Apple argues in favor of selling Macs with only 8GB of RAM
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
While letting companies get away shorting customers by installing small amounts of memory today they’re locking them in to an early upgrade/replacement in the near future.
We shouldn’t let profit companies get away with these kind of tactics as long as memory is not just not user upgradable - not even vendor upgradable after the fact.
If you make an application which stutters at 8GB RAM, that's your application's fault, not the hardware.
What fraction of Mac buyers buying these machines does that cover? If you stick to Safari and maybe Office, 8GB seems fine.
It struggled running teams in a video call, stuttering as was eating memory.
I’d say there are a lot of users running multiple Electron and high memory apps without knowing they are running Electron / high memory apps because of the insistence of everyone building cross platform GUI apps using Electron.
Your favourite video calling app, notes app, password app, work productivity app will mostly be Electron resource hogs in 2024.
OS X was using about 4GB on the test video, that left 4GB for everything else which disappears quickly with just one or two other Electron apps running.
Right. Those people shouldn't get the base model. If most of what you're doing is using FaceTime, Safari, Mail.app and watching videos--which is a surprising fraction of computer users--8GB is fine. If you're doing more you need more.
The article argues there is no reasonable market for 8GB Macs. I am disagreeing. It's not a massive market. But it's real, and they're not better served by having more memory.
I occasionally try to use Orion, which is based off of Safari Tech Preview. I really like it but it's buggier than I'd like it to be right now. It also low-key pushes Kagi on you, and while I use Kagi heavily, I don't want my browser to have a search engine bias.
To support Orion with Orion+ (which I did, and don't regret having done it), you need to purchase it through Kagi. I'm guessing this was done to simplify payment systems, but it is a nuanced way of associating Orion with Kagi.
Orion works with Kagi out of the box in ways that are seemingly more native than other search engines. Specifically, the way it handles my account token is more seamless than how the Kagi extension handles it with Safari (which I understand is a requirement due to technical limitations).
While it's absolutely nothing like how Google and Chrome or Bing and Edge are inseparable, it is a slight push that had me slightly worried about deeper integration in the future. This wasn't a show-stopper at all, though!
Also you get email forwarding, iCloud relay, and it auto-fills your MFA-SMS codes so you don’t have look at your phone. It’s great.
They don't want a Chromebook. They want a Mac. Maybe it's because they want macOS. Maybe it's build quality. Maybe it's vanity. The point is there appears to be a user set for whom 8GB is plenty, and the existence of Chrome or Electron doesn't disprove that hypothesis.
We use an M1 8GB MBA purely as a home browsing laptop and it constantly gets into yellow memory pressure with few tabs open across FF and Safari.
Performance might be acceptable but I’m sure it’s paging like crazy reducing the SSD, and hence the MBA’s life.
> Take a look at the memory pressure in task manager.
They just said it's never been a problem for it. What does looking at his memory pressure do? Give them a false sense that something is wrong now?
That said if I did regular development on my personal laptop, I'd want 16GB. But if it's not an issue for someone's use case, I don't see a problem.
I never run in to issues, except with some games and even that is rare.
Up to last year I had 4GB of RAM. I ran in to issues with that sometimes, usually related to stuff I was doing with PostgreSQL.
"Uses over 2GB of RAM at times" can be very misleading if you have large amounts of RAM; because it doesn't mean it can't work with less RAM. Why wouldn't the system keep stuff in RAM? It doesn't really cost anything to do so – "unused RAM is wasted RAM".
All of that said, at this price point, and with the cost difference of 8G vs 16G in mind, I do kind of roll my eyes at their decision to sell these machines. My 8G machine is a €230 second-hand ThinkPad, not a €1,879 premium device (I checked: the 15" M3 w/ 512GB SSD comes with 8G of RAM at this price).
Also Apple claims their "Unified Memory" is somehow more efficient. I don't really know what that means though.
The unified memory is indeed more efficient due to it's architecture but it can't solve not having enough ram to hold your software in.
That's not the point; just saying I run some services typical macOS users don't, so my Linux laptop isn't necessarily lighter than a default mac.
Either way, it's perfectly possible to have a functioning 8GB machine, even with Chrome and an electron app. And it's certainly possible with 16GB.
8gb is plenty and is definitely an appealing price point when thinking in terms of operating systems lighter than stock.
Given iPhones have 6GB of RAM, I think 8GB is fairly generous for the average Apple user.
Also, iPhones don't have to run anything like the same software, no Electron, no Chrome etc....
I hear this a lot, but my own experience doesn’t stack up. It’s just anecdata or whatever the cool kids say, but: my mother, two sisters and brother all have their own laptops. None of them work in tech, and I’ve never put my finger on the scale to persuade them to get a laptop either — if anything I’ve tried to persuade them to get iPads in the past so I don’t have to play IT department when something goes wrong.
For reference, my mother is a nurse practitioner, sister 1 is a daycare director, sister 2 is self-employed working for her husband’s construction company, and my brother just has odd jobs working at gas stations and youth counseling.
All four of them have asked me for some kind of help or advice about their laptops in the last couple of months, so I know they actively use them. My sister with the daycare called me just a couple days ago to help her get her laptop connected to a projector so she could give a PowerPoint presentation to her employees.
Everyone I know who owns MacBooks uses them for: photography editing, video editing, graphic design, programming.
"For iMovie for macOS, you can edit and share 4K video on Mac computers from 2011 or later with at least 4GB of memory." [0]
I think a lot of people over-purchase with Apple devices because they're not sure what the hardware specs mean and end up generalizing to cost. "Well, I /use/ my computer (for photos, video, etc) and that seems like it'd require more, so I probably shouldn't buy lowest tier... What's the next one up that I can afford?"
In the end, they feel good about their choice for being "just right", even though all of the options would have been.
I know exactly 2 people that program on their personal laptop, and one that does photo editing.
For everyone else it's a glorified Chrome or Safari browser. They almost all have whatever affordable Macbook they got the last time they needed a new laptop.
The only people I've ever heard complain about their laptops were non-Macbook users.
I can't see a previous comment from you that would provide context...
Edit: actually I see now that I misread the comment, so my reply was indeed out of place.
So I'd agree there's some non negligible amount of users that will be fine with the absolute most basic functioning computer.
The question could be why that user base would buy a Mac when they could get something way more cheaper and probably better adapted to their needs ? My answer would be they don't need to care about the money or utterly like macs, and it's their choice. It's still surprising Apple caters to those users though.
Generative performance and training are poor to nonexistent, Core ML is incomplete and underdeveloped, memory bandwidth was decreased on the M3 Pros, and eGPUs don't work with Apple Silicon - and what, normalizing 16GB of memory will encourage Apple to stop segmenting when they already have so little to offer? They're paygating /inference/ performance beyond their Pro chips. That's their official stance.
Even Intel wasn't prepared for the Cambrian explosion of AGI, and their libraries and APIs have been taught in higher ed for the past decade. The good news is that Apple are not the best or only consumer option and will likely be out-classed by AMD and Intel in the next 18 months. The price of any new Mac for inference today would be better spent renting GPU time.
Perhaps in 10 years computer usage would wildly evolve (I hope so), but these machines are also not speced to last 10 years either.
I can get by with 8GB on the M1+ laptops.
My only assumption is that Apple knows who and what they're making computers for.
- 8GB is enough for the base model buyer. I did stuff that most consumers don't do on an 8GB M1 MBA like editing 4K video in Final Cut Pro and I didn't notice any performance issues. If you just want a computer that gets some work done and you're willing to refrain from being a huge Chrome tab hoarder, it's fine. It handles 10-30 tabs just fine and that should be enough for anyone.
- Apple shouldn't offer 8GB as the base model simply because the component cost of 16GB is incredibly trivial, and they're offering a product that works fine now but they know won't be sufficient in the near future. A $200 upgrade is completely unacceptable to get to 16GB because it's close to 10x the retail cost of a stick of 8GB DDR5 memory.
- The base model is a price anchor and Apple intends to upsell many/most buyers to their desired average selling price. This argument is just a dismissal of a persistent question that won't go away.
- The average buyer shouldn't stress out about this and just pretend the cost is higher. Just say to yourself "The MacBook Air 15" is $1699" and compare it with other computers on that basis. You'd be surprised at how competitive it is. E.g., compare to the XPS 14 16GB/512GB at the exact same price, very similar-performing processor/integrated graphics, with a lower resolution screen (you'd have to add another $300 to get something that is considered high DPI).
[1] I assume that the M series chips are cheaper for Apple. The fact that Apple's design is in-house and subsidized by sharing the design with the world's most popular smartphone should mean that they are saving a significant amount of cost compared to buying processors from Intel.
"Apple exec praises Apple decisions".
Teams, Outlook, and Chrome open on an 8GB Mac are enough to make it page 8-10MB/second steadily.