? I'm considering doing that for my own iMac, and I saw that a 32 GB memory unit is about $65, so 4 of those $260. For laptops it's probably different, but surely it's going to be less than $1000.

You can't anymore, none of the Apple Silicon Macs have upgradable memory. If you have an older Intel Mac then it might be possible depending on the exact model.

Can't add RAM to any Mac (except the Pro, I think). You have to buy it from Apple with all the RAM it'll ever have. Which is why they overprice the upgrades so much

You can't add RAM to the M series Mac Pro. It's just a Mac Studio with PCI-e slots these days.

This seems to suggest that you can install it on a 2019 Mac Pro at least: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102742.

$4,859.99 for 8 128GB LR-DIMMS on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/8x128GB-DDR4-3200-PC4-25600-NEMIX-RAM...

The new Mac Pro (with the M2 Ultra) uses unified memory, so I guess no more third party upgrades? Looking here:

https://everymac.com/actual-maximum-mac-ram/actual-maximum-m...

The new Mac Pro is limited to 192GB while the previous Mac Pro can go up to 1.5TB.

The original 128kb Mac was about $7,300 (today's dollars).

Apple's Lisa was about $30,000 (today's dollars)

I don't know what the relevance of prices from 40 years ago is, but today they want +$800 just to add +64GB RAM to a machine.

Today, we get a much better deal.

it wasn't long ago that 128GB was a gobsmacking number for a home user

I look forward to checking the "+$1000" box for a terabyte of on-chip RAM

I am guessing they will be working to bring down those prices given how much of an advantage large RAM is for AI. Maybe they could even bring back RAM slots. Although I guess that wouldn't make sense given that bandwidth is also important and HBM doesn't go in slots.

Or they will just include 1TB of RAM when the M10 is ready? I know, I can dream...

Seriously, though, RAM should be getting cheaper/larger over time.

Maybe that M4 was the real electric Apple car project.

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