If these things will ever get MacOS support it will be useless with 8 GB of Ram.
Such a waste of nice components.
Such a waste of nice components.
Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine.
And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.
It’s rather an issue of selling deliberately underpowered hardware for no good reason other than to sell actually up-to-date versions for a difference in price that has no relation to the actual availability or price of the components. The sheer disconnect from any kind of reality offends me as a person whose job and alleged primary competency is to recognize reality then bend it to one’s will.
8 GB were the standard back then.
Edit: I confirmed that I was indeed wrong, but the payoff isn't great anyway because that just means that yes in fact they've kept the exact same ram floor for 10 years. Insane.
For me personally 16 or 32 GB are perfectly fine, 8 GB was too little (even without VMs) and I've never needed 64 or more. So it's curious to see you are pretty much exactly the opposite.
Did you miss this part prefixing that sentence?
> I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course
>"I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM"
The used M1 MacBook Air I just bought is by far the fastest computer I have ever used.
I put a spare 120 GB SSD, a cheap no-name brand that was just lying around for some testing purposes. Found the similar off-the-shelf DDR3 2 GB RAM stick. I thought the RAM was faulty, turned out it’s in a working condition, so I put it there.
I need the computer for basic so-called office work (a browser, some messengers, email client and a couple of other utilities). I thought I’d buy at least two 4GB RAM sticks after I test it, so you know, 8 GB is just the bare imaginable minimum! I have my 16 GBs everywhere since, idk, maybe 2012 or something.
And you know what?! It works very well with 4 GB of RAM and default Fedora (it’s 40 now, but I started with 38, iirc). It has the default Gnome (also, 46 now, started with 44, iirc). And it works very well!
It doesn’t allow me to open a gazillion of browser tabs, but my workflow is designed to avoid it, so I have like 5 to 10 open simultaneously.
Before throwing Fedora at the PC, I thought I would just install a minimal Arch Linux with swaywm and be good. But I decided I don’t want to bother, and I’ll just buy 8 GB later on, and be done with it.
And here I am, having full-blown Gnome and just 4 GB of RAM. I don’t restrict myself too much, the only time I notice it’s not my main PC is when I want to do some heavy web-browsing (e.g. shopping on some different heavy websites with many tabs opened). Then it slows down significantly, till I close the unnecessary tabs or apps. All the software is updated and current, so it’s not like it’s some ancient PC from 00’s.
Also, I have my iPad Pro 12,9 1st Gen with just 4 GB of RAM too, and I never feel it’s slow for me.
I understand that some tasks would require a lot of RAM, and it’s not for everyone. Having a lot of RAM everywhere, I’m quite used to not thinking of it at all for a significant part of my career (for over a decade now), so I may have something opened for weeks that I don’t have any need for.
So, it’s 2024, and I’m surprised to say that 4 GB of RAM is plenty when you’re focused on some tasks and don’t multitask heavily. Which never productive for me at least. I even noticed that I enjoy my low-memory PC even more, as it reminds me with its slowdowns that I’m entering the multitasking state.
I use swaywm on my Arch Linux laptop, and most of the time it’s less than 3–4 Gb (I have 16 Gb).
Thus making your three other machines 400% perfectly fine?
This argument is self defeating in the context of the M4 announcement. "Average consumers" who don't need 16 GB of RAM don't need an M4 either. But people who do need an M4 chip probably also need 16 GB of RAM.
I think actually more people need 16 GB of RAM rather than a top M4 chip. Having only 8 GB can be a serious limitation in some memory heavy circumstances, while having (say) an M2 SoC rather than an M4 SoC probably doesn't break any workflow at all, it just makes it somewhat slower.
I can't run podman, slack, teams, and llama3-8B in llama.cpp at the same time. Oddly enough, this is rarely a problem.
This just seems like lameness on Apple’s part.
Your estimates are not even close. You can't honestly think that LPDDR5 at leading edge speeds is only $3 per 64 Gb (aka 8GB), right?
Your estimate is off my an order of magnitude. The memory Apple is using is closer to $40 for that increment, not $3.
And yes, they include a markup, because nobody is integrating hardware parts and selling them at cost. But if you think the fastest LPDDR5 around only costs $3 for 8GB, that's completely out of touch with reality.
You can get 8GB of good quality DDR5 DIMMs for 40$, there is no way in hell that Apple is paying anywhere near that.
Going from 8 to 16GBs is probably somewhere between 3-8$ purely in material costs for Apple, not taking into account any other costs associated
You mention DIMMs and component prices instead. This is unhelpful.
See https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/memory/774... for LPDDR5 prices. You can get a price of $48/chip at a volume of 2000 chips. Assuming that Apple got a deal of $30-40-ish at a few orders of magnitude larger order is quite fair. Though it certainly would be nicer if Apple priced 8GB increments not much above $80-120.
As for prices, the prices you cited are not at all comparable. Apple is absolutely certainly buying directly from manufacturers without a middleman since we're talking about millions of units delivered each quarter. Based on those quantities, unit prices are guaranteed to be substantially lower than what DigiKey offers.
Based on what little public information I was able to find, spot market prices for LPDDR4 RAM seem to be somewhere in the 3 to 5$ range for 16GB modules. Let's be generous and put LPDDR5 at tripe the price with 15$ a 16GB module. Given the upgrade price for going from 8 to 16GB is 230 EUR Apple is surely making a huge profit on those upgrades alone by selling an essentially unusable base configuration for a supposed "Pro" product.
A DIMM is 8 or 16 chips (9/18 is ECC), while the LPDDR is a single chip for the same storage. The wild density difference in chip capacity (512MB or 1GB vs 8GB) makes a huge difference, and how a stick can be sold at retail for cheaper than the bare LPDDR chip in volume.
but up until these these things I felt I could run whatever I wanted, including Baldur’s Gate 3.
As devs and power users we'll always have an edge case for higher RAM usage, but the average consumer is going to be perfectly fine with 8GB of RAM.
All of these comments about how 8GB of RAM is going to make it "unusable" or a "waste of components" are absurd.
I was using my 4gb ram pinebook pro in public transport yesterday, and decided to turn of all cores except for a single Cortex-A53, to safe some battery. I had no problems for my usecase of a text editor + shell to compile for doing some SIMD programming.
It's not quite in the same ballpark as showing apartment or airfare listings without mandatory fees but it is at the ticket booth outside of the stadium.
> It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs to a more manageable numbers.
Or you just click the little chevron in Tree Style Tabs or equivalent and 100 tabs are just hidden in the UI.
It's fairly easy to hit a few GB of RAM used up just with those.
I'm still getting at least 16 GB on my next one though.
like, the $359 acer shitbox probably doesn't do all the exact same thing as the MBA either, but that's actually ok and really only demonstrates the MBA is an unaffordable luxury product, basically the same as a gold-plated diamond-encrusted flip-phone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292839
Not your circus, not your clowns, but this is sort of the duality of apple: "it's all marketing and glitz, a luxury product, there's no reason to buy it, and the fact that they have a better product only PROVES it" vs "of course no PC manufacturer could possibly be expected to offer a top-notch 120hz mini-LED screen, a good keyboard, great trackpad, good speakers, and good SOC performance in a thin-n-light..."
There are different categories of "power users"
And as for the parent comment’s point, being into cars doesn’t mean you’re as good as a professional race car driver.
The Macbook line will get iPadOS support long before they allow MacOS on this line. Full steam ahead towards the walled garden.
M1 chips, great screens, precise pencil input and keyboard support, but we still aren't permitted a serious OS on it, to protect the monopolistic store.
App Stores have beeen around long enough to prove that they're little more than laboratories in which to carry out accelerated enshittification experimentation. Everything so dumbed down and feature-light, yet demanding subscriptions or pushing endless scammy ads. And games that are a shameless introduction to gambling addiction, targeted at kids.
Most of the 'apps' that people actually use shouldn't need to be native apps anyway, they should be websites. And now we get the further enshittification of trying to force people out of the browser and into apps, not for a better experience, but for a worse one, where more data can be harvested and ads can't so easily be blocked...
I feel bad about all this because I advised my mother to buy an iPad Pro as it was sold as a laptop replacement but it never materialized anywhere near expectations and ended being an expensive mistake that can only offer compromised workflows with limitations that do not even come close to a MacBook she was used to (even in Apple own apps, even something like the Page app, yes).
I think the iPad would be a fine device, if only they didn't try to upsell it and stopped pretending it is a "Pro" thing. If the whole lineup would get OLED displays, more RAM across the board and decent base storage for media at a more honest price it would be an easy recommendation.
As it is, the entry level is lackluster because of the display (if you only buy for content consumption it is better to go with an Android OLED options) and the high-end variant are just stupid expensive for what they will actually allow you to do.
But too many Apple customers have drunk the Kool-Aid so they don't have to care much about the reality and we just get expensive bullshit.
The multitasking will still be poor but perhaps Apple can do something about that when in docked mode.
That said, development likely remains a non-starter given the lack of unix tooling.
At least, chrome wouldn’t run that many tabs on iPad for sure if it used the same engine as desktop chrome
3 GB ram chips probably exist, but are definitely not common.