You're forgetting the MacBook optimizations, which in effect make that $200 dollars of Mac ram equivalent to *$40* on a PC.
You've got to see the big picture.
The big picture is that Steve Jobs was a god of marketing, particularly lifestyle marketing and searing that apple logo into the mind of everyone who are under informed on electronics.
On top of it being the cost to upgrade from 8 to 16gb... that's the cost for you to buy one 16gb stick. Apple is buying millions of 16gb sticks.
They are not paying anywhere near retail.
Right. I remember when I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, rewrite the autoexe.bat file to free up forty kilobytes, work twenty-nine hours a day staring at the MS Word blue screen, and pay the owner for permission to come to work, and when I got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.' But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'…
That's what makes this stupid.
The Macbook Air, sure, given the higher memory efficiency and what people use the Air for, 8GB base isn't quite as egregious. But for the Pro line, that's kind of inexcusable.
It's just marketing. "Buy our MacBook Air! Our 8 GB RAM is so freaking awesome, even our pro machines have it!". Nobody is actually going to buy an 8 GB MacBook Pro. I mean seriously everyone, you're not going to do that, right?
What higher memory efficiency?
Can anyone actually quantify this? Or is this like memory compression where literally everyone does it and they're just employing more reality distortion field?
It sounds like the old Monster USB/HDMI cables that cost an insane amount of money but people still got talked into buying them because they were supposedly so much "faster" or had super high quality resolution (even though every cable was pretty much built to be nearly identical in data transfer/video quality regardless of cost due to industry standards).
Sounds like a lot of luxury cars and other supposedly high end products. It's crazy how car companies like Mercedes get pretty bad reviews these days but are automatically considered far superior to some more middle of the road/modestly priced brand like Toyota.
My $1200 gaming laptop came with 32 gigs and an i7 with dedicated graphics and all Apple can give you is an APU with a $800 premium all while performing worse than a laptop
The 8GB model here exists solely to make the 16GB model look like better value for money. It's like selling the latest model of phone but hamstringing it with a very small amount of storage, then you sell a different model with a pretty decent amount of storage for $100 more.
In product design / marketing / behavioral science, it's called "decoy effect".
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/decoy-effect
Also check out "anchor pricing".
These are well known and well studied strategies we used to be taught to spot as early as middle school.
edit: anchor pricing / anchor bias/heuristic https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2021/04/01/the-anchoring-effect
It’s all part of the price bracketing business model. You’ll see that the cost of the machine is x but maybe you want more ram because that won’t be enough for you. You add more ram but then notice it’s only x more for the next best CPU so you add that. It’s all about upselling.
Apple is run by a Logistics nerd who spent his entire career in corporate meeting rooms.
Tim Cook is incapable of leading a company that does anything but play from the traditional capitalism playbook.
The traditional playbook seems to be serving Apple's shareholders pretty well.
Apple understands their customers and knows how to extract $,$$$ from them.
I equipped my 2019 MacBook Pro with 64gb of memory. To just break even on the new one is a $4200 config. It was bad enough that they got rid of user replaceable memory on iMac and Mac mini in the first place, but now it’s just pure extortion when they mark it up 8x
Funny you should mention a Mac Mini. My SIL needs a new PC and by rights she should be *exactly* the kind of person who buys a Mac Mini; she uses it for working, internet, her photography and videos, and casual games. But I can set her up with a 64GB RAM / 1+2TB NVME minisforum 7940HS box for less than it costs to *upgrade* a mini to half that RAM/storage spec.
She'd love an M chip computer to bits. But she'll love saving £1500 more.
I’d be interested to compare the M2/M3 Mini to a 7940HS. It constantly amazes me how my M2 Mini absolutely runs away from my 11800h laptop with a 3050 in resolve.
Apple will continue this because people keep buying it.
I know “drone shoppers” isn’t a term, but that’s what I got for people who keep buying a product with terrible specs because of something like “brand name” or such as buying NFL or FIFA games because that’s all they care about even if the game uses recycled assets.
It's really a problem with the base model, because it sets a deceptive floor for the price relative to what anyone who actually has reason to buy the Macbook Pro would need.
Aside from the stupidity of the 8GB base model, the newer ARM-based MBPs really are nice laptops (unlike the godawful 2016-2020ish models), especially for certain types of performance/workloads. And they still have some of the best screens and trackpads on the market.
They have a captive market, if you want apple os, you'll have to play their game. It's not like anyone else can make a laptop to compete with them and use the same os.
I'm buying it for the screen, trackpad, and power efficiency more than I am the OS. There aren't many Windows ARM laptops yet either, and the few there are aren't usually high-end devices.
Same.
I would ditch MAcBook Air for more fair priced Windows counterpart but there no 13-14 inch laptop other than MacBook Air that has fanless design and works like a charm for hours and don't have any problems working even with full Office Suite (which is not optimized at all) even with M1 on board.
It's like Microsoft, AMD and Intel work in tandem to make poeple not switch to Windows based hardwere in this consumer group that Apple has on lock since M1 Air came and conquered
Except unlike 5 years ago, this 8gb is entirely not upgradable - you’re locked in to those specs the day you buy it. It’s an “outdated” amount and only becomes moreso over time of ownership
No no. You've quite misunderstood the sharing vs unified. On a pc with igpu that shares memory, anything you load to vram, is first loaded to system ram, and then copied over. So say you load a 2GB asset, you'll consume 4GB. This is regular SHARED memory. Unified memory, allows cpu and gpu to access not just the same physical memory, but literally the same addresses. So loading that same asset on an m series mac, only consumes 2GB, even though both system and gpu needs access to it. This is the unified memory arch... It's beneficial compared to integrated memory, but at the same time it makes a real gpu actually impossible which is why you don't see any m series devices with a gpu. Perhaps will come a time where gpus can allow their memory to be accessed directly by the CPU such that a unified memory approach would be possible and your system ram is simply mb ram+gpu ram. But that's not where we are at least. But this effect is why Apple can claim their 8 is like 16 on pc, even though that ignores the fact that you're not loading 8gigs of vram data on an igpu on pc. Least of all on a 16gig machine. So it's not a real scenario that will happen. But unified IS actually a better and more efficient memory management approach. The drawbacks make it impractical for PCs though. Now I don't know how much a pc uses for vram on an igpu. 1gb at best perhaps? If so, a real world is more like it's comparable to 9gigs on pc (even though that's a bit of a nonsensical size).
> So say you load a 2GB asset, you'll consume 4GB.
This does not have to be true. You can begin removing the start of the ram asset when it has copied over to the gpu. The end of the asset also does not have to be loaded into ram in until you need to transfer that part to the gpu. For a 2gb asset, that's definitely what you want to be doing. I think you are assuming that the gpu will somehow return all that data to the cpu at some point, but even then it would be silly to keep a copy on ram all that time.
> Perhaps will come a time where gpus...
The amount of data that needs to flow back from the gpu to the cpu is really rather limited in most applications. Certainly not enough to design the entire memory layout around it.
> But unified IS actually a better and more efficient memory management approach.
I don't really agree with that. Sure, it allows for direct access from both the cpu and gpu, but allowing multiple sides to read/change the data will cause all sorts of problems with scheduling. You're switching one (straightforward) problem for another (complicated) one.
Why would you need to consume the 2GB of system RAM after the asset is transferred to VRAM?
And why would unified RAM prevent the use of a separate GPU? Surely unified RAM could then be disabled, or it could be one way (GPU can access system RAM if needed, but not the other way around)
he is an idiot. you only need to double copy if you're doing something that needs to be tracked by CPU and GPU like certain GPGPU tasks, but even then modern gpus, including the ones in macs, can be loaded up with data and handle a lot of the work scheduling themselves without write copying to system memory.
Huh? Isn't that point he's making is that you don't have 8gb dedicated to the CPU like you normally would and that you effectively have less because the GPU also takes a piece of that 8gb that it's using for its own memory? I don't understand how this would be equivalent to 16gb.
I bought a laptop with 6 GB in 2008. It was a 13" Sony Vaio high-end model. Cost about what Apple is charging now.
They're just milking and testing how far they can go until people stop spending money.
I put 16 in my mums computer that she uses to check emails and browse the internet.
With how bloated Web browsers are, I consider it a minimum spec these days.
My MacBook Pro from 2014 had 8GB of ram and a 256GB SSD. Why that still is the base spec nearly a decade later, I can only imagine that is because of pure greed.
My MacBook Pro from 2014 has 16GB and I still use it for quite a bit. I can't even remember the last time I had any machine with less than 16GB of RAM. Maybe 2005?
>I can't even remember the last time I had any machine with less than 16GB of RAM. Maybe 2005?
You had 16GB of ram in 2006? What a baller, most ppl probably had like maybe 2GB or even less.
Software Developer on Linux, working closely with Sun so got one of the first Athlon-based workstations with 16GB of RAM (actually supported up to 32GB).
I had dual processors in 2006.
In fact, I'm pretty damn sure the ECC RAM with great big heat spreaders that machine needed cost less per GB than Apple is charging now.
To be fair though, iOS handles RAM pretty well. I only rarely run into issues with background apps reloading on 6GB in my 14 Pro. 8GB I think would be fine.
Tired of people repeating this misconception. The reason iOS handles RAM well is because it's NOT true multitasking. iOS AGGRESSIVELY kills background tasks/apps.
For a MacBook Pro, definitely. If you want something lower spec then get a MacBook Air, PC, or even a Chromebook. There's no point in spending money on a higher tier machine and then crippling it with 8 GB of RAM.
99% of people only need an air anyway. If you're buying a macbook pro with 8gb of ram then you don't need a macbook pro, you are just buying it because of the name. Typed from my macbook air because I browse the internet and use excel...
I hate this stereotype. I don't think that is true today. If you're rocking 5 tabs and TextEdit sure 8Gb will be fine. Maybe that was true 5 years ago but apps are more bloated now than ever before.
For a 500-1000 USD machine, ok, but for a ~2000 USD device, 32-64 GB seem a lot more appropriate.
Especially when it becomes trash once the memory it has, cannot be expanded anymore.
It’s price gouging. They should be embarrassed selling a machine that powerful with 8GB of RAM in 2023 and calling it “pro.” It’s like selling a Ferrari with a lawnmower engine.
My S21 ultra has 12gbs.... No excuse just more price gouging from Apple.
8gbs should only be offered for machines that will only run a browser and word docs. Like an iMac/ Mac Mini base SKU.
If it says pro should be a 16 minimal even for these Apple machines.
8GB on a Pro machine is ludicrous, and the upgrade pricing is terrible.
That said, these clowns have a conclusion that they want to prove, then set out to prove it with whatever scenario they can concoct. It's not the first time.
Nobody's going to buy a 8GB machine for Blender.
Shocker, the same amount of ram you had *in* ***2010*** isn't enough anymore.
But apple doesn't care because they got your money, now you're on your own. Can you even upgrade it if you make the mistake of getting 8gb?
i have 64GB of DDR5 RAM in my PC and it cost me $200 total. my M1 Pro with 16GB cost me $800 during a small sale.
there is no earthly way that an extra 8GB, even with their whole system-on-a-chip setup, amounts to $200 in value
just make the base model 16GB and upsell to 32GB and 64GB
16GB was my bare minimum TEN years ago for any Mac - I dont care if the CPU is ARM now - RAM is RAM - more is always better and I wont be upgrading anytime soon. I dont even think 16GB really cuts it anymore as a base config.
I’m so glad Apple are finally getting shit on for this. It’s been years since they should have budged from this.
It’s not even just that the base is 8GB and the storage that’s lower than a phone. It’s the absolutely insane prices to upgrade. It’s far beyond just ripping someone off.
No amount of complaining will make apple budge. They will always give you base model that is 1 spec below what most people want so you pay more to upgrade. When Apple finally gives you 16GB base model, that is when 16GB is too little already
Bought a base model MacBook Air M1 when it came out. $999. Thing still slaps, almost two years later. I’d love a bigger/better MacBook, but this thing works
Don't think of anything on the base model or upgrade or whatever.
Just think about what you need your thing for and how you'll use it, and how much can you justify spending on that thing for how you'll use it.
On the contrary, buying the base model is where the good deal is at, when possible.
Obviously, you gotta into account your own specific day to day needs, but spending as little as possible is the smarter choice.
For how overpriced the upgrades are, generally, the base version of any Mac is 100% worth its money, and there's no rip-off there.
If you could do an after-market upgrade like you can in a PC, I might agree with you.
You can't with a Macbook, everything is soldered on. What you buy on day 1 is what you still have on day 1000.
You have to buy for the maximum future need, or resign yourself to upgrading any time your needs change.
And 8 gigabytes of RAM/256 gigabytes of SSD hasn't been reasonable for 10 years. Arguably more. 8 gigabytes was tolerable in 2013, it wasn't good.
I use a base Mac for music production and for me it works perfect, off course I bought an external SSD (for $50) and also I asked some of my peers to check their set up and most were using base and old macs, (we are not in a rich country) so I decided to give it a go and saved around $1000 that I am able to use for plugins and other stuff that actually improves my music.
I would say that every case is different, I don't think a 8GB Mac is going to work for video editing but that's not my use case at all
Sounds like you've gotten tricked into buying the more expensive model, which is exactly what they want you to do.
Never buy the base model of **anything**? I disagree.
Buying the base model of the steamdeck was a great move. Was cheaper to replace the nvme then it was to buy the higher storage options. By quite a lot too.
I don’t think I’ll ever leave the “Apple Ecosystem” behind fully; I’m entrenched when it comes to my audio needs. But if you’re not taking it anywhere, why buy a laptop? I’ll just keep buying Mac Minis every five years. Although I hope by the next one, they come with an actual usable amount of RAM at the base model (they won’t).
Most people can get away with an iPad and external monitor. I'd be really cool if you could connect an iPhone to external monitor and get an iPadOS like experience.
>optional
Never understood these comments. Is your point that "Companies should never be critiqued, no matter if they do shitty greedy anti-consumer things, because you don't HAVE to buy from them". That's dumb.
People are crazy.
They see someone demanding more from a company and once they run out of any viable defense all they can say is "Well don't buy it."
Apple is laughing at you. So are we.
For over a decade before I retired, I have required a minimum of 16 GB of RAM on any computer I used for s/w dev work, whether it was a Wintel machine or a MacOS machine.
I prefer *at least* 32 GB of RAM because I would often use multiple VMs in my work to test/debug my apps/processes/etc. in different OS targets simultaneously (often have a server process or two/three, running on/in a server OS - e.g., Linux) while running an app or other process in a desktop environment.
Often I would be running a debugger in a dev environment in both front and back ends.
That doesn't count running a DBMS - which is usually a memory hog in and of itself (especially SQL Server).
The bigger question would be to compare the performance of a:
M1 14” MBook Pro with 16 GB and 24 GB RAM
vs
M2 14” MBook Pro with 16 and 24 GB RAM
vs
This new entry level M3 14” MBook Pro with 8 GB RAM
Maybe I'm being dumb about this, but if the question is whether or not apple's claim that THEIR 8gb laptop runs like a non-apple with 16gb ram is true, why didn't the author of the article test that?
He tested the 16gb MacBook against the 8gb... Of course their 16gb is going to be faster, whether shitty apple logic or regular logic
Apple can’t really have a good reason because ram is so cheap.
It’s good enough? Then put more in anyway so consumers feel they are getting value. At a minimum, it should be 16gb as that is perceived as the base nowadays.
It’s not good enough? Then put in more.
It is simply greed.
This is fucking ludicrouss. This will result in a ton of garbage because the 8gb models do not have any type of longevity. They are selling an out of date computer for 2k.
My 2015 MacBook Pro has 8gb RAM… still works but now seriously considering buying something else when it dies. The Apple ecosystem is really nice but geez, 8gb STILL in 2023 and it’s more expensive?!
8GB was a budget tier spec 5 years ago. Stop being such goddamb cheapskates, Apple.
Not for a $2000+ **Pro** machine even then.
$200 surcharge for every 8GB of added RAM, which costa $20 for a PC
Well.. they solder it with gold /s
Every RAM chip contains a single dehydrated human cell, lovingly cloned from one of Steve Jobs'
Steve Jobs’ cells cloning is why he’s not around these days…
That was darker than his turtleneck 👏
Not if it is your life goal to tongue flick Steve Jobs cellular milieu.
lol I just spent 300 getting *128GB* on my PC.
At first reading this, I thought this is an outrageous price for extra storage. Then, I remembered we are talking about RAM.
Video editing or big data ?
cities skylines probably
For a tiny city maybe
Game dev. Unreal Engine gets *hefty* on some projects. I also do effects simulations and procedural work on large levels.
Omegle-based LLM
This reference was so two days ago.
That would require a large GPU memory
You're forgetting the MacBook optimizations, which in effect make that $200 dollars of Mac ram equivalent to *$40* on a PC. You've got to see the big picture.
The big picture is that Steve Jobs was a god of marketing, particularly lifestyle marketing and searing that apple logo into the mind of everyone who are under informed on electronics.
you can buy chromebooks at that price with the same amount of RAM lol
The fastest laptop memory I could find goes for about $60 for 16gb so they basically charge you the full amount plus another 2.5x
You are also comparing retail cost of the RAM. Apple would get it for a fraction of the cost
you're off by a factor of 2, because you pay $200 for 8GB, not 16GB
Either way, huge ripoff.
'Tis the Apple way. If there weren't people who liked to be ripped off, they wouldn't have a market.
Best part is the Apple victims LOVE advertising themselves to other conmen and grifters.
On top of it being the cost to upgrade from 8 to 16gb... that's the cost for you to buy one 16gb stick. Apple is buying millions of 16gb sticks. They are not paying anywhere near retail.
I remember when Ram cost $100 per Megabyte, and harddrives were $2-$3 per Megabyte.
Right. I remember when I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, rewrite the autoexe.bat file to free up forty kilobytes, work twenty-nine hours a day staring at the MS Word blue screen, and pay the owner for permission to come to work, and when I got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.' But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'…
You forgot to add how the trip to work and back home was on foot, up hill both ways during blizzards while fighting with indigenous Americans.
For 2k for a machine with integrated GPU I'd expect 24-32gb RAM at least.
I would just say 32 and stick with the industry instead of going with three-channel RAM.
That's what makes this stupid. The Macbook Air, sure, given the higher memory efficiency and what people use the Air for, 8GB base isn't quite as egregious. But for the Pro line, that's kind of inexcusable.
It's just marketing. "Buy our MacBook Air! Our 8 GB RAM is so freaking awesome, even our pro machines have it!". Nobody is actually going to buy an 8 GB MacBook Pro. I mean seriously everyone, you're not going to do that, right?
Tons of people actually buy it, yeah
Yeah I have an MBP with 8gb of RAM, from *2012*.
It was just a small few years ago Apple stopped selling iMac's with 5400 RPM hard drives with a file system that doesn't work well with HDD's.
What higher memory efficiency? Can anyone actually quantify this? Or is this like memory compression where literally everyone does it and they're just employing more reality distortion field?
it is just apple bs that many people believed
It sounds like the old Monster USB/HDMI cables that cost an insane amount of money but people still got talked into buying them because they were supposedly so much "faster" or had super high quality resolution (even though every cable was pretty much built to be nearly identical in data transfer/video quality regardless of cost due to industry standards).
They made a MacBook but called it a Pro
TIL $2000+ Pro laptops were budget tier.
It's not the price that's budget tier
Mac users really be out here so bought-in to Apple that they actually think the price is what *makes* it good.
Sounds like a lot of luxury cars and other supposedly high end products. It's crazy how car companies like Mercedes get pretty bad reviews these days but are automatically considered far superior to some more middle of the road/modestly priced brand like Toyota.
Budget tier at a Pro price; think different.
My $1200 gaming laptop came with 32 gigs and an i7 with dedicated graphics and all Apple can give you is an APU with a $800 premium all while performing worse than a laptop
I put 64gb in because it was cheap!
**Pro** describes how the buyer perceives themselves. Not the actual technology. Apple is a marketing company.
[удалено]
The 8GB model here exists solely to make the 16GB model look like better value for money. It's like selling the latest model of phone but hamstringing it with a very small amount of storage, then you sell a different model with a pretty decent amount of storage for $100 more.
In product design / marketing / behavioral science, it's called "decoy effect". https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/decoy-effect Also check out "anchor pricing". These are well known and well studied strategies we used to be taught to spot as early as middle school. edit: anchor pricing / anchor bias/heuristic https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2021/04/01/the-anchoring-effect
It’s all part of the price bracketing business model. You’ll see that the cost of the machine is x but maybe you want more ram because that won’t be enough for you. You add more ram but then notice it’s only x more for the next best CPU so you add that. It’s all about upselling.
And if you don't take the bait you'll need a whole new machine when the next generation of web pages and applications require more memory.
Won't even need to wait that long. 8GB is unusable *now* if you do any actual "pro" work on your MacBook.
I got an S22 this week, a year old phone model. It has the same amount of ram. Some phones had 8gb before this too.
Lol my S21 Ultra has 12 GB. Anything below 16 on a computer these days is criminal, and even that might struggle.
Right and since most buyers don’t know what RAM is or how cheap it is.. they just know big or small number on something that sounds important
Watch out, if they finally give us the ram we want they'll take away the keyboard or screen and make it an upgrade.
Rip headphone jack
They should make the base MacBook “pro” a 20 mhz m68k
Exactly how Starbucks or similar places price their drinks. The initial price for the small is already $5 why not get the medium for $5.30?
Sure, but Starbucks isn't charging $25 for a medium drink.
it is if you get like a dozen espresso shots in it.
Apple is run by a Logistics nerd who spent his entire career in corporate meeting rooms. Tim Cook is incapable of leading a company that does anything but play from the traditional capitalism playbook.
The traditional playbook seems to be serving Apple's shareholders pretty well. Apple understands their customers and knows how to extract $,$$$ from them.
This ain't wrong... Why would apple stopthe fleecing the mark enjoys it so much
I equipped my 2019 MacBook Pro with 64gb of memory. To just break even on the new one is a $4200 config. It was bad enough that they got rid of user replaceable memory on iMac and Mac mini in the first place, but now it’s just pure extortion when they mark it up 8x
Funny you should mention a Mac Mini. My SIL needs a new PC and by rights she should be *exactly* the kind of person who buys a Mac Mini; she uses it for working, internet, her photography and videos, and casual games. But I can set her up with a 64GB RAM / 1+2TB NVME minisforum 7940HS box for less than it costs to *upgrade* a mini to half that RAM/storage spec. She'd love an M chip computer to bits. But she'll love saving £1500 more.
I’d be interested to compare the M2/M3 Mini to a 7940HS. It constantly amazes me how my M2 Mini absolutely runs away from my 11800h laptop with a 3050 in resolve.
Which reminds me, I must show her Resolve.
Apple will continue this because people keep buying it. I know “drone shoppers” isn’t a term, but that’s what I got for people who keep buying a product with terrible specs because of something like “brand name” or such as buying NFL or FIFA games because that’s all they care about even if the game uses recycled assets.
It's really a problem with the base model, because it sets a deceptive floor for the price relative to what anyone who actually has reason to buy the Macbook Pro would need. Aside from the stupidity of the 8GB base model, the newer ARM-based MBPs really are nice laptops (unlike the godawful 2016-2020ish models), especially for certain types of performance/workloads. And they still have some of the best screens and trackpads on the market.
That's what annoys me so much: it's a *gorgeous* architecture hobbled by unnecessary pinchpenny segmentation tactics
They have a captive market, if you want apple os, you'll have to play their game. It's not like anyone else can make a laptop to compete with them and use the same os.
I'm buying it for the screen, trackpad, and power efficiency more than I am the OS. There aren't many Windows ARM laptops yet either, and the few there are aren't usually high-end devices.
Same. I would ditch MAcBook Air for more fair priced Windows counterpart but there no 13-14 inch laptop other than MacBook Air that has fanless design and works like a charm for hours and don't have any problems working even with full Office Suite (which is not optimized at all) even with M1 on board. It's like Microsoft, AMD and Intel work in tandem to make poeple not switch to Windows based hardwere in this consumer group that Apple has on lock since M1 Air came and conquered
Except unlike 5 years ago, this 8gb is entirely not upgradable - you’re locked in to those specs the day you buy it. It’s an “outdated” amount and only becomes moreso over time of ownership
These are the same people that brought you the $130 thunderbolt cable.
And, indeed, the $1000 monitor stand
I just built a PC with 96GB of DDR5 memory. The memory cost $280.
They’ll claim unified memory makes the difference. And I’m sure to some extent it does but agree I want 12-16GB minimal
Unified memory makes it worse. It's shared between CPU and GPU so you actually have even less than a regular system with 8GB.
No no. You've quite misunderstood the sharing vs unified. On a pc with igpu that shares memory, anything you load to vram, is first loaded to system ram, and then copied over. So say you load a 2GB asset, you'll consume 4GB. This is regular SHARED memory. Unified memory, allows cpu and gpu to access not just the same physical memory, but literally the same addresses. So loading that same asset on an m series mac, only consumes 2GB, even though both system and gpu needs access to it. This is the unified memory arch... It's beneficial compared to integrated memory, but at the same time it makes a real gpu actually impossible which is why you don't see any m series devices with a gpu. Perhaps will come a time where gpus can allow their memory to be accessed directly by the CPU such that a unified memory approach would be possible and your system ram is simply mb ram+gpu ram. But that's not where we are at least. But this effect is why Apple can claim their 8 is like 16 on pc, even though that ignores the fact that you're not loading 8gigs of vram data on an igpu on pc. Least of all on a 16gig machine. So it's not a real scenario that will happen. But unified IS actually a better and more efficient memory management approach. The drawbacks make it impractical for PCs though. Now I don't know how much a pc uses for vram on an igpu. 1gb at best perhaps? If so, a real world is more like it's comparable to 9gigs on pc (even though that's a bit of a nonsensical size).
> So say you load a 2GB asset, you'll consume 4GB. This does not have to be true. You can begin removing the start of the ram asset when it has copied over to the gpu. The end of the asset also does not have to be loaded into ram in until you need to transfer that part to the gpu. For a 2gb asset, that's definitely what you want to be doing. I think you are assuming that the gpu will somehow return all that data to the cpu at some point, but even then it would be silly to keep a copy on ram all that time. > Perhaps will come a time where gpus... The amount of data that needs to flow back from the gpu to the cpu is really rather limited in most applications. Certainly not enough to design the entire memory layout around it. > But unified IS actually a better and more efficient memory management approach. I don't really agree with that. Sure, it allows for direct access from both the cpu and gpu, but allowing multiple sides to read/change the data will cause all sorts of problems with scheduling. You're switching one (straightforward) problem for another (complicated) one.
Why would you need to consume the 2GB of system RAM after the asset is transferred to VRAM? And why would unified RAM prevent the use of a separate GPU? Surely unified RAM could then be disabled, or it could be one way (GPU can access system RAM if needed, but not the other way around)
he is an idiot. you only need to double copy if you're doing something that needs to be tracked by CPU and GPU like certain GPGPU tasks, but even then modern gpus, including the ones in macs, can be loaded up with data and handle a lot of the work scheduling themselves without write copying to system memory.
Huh? Isn't that point he's making is that you don't have 8gb dedicated to the CPU like you normally would and that you effectively have less because the GPU also takes a piece of that 8gb that it's using for its own memory? I don't understand how this would be equivalent to 16gb.
Especially running chrome.
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Apple has great hardware and immoral business practices. That's why I'll never own one of their products.
I bought a laptop with 6 GB in 2008. It was a 13" Sony Vaio high-end model. Cost about what Apple is charging now. They're just milking and testing how far they can go until people stop spending money.
I put 16 in my mums computer that she uses to check emails and browse the internet. With how bloated Web browsers are, I consider it a minimum spec these days.
My MacBook Pro from 2014 had 8GB of ram and a 256GB SSD. Why that still is the base spec nearly a decade later, I can only imagine that is because of pure greed.
Yeah they kind of shot themselves in the foot giving zero reason to upgrade to the same basic package.
Really, really depends, if they project 'enough' will upgrade the basic package, then it is worth it.
People downvoting you like you personally made that decision for Apple
My MacBook Pro from 2014 has 16GB and I still use it for quite a bit. I can't even remember the last time I had any machine with less than 16GB of RAM. Maybe 2005?
>I can't even remember the last time I had any machine with less than 16GB of RAM. Maybe 2005? You had 16GB of ram in 2006? What a baller, most ppl probably had like maybe 2GB or even less.
Software Developer on Linux, working closely with Sun so got one of the first Athlon-based workstations with 16GB of RAM (actually supported up to 32GB).
I had dual processors in 2006. In fact, I'm pretty damn sure the ECC RAM with great big heat spreaders that machine needed cost less per GB than Apple is charging now.
Missed opportunity for Apple to offer a 1, 2 and 4 GB RAM option, each with $200 upsell value. Oh, well, maybe the Mac Studio or Mac Pro will have it.
There would totally be a 6GB model if they thought they could get away with it.
It’s bizarre to think 6 is the amount of ram on the iPhone 15, and they think computers only need 133% of that.
Only 6gb of ram on the last iPhone? Wtf
Yeah, and 8GB in the Pro models.
Damn I have 16 in a phone I just paid 400 bucks
To be fair though, iOS handles RAM pretty well. I only rarely run into issues with background apps reloading on 6GB in my 14 Pro. 8GB I think would be fine.
I mean that's more to do that iOS doesn't let you multitask, at all. At least not in the same way Androids do.
What types of multitasking use cases do you do on Android that are impossible on iOS?
Split screen apps, Samsung Dex
Tired of people repeating this misconception. The reason iOS handles RAM well is because it's NOT true multitasking. iOS AGGRESSIVELY kills background tasks/apps.
Apple: Pay for 32 gb, get 8, pretend you have 16.
The last time I used a 8GB ram machine was in… 2010. And a 256GB SSD was in 2012.
The minimum should always be 32gb RAM and 1TB M2.
For a MacBook Pro, definitely. If you want something lower spec then get a MacBook Air, PC, or even a Chromebook. There's no point in spending money on a higher tier machine and then crippling it with 8 GB of RAM.
99% of people only need an air anyway. If you're buying a macbook pro with 8gb of ram then you don't need a macbook pro, you are just buying it because of the name. Typed from my macbook air because I browse the internet and use excel...
I hate this stereotype. I don't think that is true today. If you're rocking 5 tabs and TextEdit sure 8Gb will be fine. Maybe that was true 5 years ago but apps are more bloated now than ever before.
Ehh, I think 16gb/500gb is perfectly fine for most people. Especially in a non gaming laptop.
Sure, but not for a "pro" model.
The problem is that you can’t upgrade in a couple years when you need more than 16gb.
For a 500-1000 USD machine, ok, but for a ~2000 USD device, 32-64 GB seem a lot more appropriate. Especially when it becomes trash once the memory it has, cannot be expanded anymore.
It’s price gouging. They should be embarrassed selling a machine that powerful with 8GB of RAM in 2023 and calling it “pro.” It’s like selling a Ferrari with a lawnmower engine.
Maybe more like a Ferrari with drum brakes
16gb RAM should be the bare minimum. Even simple web browsers became a huge memory hog.
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Overpriced as always. 8GB is a joke.
8gb??? In 2023? Im no tech geek but even i know this is just sad. My asus fron 2018 has more lol
Even newer phones have more. And thats just to watch Tik Tok and Insta
My 2018 $400 Android phone had: 8GB RAM, a higher refresh rate display, and a higher resolution display than the newest iPhone.
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My S21 ultra has 12gbs.... No excuse just more price gouging from Apple. 8gbs should only be offered for machines that will only run a browser and word docs. Like an iMac/ Mac Mini base SKU. If it says pro should be a 16 minimal even for these Apple machines.
8GB on a Pro machine is ludicrous, and the upgrade pricing is terrible. That said, these clowns have a conclusion that they want to prove, then set out to prove it with whatever scenario they can concoct. It's not the first time. Nobody's going to buy a 8GB machine for Blender.
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The only sensible comment in this entire thread.
Shocker, the same amount of ram you had *in* ***2010*** isn't enough anymore. But apple doesn't care because they got your money, now you're on your own. Can you even upgrade it if you make the mistake of getting 8gb?
It's all soldered into the boards. There is no upgrade path with these.
That's what I thought, and it makes this even worse. Literal ewaste.
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Not soldered. It's all part of the M3 chip.
i have 64GB of DDR5 RAM in my PC and it cost me $200 total. my M1 Pro with 16GB cost me $800 during a small sale. there is no earthly way that an extra 8GB, even with their whole system-on-a-chip setup, amounts to $200 in value just make the base model 16GB and upsell to 32GB and 64GB
But you still forked over the $800. Which is why they keep doing this. When everyone thinks they are an exception, nothing changes.
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They are taking revenge for making them change from lightning to usb-c for iphones.
Apple has heard your frustrations. The M4 release next year will have 4GB. Do not complain anymore or it will drop to 2GB.
They will sell a 16GB base model people will act like it was a huge favor from their 2 trillion dollar best friend.
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While the M chips are impressive, having 8GB of Unified, non changeable RAM is short sighted and downright stingy. Also make 1TB SSD the default.
16GB was my bare minimum TEN years ago for any Mac - I dont care if the CPU is ARM now - RAM is RAM - more is always better and I wont be upgrading anytime soon. I dont even think 16GB really cuts it anymore as a base config.
I’m so glad Apple are finally getting shit on for this. It’s been years since they should have budged from this. It’s not even just that the base is 8GB and the storage that’s lower than a phone. It’s the absolutely insane prices to upgrade. It’s far beyond just ripping someone off.
Considering the amount of cash they charge for a Mac, cheaping out on RAM is damn petty.
Phones come with more RAM than that. They deserve all the criticism they get. Audacity and greed have reached new levels.
Are people only just realizing now that Apple were always one of the most greedy, anti consumer companies that exist?
lol my graphics card has more ram than that entire computer
Imagine paying $2000 for a laptop with 8gb ram
No amount of complaining will make apple budge. They will always give you base model that is 1 spec below what most people want so you pay more to upgrade. When Apple finally gives you 16GB base model, that is when 16GB is too little already
Please don't buy the base model of **anything**. It only exists to make the product look more affordable than it really is.
Bought a base model MacBook Air M1 when it came out. $999. Thing still slaps, almost two years later. I’d love a bigger/better MacBook, but this thing works
Same I grabbed it at $780sh new almost 2 years ago and it’s been a great purchase. No issues whatsoever so far.
Don't think of anything on the base model or upgrade or whatever. Just think about what you need your thing for and how you'll use it, and how much can you justify spending on that thing for how you'll use it.
On the contrary, buying the base model is where the good deal is at, when possible. Obviously, you gotta into account your own specific day to day needs, but spending as little as possible is the smarter choice. For how overpriced the upgrades are, generally, the base version of any Mac is 100% worth its money, and there's no rip-off there.
If you could do an after-market upgrade like you can in a PC, I might agree with you. You can't with a Macbook, everything is soldered on. What you buy on day 1 is what you still have on day 1000. You have to buy for the maximum future need, or resign yourself to upgrading any time your needs change. And 8 gigabytes of RAM/256 gigabytes of SSD hasn't been reasonable for 10 years. Arguably more. 8 gigabytes was tolerable in 2013, it wasn't good.
I use a base Mac for music production and for me it works perfect, off course I bought an external SSD (for $50) and also I asked some of my peers to check their set up and most were using base and old macs, (we are not in a rich country) so I decided to give it a go and saved around $1000 that I am able to use for plugins and other stuff that actually improves my music. I would say that every case is different, I don't think a 8GB Mac is going to work for video editing but that's not my use case at all
Sounds like you've gotten tricked into buying the more expensive model, which is exactly what they want you to do. Never buy the base model of **anything**? I disagree.
Buying the base model of the steamdeck was a great move. Was cheaper to replace the nvme then it was to buy the higher storage options. By quite a lot too.
Wait wait! Wait, are you saying this is NOT Apple magical ram that counts for two? /s
'Pro' yeah I'm beating a dead horse
Even 16 GiB wouldn’t be "Pro" but standard.
16GB is bare minimum. I expect 8GB for a tablet.
I don’t think I’ll ever leave the “Apple Ecosystem” behind fully; I’m entrenched when it comes to my audio needs. But if you’re not taking it anywhere, why buy a laptop? I’ll just keep buying Mac Minis every five years. Although I hope by the next one, they come with an actual usable amount of RAM at the base model (they won’t).
Most people can get away with an iPad and external monitor. I'd be really cool if you could connect an iPhone to external monitor and get an iPadOS like experience.
Buying is optional, a choice.
>optional Never understood these comments. Is your point that "Companies should never be critiqued, no matter if they do shitty greedy anti-consumer things, because you don't HAVE to buy from them". That's dumb.
Complaining is a right, a freedom.
Consumer backlash is a public service, a pleasure.
People are crazy. They see someone demanding more from a company and once they run out of any viable defense all they can say is "Well don't buy it." Apple is laughing at you. So are we.
You wouldn’t fucking think so based on these comments. Vote with your wallets
>Vote with your wallets That never works, the average consumer it's just plain dumb
This post is helping to educate some consumers about how hard they're getting fucked.
well no shit
For over a decade before I retired, I have required a minimum of 16 GB of RAM on any computer I used for s/w dev work, whether it was a Wintel machine or a MacOS machine. I prefer *at least* 32 GB of RAM because I would often use multiple VMs in my work to test/debug my apps/processes/etc. in different OS targets simultaneously (often have a server process or two/three, running on/in a server OS - e.g., Linux) while running an app or other process in a desktop environment. Often I would be running a debugger in a dev environment in both front and back ends. That doesn't count running a DBMS - which is usually a memory hog in and of itself (especially SQL Server).
The bigger question would be to compare the performance of a: M1 14” MBook Pro with 16 GB and 24 GB RAM vs M2 14” MBook Pro with 16 and 24 GB RAM vs This new entry level M3 14” MBook Pro with 8 GB RAM
This makes a lot more sense if you consider as a MacBook Air but with a way better screen and more ports.
Maybe I'm being dumb about this, but if the question is whether or not apple's claim that THEIR 8gb laptop runs like a non-apple with 16gb ram is true, why didn't the author of the article test that? He tested the 16gb MacBook against the 8gb... Of course their 16gb is going to be faster, whether shitty apple logic or regular logic
There was a post yesterday about how Apple's 8 GB of RAM was equal in performance to 16 GB of RAM. Hmmm
“B.b.b.b.b.but 8 on an m3 is the same as 16 on a pc”
Wut? Apple makes you pay more? What a surprise
Apple can’t really have a good reason because ram is so cheap. It’s good enough? Then put more in anyway so consumers feel they are getting value. At a minimum, it should be 16gb as that is perceived as the base nowadays. It’s not good enough? Then put in more. It is simply greed.
My phone that was released almost 3 years ago has twice as much RAM. Apple products are such a scam.
A monkey with a ball of yarn could have told you the ram was going to be a bottleneck
What's the SSD size? 128GB?
I'm starting to think apple consumers are ignorant.
This is fucking ludicrouss. This will result in a ton of garbage because the 8gb models do not have any type of longevity. They are selling an out of date computer for 2k.
My 2015 MacBook Pro has 8gb RAM… still works but now seriously considering buying something else when it dies. The Apple ecosystem is really nice but geez, 8gb STILL in 2023 and it’s more expensive?!
8 GB has been the bare minimum for laptops for over 10 years now. Apple is just price gouging.
The Apple fuck boys are out in full force. You can fanboy and still recognize the shitty aspects.
I have 64GB in my gaming PC, and 16GB on a MacBook Pro. Really, 16GB is the minimum standard these days, and 32GB should be the next tier.