Apple keeps flogging 8GB RAM for its Mac computers but it's still a dead horse
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
It’s too bad soldered designs mean no user upgrades though.
as someone more into the DIY PC space, this was my opinion for a long time. almost by reflex, I mentally tally up what it would cost to build a PC with similar specs or buy a windows laptop off the shelf and laugh at the suckers who buy apple. before "apple silicon" was a thing, they would often sell macbook pros for $2-3k that were multiple generations behind what windows OEMs were putting in their laptops.
but one day a very obvious realization hit me. apple has never competed on perf/$, and none of their customers care. their customers are very willing to pay extra or sacrifice on specs to get a well-integrated product with an OS that does not track their every move, does not shove ads down their throat, and reliably boots after an update. it's hard to put a dollar value on that or call certain SKUs "robbery" when nothing similar exists. if you want macOS or a chassis that doesn't look like it was designed by either a 14yo gamer or a 50yo corporate drone, there isn't much in the way of competition.
But maybe the part that bothers me about their claim about 8GB is the timing of it. They’re going to have to increase baseline amounts to be able to support AI features in the future - but until those models come out, they have to essentially stretch the truth about how much RAM is “good enough” to sell what they’ve already brought to market, and that part feels deceptive. They aren’t leading with admitting that these devices are woefully inadequate for on device inference.
I think this is a lame attempt at rationalizing something that has no justification whatsoever.
Nowadays, adding adequate amounts of RAM is not a cost concern. We have cheap miniPCs with 16GB and even 32GB of RAM being sold for less than what Apple charges for adding 8GB of RAM.
This is not what any customer wants. Apple customers do not want to be short-changed, even if they are loyal Apple customers. Just read through this discussion. A browser such as Chrome quickly dries out all free RAM with a few tabs opened, which can be around 5-6GB of RAM on a Mac.
You are also awfully wrong in claiming Apple products do not compete on perf/$. Apple has been for years pushing the idea they sell premium, high-performance hardware. Their switch from Intel to their own silicon is sold as a premium to pay for performance improvements. Each and every single version bump of their silicon has been marketed fully centered on performance. Even Apple's lame excuse for shipping substandard RAM sizes is centered on performance, and how Apple's weak 8GB shared memory matches other OEM's 16GB +XGB VRAM systems.
And now all of a sudden Apple does not compete on performance?
It's not rationalizing to state a fact. We buy what we want. I don't need a faster phone or a faster Mac. I'll take it, yeah, but that's not why I like the product
Apple Silicon has just made performance another perk
* I'm not an Apple fanboy and really wish they hadn't lost their soul in exchange for being a multi trillion dollar company. But I do appreciate that their hardware is way more affordable than it used to be (eg $699 M1 MacBook at Walmart)
I don't that's an apples-to-apples comparison (pun intended). the ram in those computers is soldered to the mainboard, while it is part of the SoC in the newer macbooks. I don't know exactly how much that contributes to the manufacturing cost, but my intuition is that it would be significantly higher.
> You are also awfully wrong in claiming Apple products do not compete on perf/$. Apple has been for years pushing the idea they sell premium, high-performance hardware.
I don't think I am, unless "perf/$" means something very different to you. to me, it means the amount of performance you get for your money. apple is certainly crowing about "apple silicon" now that they have the best mobile parts, but I don't think even apple marketing would claim to outperform laptops from acer, asus, etc. for the same money.
but this is all an aside to my main point. adding up the cost of a bag of parts is one way of valuing a computer (and one that makes a lot of sense for a tower that hides under your desk), but it's not the only way. you can also look at it from more of a product perspective: what does it enable you to do? if you're a video editor or developer by trade, it's easy to justify the cost of a $2-3k macbook pro, even with the understanding that it's a huge markup over the bill of materials. it is a thing you use to make money. the base macbook air is perfectly fine for watching videos, sending emails, and possibly flexing on your friends at college. I don't think it's unlikely that apple intentionally hamstrings their $1000 offering to make it unsuitable for professionals, but that's not something I get upset about anymore. the alternative is not a $1000 mba with 16GB ram and a 512GB ssd; it's a macbook air that starts at $1500.
They can raise prices and start at 16gb, and they price low-end buyers out of the market and lose sales.
The can keep prices and start at 16gb, and they convert mid tier buyers into low end buyers, and lose $200 per sale on formerly mid-tier buyers. I reckon they did the math and additional low-end sales wouldn't compensate for mid-tier loss and margin reduction on all products.
I think they don't change because any change leads to a financial loss. I guess the PR and reputation loss isn't great enough to overcome that.
Their memory and storage pricing is detached from underlying costs, and is just an artificial way to segment customers into normal people with modest needs, and crazy people like us willing to pay through the nose.
And, also, I think they're probably right, that a majority of low-end buyers never reach extremes of memory pressure. They use Macs like expensive Chromebooks or iPads with keyboards.
Hopefully the new local AI initiative will give fresh incentive to ramp up memory and dislodge them.
Edit: are you closing things or are you quitting things?
I appreciate the search index tip!
I also have a work-issued M2 MBP with 32GB which has none of the slow-down issues I see on my personal M1 no matter what I do. Though sometimes the FireEye anti-malware process 'xagt' gets stuck using a shitload of CPU non-stop and murders the battery - killing that it immediately starts cooling down the outer case temperature noticeably within a few seconds, which is crazy. It starts up again shortly but doesn't continue using CPU like crazy ... I really need to write a daemon to do that automatically for me rather than just when I notice battery going way too fast.
All at the same time? Because that’s hardly believable. Docker + any IDE already starts lagging with just 8GB. If you try connecting it to an external display it becomes virtually unusable.
You understand that browsers don’t need gigs of ram per tab right?
8GB macs struggle driving a second display if you’re actually trying to do anything on it.
are you sure you don't have any hidden extensions and/or computer viruses?
My M1 Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM runs Xcode, the iOS Simulator, and a couple browser tabs on dual monitors without any hiccups. This is really a non-issue.
What makes some people think using Chrome makes them special? If they have a business case for more memory, then the price difference should be negligible, right?
Yes, 16GB (or currently 18GB) is nice, but it only means I can leave chrome & slack open forever; And has no impact on my actual work whatsoever.
I know this is totally unrelated and probably won't see it, but I read your comment about German solar farms sometime ago and I was wondering if you could throw light on that. I can't find any email to contact you by except the one you shared like a year ago (hnr@webhome.de) which I figured belongs to your friend. Please, what's a good email where I can reach you? Mine's in my profile. Thanks and hoping to hear back.
I did 4k video editing on my 8GB MacBook air M1, and it's still faster than on my desktop with an AMD 3600X and an Nvidia 1650.
Granted, it did swap, but it was still faster.
While I agree that 8BG is not much, I completely disagree that it's ruining the experience.
> That's the point most observers miss. The usual narrative is that 8GB isn't good enough for serious workflows. It isn't but that completely misses the more important point. 8GB isn't even enough for browsing the web.
What an awful writing style. Just barely factual but mostly misleading. Yes, you can run out of memory just using a web browser, but you'd need to use quite a few web apps, watch a few videos at the same time. And browsers suspend these things in the background, so it's even less likely. But technically, you can.
Chrome is also technically the most popular browser, but the article is talking within the context of macOS. MacOS market share is about 16%, Safari market share as a desktop web browser is about 14%. These vary slightly by source, but it's evident that Safari is used by the majority of people on macOS, and it handles memory much better. Once again, strictly speaking, it is correct to say that Chrome is the most popular, but not in the context that matters. Technically correct, but irrelevant.
Then the author concludes that 8GB is not good enough for browsing the web. Not only is this not true, as many people with Macs will point out (and in fact I've never had my leisure + basic office work M1 Mac mini 8GB stutter), but it's also a conclusion based on a snuck premise. The author merely said that you can technically run out of memory, and that it happened to them with a browser popular in a different market. But they make it seem as if those premises build up to the conclusion they make, which they don't.
> Regular Chrome users will know what a memory hog Chrome can be. Right now, I have about 15 tabs open, which is actually pretty low for me. Often, my tab count can blow well past 50 in multiple windows.
Once again this squeezes two ideas together as if they're connected. Most regular users of Chrome might not even know it's a memory hog as they probably don't inspect it too closely. But then the thought jumps completely to how the author has way more than 50 tabs open. Where is the connection? The regular users don't have "well past 50" tabs open. The author is presenting an exceptional use case in the context of "regular users" and implies there's some connection.
> And three of my current tabs are chewing up over 500MB each.
Here the author omits that tabs might be hibernated in different ways for different browsers. It is left for the reader to assume that 0.5GB per tab times "well past 50" tabs is "well past" 25GB of memory just for the browser.
Another thing that was omitted is that software will eat RAM for caching when it can and a lot of garbage-collectors don't run purges very aggressively until system memory is low. That's fine, it's wiser to keep resources in system memory in case they need to be accessed again than to keep RAM empty.
> Mac laptops and computers have lots of appealing attributes. I won't go into them here for fear of being set upon en masse by my co-workers and pummelled into a quivering puddle of blood and hair.
Just some personal victimhood for no reason in an otherwise numbers-led story?
> But even I, most fanboyish of fanboys for Mac computers in a certain non-gaming context, will tell you that 8GB being "suitable", even for light or casual computing", is complete and utter nonsense. Next!
Well yes, that you have tried to tell indeed, very very poorly. I don't know what to call this but actively misleading. You can't write this badly by accident.
The average person has not been complaining about 8GB Macs and people with specific needs probably would be wiser to buy a laptop that meets those specific needs. While it may be nice for everyone to have a bit of memory headroom when it's so cheap, 8GB machines do many office and casual workloads just fine. There are almost no benefits to 16GB vs 8GB when you run Teams and a slide/word processor all day, with an enterprise website or two open on a browser. Same as there are no benefits to 16GB vs 8GB when you watch one YouTube video and respond to your emails on a Mac.
Using my 8/512/15-air happily. It is good.