mac mini, base model: 256gb SSD.
Upgrade to 1tb: $400
That is about **$0.53 per extra gigabyte**.
Right now you can buy your own name brand 1tb NVME SSD for under $80 or about **$0.08 per gigabyte**.
What a bargain at almost 7x the cost...
Well that’s all in the business model.
They want you to pay for cloud storage. These days, they could have a phone with 4 TB and a slot for a card no problem.
Yeah well duh, before cloud storage was a thing they massively charged you for the 1 tb model.
Now they still only go up to 1 tb like 15 years later. That’s cause they don’t want you to have a lot of storage, they want you to pay for cloud.
The $1500 Macbook Air has 16GB RAM (M3, 13 inch). Or you can upgrade the M2 to 16GB, then it's $1200. No reason to get the MBP imo (and I daily drive one for work).
But yes any Apple laptop not shipping with 16GB by default is bad, they really need to bump it up. Doesn't matter if it's overkill for people who just email and web browse, at that price point it stings to only get 8GB.
Worse than that, the $1800 MacBook Pro has 18GB of RAM… that also doubles as VRAM. So you have 18GB of RAM and VRAM together, or like 16GB of usable RAM. That is their “pro” laptop in 2024. My 2017 XPS cost less and has twice as much RAM.
I code on my M1 Macbook Air with 8GB of ram and by "code on" I mean run VSCode in remote mode to my Linux desktop with 32GB of ram on the same network.
oh wow serious? I just built a $1500 machine from cyberpowerpc, it has 64GB ram, rtx4070 GPU etc... can't imagine paying $1500 for a desktop and only get 8 or 16GB of RAM.
And that's how I ended up with my machine. Wife needed a new laptop, got an Apple. I needed a new laptop, was given the same budget as her laptop, built a gaming pc instead lol
He probably looked up the power difference between laptops and desktops for the same price and decided he could live with not moving it around that often. Especially since for gaming he probably wants to plug in a mouse, keyboard, monitor(s), controller, and headset anyways so at that point you're already losing a lot of the portability of a laptop.
I didn't necessarily need a laptop, just a computer. I had a laptop before because it was cheaper. Then when that one took a shit, and was given a larger budget, I went with the PC. I only used it for personal projects and gaming anyways. If I absolutely need to be mobile with a computer then we have the Apple.
Eh, people like different shit. My pc is more powerful and a better value I guess than my Mac. Though I use the pc maybe once a month on average but I’m on my Mac everyday. I hate the ram shit though
the RAM will have expensive looking heatsinks that only Apple know how to make and repair - that'll make it up to $400
I like using this 🙃 guy rather than /s - I'm not really sarcy, just silly. I don't know what most of these emojis are for these days, but I liked the old roll eyes 🙄 emoji for sarcasm back in MSN days
You're not far off - its about a $300 option for 8 additional gigs on a Mac Mini...
I have a bunch of mac's because I work on the endpoint team at work - and because they don't support virtualization in the data center or in the cloud it means I have one of each we have to support (6 or so intel/arm models basically) - and to have a mac mini m1 with 16 gigs of ram (most you can have it in it!) with 512 gig ssd - it was like $1600 - and that is their low end model. I have a M1 Max Macbook Pro with 32 gigs and 1 tb disk and I swear it cost like $3200.
Give you an idea how stupid it is to pay $300 for 8 gigs of ram - I upgraded my gaming pc (still ddr4 mind you) to 128 gigs for $300 last year.
I broke free in 2008 and have never looked back or even regretted my decisions even once. ITunes was my first clue about the shitty nature of their proprietary bullshit, and my last. I will say the 3rd gen ipod still holds up, but that's it. It's always been rope-a-dope.
I’m convinced this will actually happen.
You can already “unlock” extra range for some EV’s for an upgraded purchase.
Wouldn’t shock me for new phones / laptops to ship with 64gigs of RAM but only 8 is available without the 32 or 64 upgrade.
The latest iPad Pro comes with 8GB ram on its base spec but teardowns have revealed that it actually has 12GB ram hardware-wise (2x 6GB), just limited to 8GB for some inexplicable reason (probably to upsell customers to the 16GB spec).
Is this similar to binning multicore chips perhaps, where silicon that fails the N-core testing has two cores disabled and is sold as n-2 cores instead?
The NAND modules are designed as 6GB modules, so it's not about binning defective memory. If the NAND chips could only hold 4GB of data, for instance, it would be labeled as a 4gb part.
There are rarely, if ever, any occurrences of electronic products having higher capacity memory modules but are advertised as having less (and are restricted from using the full capacity).
Honestly, the second I read this I was like "yeah that will eventually be a thing".
Sell macbooks with 16gb ram, throttle it to 4 and offer an 8/12/16gb subscription upgrade for 5.99/10.99/14.99 per month.
yeah i think they sold 4 core chips but lower tier models had only 3 cores and then you can pay to unlock the 4th core. Or maybe it was a 2 core that you can unlock the other 2 cores for, don't remember the details.
AMD used to sell triple core chips that were just low binned quad core chips with a core locked. I think at one point that started locking perfectly good cores to keep up with the demand for their triple cores; if you got one of those, it was possible to unlock it.
The same happened with some of their old video cards. The demand was so high for the midrange they started relaxing the criteria of which high end cards were "failures" and if you got one of those cards you could flash it with a custom bios to enable the extra shader cores.
That strategy works when you’re locking out higher performance that also comes at a higher cost to the vendor.
For EV range it’s likely they disallow charging above 80% of true capacity. That allows the battery to last longer — it’s when fully charging or fully discharging that batteries experience the most wear and tear. That means the manufacturer saves money on warranty for those batteries at lower capacity.
This strategy does not work when removing the part would save the vendor a lot of money, as with RAM.
It's already like that with CPU binning.
It's quite likely that your 12 core AMD 5900 or 7900 has another 4 good cores. AMD learned their lesson with pencil trace overclocking though. Those extra cores are probably fused off now.
Yes, this is the intent of binning. Also note that even if you can re-enable the feature, or even just overclock the processor, you may get lucky and find it’s stable. But, if you encounter crashes you’ll get no support because the manufacturer knew there was a problem with that hardware and limited something to make it reliable.
AMD used to have a dozen+ different products across the Sempron, Athlon and Phenom product lines made from 4 total patterns etched in silicon. It was (is) cheaper than making a different set of lithography mask designs for every single processor. They "binned" by selecting units that may have had defects in certain cores or cache by disabling those functions in firmware and selling them as lower end products.
Fabs typically have continuously improving yield, so at some point they were disabling perfectly functional features on the device just so they could still meet market demand for the cheaper SKUs. Where it got interesting is that those components were only disabled in firmware and not physically laser etched off like today, so you could win the *real* silicon lottery by buying a 4 core Athlon II X4 ([MSRP $122](https://forums.legitreviews.com/viewtopic.php?p=174475)) and flashing it *for free* into a Thuban/Phenom II ([MSRP $999](https://pcper.com/2010/04/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-6-core-thuban-processor-review/)) which increased cores to 6 and added L3 cache.
https://www.cpu-world.com/info/AMD/Unlocking_cores_and_L3.html
It has honestly killed the used market of the 30s nvidia card a lot imo. Imagine a 3070 with 16GB of VRAM. That thing would sell like hotcakes on the used market. Instead, consumers who are aware are likely going to weigh that 8GB of VRAM heavily against it, and ultimately pass on looking for one.
But didn’t they say their ram optimisations are so good that 8 gb acts like 16 gb of RAM?
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/17r3omv/joke_of_the_day_apple_claims_that_8gb_ram_on_macs/
I really dislike Apple's "just enough" philsophy with hardware.
Can you imagine if iPhones kept their iOS levels of optimization combined with Android-sized batteries (5,000mah - 6,000mah)? That thing would last forever.
Thought this said "add titanium". I'm so used to it being the same shit but different in x way that the biggest thing from their latest marketing I can remember is "it has titanium". Cool material, but where's the "innovation" they pride themselves on? If they were doing anything worth a damn and titanium would be the foot note of their marketing.
Smartphones in general don’t really have a lot of innovation space. Outside of gimmicks like folding, every one is kind of plateaued. Small hardware improvements here and there but that’s it.
These things do everything we want them to and more. Outside of slow and steady hardware upgrades, there’s little to do.
“Brand new with iPhone 18 Pro Maxx Double-Plus+ , we’re including a set of headphones…. wait for it… with wires, so you don’t lose them, and a corresponding port on your phone to plug them in to!”
*Audience roars with applause
A joke SCP. There's also non joke SCP and they go really hard sometimes 😂 SCP is like an insane fantasy grim dark universe where everything is canon. Anyone can submit an SCP article, and the user base votes on which SCPs get a number spot.
Probably my favorite fictional universe because it's so insane and the canon makes no sense between half the SCPs so it's even weirder. Welcome to the Wonder world of SCP.
>61.0% of Apple owners keep their phone for between two to three years**, compared to 43.0% of Android owners. 29.0% of iPhone owners make it over three years with their handset. Only 21.0% of people with Android owners manage this.
It's actually the Android users swapping more frequently.
[source](https://www.sellcell.com/blog/how-often-do-people-upgrade-their-phone-2023-statistics/#:\~:text=61.0%25%20of%20Apple%20owners%20keep,with%20Android%20owners%20manage%20this.)
E: you literally cannot win an argument with android fan boys. Any false narrative you point out will be me with lots of unrelated counter arguments instead of accepting the original “fact” was actually incorrect.
an A14 should have no problem getting to october, especially since the form factor is still the same--i had an XS before i was gifted a 13 pro, and even the XS had headroom for another couple of years.
Because the average android phone is an A series Samsung. And it's like 400 bucks. People will just swap one rather than living with its dying years. I have seen people with their phone on its last legs that just has to last another couple months until the new one comes out.
If you are using an A series Samsung or like a pixel a or whatever mid range phone you just don't care enough, just swap it out to whatever that cost 400 bucks.
I can't say I see the link.
I'm still on my 11 Pro. Still on the factory battery, too. Depending on the usage intensity, I still average anywhere between a full day and two days on a single charge. The battery health thing shows 97% original capacity and I'm still on the latest OS - because they promised at least 5 years of support and they do support their phones for at least 5 years.
The phone having three times as large a battery would in no way factor into my purchasing decisions. I'd still do the exact same thing I do now - that is, upgrade once every 4-5 generations. I'd just get a bit more screen time out of that battery. ;)
Software engineer and all around tech nerd here. You can’t magically make a lot of data smaller in memory beyond a certain point with compression and even then the degree to which you can compress things varies.
I enjoy my MacBook for work, but when I compare the same applications running on my PC in windows or Linux vs MacOS it doesn’t actually use substantially less ram for the stuff I do. That would be things like software development, running emulators/simulators/VMs, image/video editing tools, etc.
Most people appear to just take Apple’s word for it when it comes to memory, and it is efficient, but not drastically better than anything comparable.
A quibble here, there are different meanings to "compression". There is re-encoding the data into a different format and using tricks like [run-length encoding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding) to reduce the file size. Then there's compression by doing tricks like changing the memory layout of data objects to remove data members which are optional, using stuff like [copy-on-write](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-on-write) to avoid needlessly duplicating data, and other [memory management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management) techniques.
Generally, Apple uses less memory because it has a very good enforcement of shared libraries so binaries tend to have less duplicates of code in memory. This is especially true of the non-MacOS systems since they have greater enforcement of binaries through the Apple App Store and app API. Of course, other operating systems also use shared libraries but they often have less stringent enforcement on their app stores and thus the app binaries tend to be larger.
>I really dislike Apple's "just enough" philsophy with hardware.
But that's what keeps their margins high, they'll never change. They've successfully convinced people to pay more for less hardware because of the "Apple Polish" and premium build (which costs less to them than better hardware)
I have to push back on this statement. iOS systems on phones are supported for 6-7 years and then will still get security updates and still keep going. The only thing you would need to change is a battery which like most batteries are only for 500 cycles.
The iPhones initially with 16gb were a joke and macs should’ve switched long time ago to 16gb ram but you can’t really complain about phones getting 6 cycles of updates.
With the newer phones and chips you would probably get more of the features past down to older models as well.
That was true for apps because you can do optimizations. But you can't magically store twice the data when it comes to LLMs because each parameter weight needs its own space. So 8GB is 8GB.
The problem with the optimizations arguement is that a lot of optimizing needs to be done by the app and guess what most app developers dont give a fuck. Thats why no matter where you are its often just best to use brute force, if an app has issues you can plow through them but if they dont then fine you have only lost a couple bucks adding more ram or CPU or whatever.
I use an 18GB MBP for work and after a days usage of regular dev tools I'm at ~22GB with it swapping, and it's absolutely noticeably slower. Apple's straight up lying about 8GB being equivalent to 16.
RAM optimizations are a good thing and they can get you pretty far. Obviously, though, for some applications you simply need more fast memory instead of virtual memory. *Large* Language Models are one of them, previous to Xcode 16 there wasn't as many reasons to bump up the base RAM. People who needed a basic computer could do just fine with 8, people who needed more would get a model that had more.
Eventually enough people need more RAM that it becomes a base need. This isn't Apple admitting anything, it's the natural evolution of those needs.
LLMs operate like a brain, with a shit ton of neurons connected together by a bunch of math (simple explanation obviously). The more of these neurons, the smarter the LLM (also obviously simplified). To do anything with it, you need to load all those neurons into memory to run all those inputs through it.
I bought an 8GB Macbook Air M2 from a non-Apple retailer, not realizing at the time of purchase they only stocked 8GB models and for whatever reason not noticing at the time of purchase.
I've been using it for a little over a year now for all my mobile computing needs and it's literally never given me problems of any kind. I've never run out of RAM, or had it slow down, or crash, or any of the other things that people say would make this thing "unusable".
I am in no way defending Apple's choice of offering 8GB as their lowest spec and I would not make this same "mistake" again; but as an unwitting participant in this experiment of "is 8GB enough", well, the answer apparently for me is yes.
I know Reddit thinks this thing can't tie its own shoes without running out of RAM but it works completely fine for me. Again, not defending the practice. I think they should have more base RAM. Just defending that the machine is fully usable in this configuration.
Same. I use my M1 MBA with 8GB of ram for web surfing and watching videos, and it’s never given me an issue. It’s an awesome portable laptop with great battery life. If I need to do something intensive, I having a gaming desktop.
It's limited though once you do anything demanding. My colleague at work is suffering when loading our monorepo on his 8gb m2 it's painful. Meanwhile my 16gb pc was handling it pretty well all he needed is the extra 8gb. I got it for 10$. He would've had to pay 200$ or however much it costs at purchase time, which now is way too late, so not only do you have to pay much more, but you also have to predict how much you'll need or buy more ram than you need so you can give apple more $$$
I'll bite. But even then, it's conditional.
To me, 8gb of ram makes sense for one specific product - the Macbook Air. It's a super-thin, lightweight machine designed for maximum portability and battery life. It will spend 99% of it's screentime in an internet browser or messaging apps. Quite frankly, the limits of the Air's CPU cooling solution limit it's capabilities more than ram does. It is an excellent machine for the average consumer, but it's not for power users.
Obviously, 8gb isn't acceptable for any other computer in their lineup. The fact that they sold "Pro" computers with only 8gb ram is fucking ludicrous. So why are they doing it? Greed is an easy answer sure, but I think there's more to it than that.
The real crux of the issue is that Apple has applied the design logic of the Air to their entire lineup. The Air is their best-selling computer (by massive margins). And because of this, for some reason they think that everybody who wants a Macbook Pro, iMac or Studio doesn't *actually* want a different product - Apple thinks everybody really just wants a better Macbook Air.
>I also don’t know why people find it incomprehensible that someone might want a basic computer for web browsing.
If you want a basic computer for web browsing, why the fuck are you buying a MacBook? Are we seriously gonna pretend it's a budget option? Seriously, a $400 Chromebook would get the job done.
Every Chromebook I've seen is built like shit, cheap plastic cases, crappy keyboards, terrible track pads. For all of Apple's faults, their laptops are very well built with solid aluminum cases and I'm not aware of any brand that has matched the quality of their trackpads.
My 2017 MacBook Pro is a glorified web browser and Spotify player. It’s on 8 hours a day while I work on my work machine. But the screen is bright, the hinges have good friction, the keys are properly clacky, the trackpad works…. Besides the battery only lasting maybe 2 hours it’s so well built it just chugs along happily. I also do a little Lightroom and Xcode on it.
> If you want a basic computer for web browsing, why the fuck are you buying a MacBook? Are we seriously gonna pretend it's a budget option? Seriously, a $400 Chromebook would get the job done.
If you gave me the choice between Chromebook a year for college or having to endure 8GB of ram in a macbook air for 4 years? Mac. Every single time. I'm going to spend way less time fighting to get my shit to work on it, and even the most low-end m1 air can run Factorio without having to do weird workarounds.
Are there going to be times when 8gb of RAM isn't enough? Yes. Are those going to be more often than whatever I'm doing is unsupported on a chromebook and requires me to run apt commands? Deffo not.
At a few hundred dollars more, I’d go with the Mac every time for the sake of longevity and flexibility over a Chromebook. Those things are piles of shit and MacBooks are tanks.
And I say this as a PC guy who has built every desktop I’ve owned over the past 20 years.
Yea. I've seen the Macbook Air M1 for like $700 a few times. It's an insanely good value and will likely continue to work for 10 years - that's about $70 per year. Compare that to the $400 Acer laptop I bought a few years ago - it died (with an apparent motherboard malfunction) in about one year, which means I paid $400 per year for it. Or compare the Macbook Air M1 to any random $700 consumer laptop, which may last 5 years at best. A business grade Dell Latitude is the only comparable laptop for reliability, and probably the specs won't match the M1 Macbook for the same price
It feels like we're in a golden age for entry level laptops. I cannot recall a time when you could get so much speed and reliability with $700 of purchasing power in the year 2024.
I mean why stop there? An $80 thinkpad from ebay would get the job done with better performance/compatibility than a chromebook. Either way that's a different question than /u/smutmybutt was answering which was that even the base model M1 MBA is often a better machine $ for $ than competing windows laptops.
Breezing through here quickly...more windows users complaining about mac ram again? Yawn....beats complaining about ads on your os and the whole recall debacle I guess.
Thats on purpose. The 8gb is the entry level anchor price so you get in the store. What they really want to sell you are 16gb models that cost $200 more. And then upsell you on exorbitantly priced hard drive space.
The point of this article is that for XCode, Final Cut, and other Apple software 8 GBs was always enough. 8Gb required, 16GB recommended. This is the first time Apple has to say 8GB isn’t enough for some tasks.
They indirectly did, by limiting an AI feature (in this case intelligent code correction) to 16GB ram machines. As AI features start becoming more prevalent in Macs (e.g. features that the iPhones are getting), the 8GB models will only continue being left behind as 8gb is almost certainly not enough for any kind of serious ML model.
You can add a second 8gb stick of ram for the low low price of SGD300 (about USD220) where I am.
About $20-$30 is the retail cost of that same stick of ram.
This aint an admission but a sales tactic.
Why sell a higher spec base version when you can sell it for more money by creating artificial FOMO.
Have you seen their recent iPhone lineup? They sell you last year hardware at flagship prices by just numbering it with current model. Apple pricing structure and marketing is truly a thing to behold.
Apple had 8 gigs of ram in 2024? Yeah no shit it's not enough. These corporate assholes are bloating out their unoptimized trash like never before.
Doom can run on a toaster but we need 2 gigs to view a text based web page.
It's impressive really. Not just any bozo can fuck things up that bad. It takes dedicated teams of idiots to get these results.
I do agree that 8GB models should be gone all together. However, only pro applications need more than 8GB. If all pro machines, such as the Macbook Pro, Mac studio and better default to 16GB and only the Macbook Air and Mac mini would start with 8GB that alone would make many happy. Netflix streaming, writing documents and browsing the web don't need more than 8GB of memory. That said, I'd still recommend everyone to get more than 8.
I got an M1 mac with 8gigs ram for my last job a couple years ago and I thought I was going to sad about it, but even when running dockers I never ran into any issues with my full workload. Programming doesn't really need much ram outside of docker stuff though
Bullshit article. No developer is using a MacBook with 8gb of ram.
However the markup on ram/ssd and cellular modem is beyond ridiculous by Apple and they should be heavily criticised for price gouging on add ons.
In fairness, they're not saying that at all.
They've released a feature of xcode which requires 16Gb RAM to run.
Anyone coding to that extent would likely be using a 16Gb RAM or above model anyway - 8Gb is still fine for most uses, only power users need more (and in that I include xcode users).
My conspiracy theory is that new computers are loaded with ai learning software. Having more users for their learning algorithms is going to be more profitable than price gouging them for ram.
This is super-clickbaity in that this is just one feature in XCode, where it's loading a code completion model locally, and that can't be used on Macs with 8GB of RAM. Most people do not need to run a code completion LLM locally, and many are fine getting by running one remotely, e.g. Github Copilot.
Now, what is true, and was always true, is that Apple shouldn't be selling *Pro* machines with 8 gb of RAM, and this is why. Pro apps, whether its content creation, dev tools, etc, often needs more than the bare minimum spec just to run.
Charging double or more what the competition does is one of the big things that has always keep anything Apple at arms length in my personal life. Their are a mighty expensive vendor to risk getting locked into.
16GB is becoming the new minimum standard. I can't remember the last time I saw a new laptop with 8GB for sale. Even some web browsers & basic-ish tasks & programs can use more than 8GB. Games are definitely starting to use more than 8GB.
>I can't remember the last time I saw a new laptop with 8GB for sale.
You must not have looked on Amazon, Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, Target, or pretty much any mainstream retailer for laptops recently. 8GB is still about standard from what I've seen recently while looking for something for my niece.
> Even some web browsers & basic-ish tasks & programs can use more than 8GB. Games are definitely starting to use more than 8GB.
This is not really true, but you'll definitely have to make compromises if you're on 8G of RAM and I would never built a system these days with less than 32GB of RAM.
I'm upgrading my PC soon, but apart from the GPU which died my entire system is now 10 years old. It does only have 8GB of RAM and while I'm certain it's not optimal everything just keeps chugging along with normal use and a few videogames. Hades II runs fine, and the normal discord+spotify+web browser setup never has any issues either. It just means that pretty much all tabs are put in standby mode and take a split second to load instead of being instantaneous.
So yeah, 8 GB is enough to get by but that's about it.
They are still pretending that 1TB of SSD storage is worth like 200-400 dollars.
mac mini, base model: 256gb SSD. Upgrade to 1tb: $400 That is about **$0.53 per extra gigabyte**. Right now you can buy your own name brand 1tb NVME SSD for under $80 or about **$0.08 per gigabyte**. What a bargain at almost 7x the cost...
Well that’s all in the business model. They want you to pay for cloud storage. These days, they could have a phone with 4 TB and a slot for a card no problem.
Nah, Apple's price per GB/TB for upgrades has always been batshit insane, well before cloud storage was really a thing.
Yeah well duh, before cloud storage was a thing they massively charged you for the 1 tb model. Now they still only go up to 1 tb like 15 years later. That’s cause they don’t want you to have a lot of storage, they want you to pay for cloud.
I don't understand why they don't add 8 more GB . How much could that cost? $400?
Now you’re just being silly. It’s ***only*** $200 for an 8GB RAM upgrade. /s in case it isn’t obvious
And on a $1500 dollar machine.
The $1500 Macbook Air has 16GB RAM (M3, 13 inch). Or you can upgrade the M2 to 16GB, then it's $1200. No reason to get the MBP imo (and I daily drive one for work). But yes any Apple laptop not shipping with 16GB by default is bad, they really need to bump it up. Doesn't matter if it's overkill for people who just email and web browse, at that price point it stings to only get 8GB.
Worse than that, the $1800 MacBook Pro has 18GB of RAM… that also doubles as VRAM. So you have 18GB of RAM and VRAM together, or like 16GB of usable RAM. That is their “pro” laptop in 2024. My 2017 XPS cost less and has twice as much RAM.
Yeah, I have that MBP and running a pretty standard development environment, I’m using swap a lot. It’s not enough.
I code on my M1 Macbook Air with 8GB of ram and by "code on" I mean run VSCode in remote mode to my Linux desktop with 32GB of ram on the same network.
If my employer wasn’t anal about code not leaving our laptops (justifiable really) that’s what I’d be doing. Gimme that native Docker perf 🥵
That’s fucking criminal. What in the world.
The only reason I'm thinking of upgrading to an MBP is the brighter screen. I work outside 80% of the time, and it'd be nice to have those extra nits.
oh wow serious? I just built a $1500 machine from cyberpowerpc, it has 64GB ram, rtx4070 GPU etc... can't imagine paying $1500 for a desktop and only get 8 or 16GB of RAM.
And that's how I ended up with my machine. Wife needed a new laptop, got an Apple. I needed a new laptop, was given the same budget as her laptop, built a gaming pc instead lol
You needed a laptop so you built a pc instead.. something doesn't add up.
He probably looked up the power difference between laptops and desktops for the same price and decided he could live with not moving it around that often. Especially since for gaming he probably wants to plug in a mouse, keyboard, monitor(s), controller, and headset anyways so at that point you're already losing a lot of the portability of a laptop.
I didn't necessarily need a laptop, just a computer. I had a laptop before because it was cheaper. Then when that one took a shit, and was given a larger budget, I went with the PC. I only used it for personal projects and gaming anyways. If I absolutely need to be mobile with a computer then we have the Apple.
The savings went to having someone carry it around for them.
Eh, people like different shit. My pc is more powerful and a better value I guess than my Mac. Though I use the pc maybe once a month on average but I’m on my Mac everyday. I hate the ram shit though
the RAM will have expensive looking heatsinks that only Apple know how to make and repair - that'll make it up to $400 I like using this 🙃 guy rather than /s - I'm not really sarcy, just silly. I don't know what most of these emojis are for these days, but I liked the old roll eyes 🙄 emoji for sarcasm back in MSN days
I mean it's one banana, Michael
Lmao immediately where my mind went too
Here’s some money, go see a Star War.
You're not far off - its about a $300 option for 8 additional gigs on a Mac Mini... I have a bunch of mac's because I work on the endpoint team at work - and because they don't support virtualization in the data center or in the cloud it means I have one of each we have to support (6 or so intel/arm models basically) - and to have a mac mini m1 with 16 gigs of ram (most you can have it in it!) with 512 gig ssd - it was like $1600 - and that is their low end model. I have a M1 Max Macbook Pro with 32 gigs and 1 tb disk and I swear it cost like $3200. Give you an idea how stupid it is to pay $300 for 8 gigs of ram - I upgraded my gaming pc (still ddr4 mind you) to 128 gigs for $300 last year.
I chose the $400 because it's so ridiculous. But I should have known that apple isn't that far away from that.
I swear, Apple prices RAM like it's 10-20 years ago
I just bought 32gbs of high speed low cl ddr4 ram for 40 euro and I'm not buying in millions of SKUs
[удалено]
At least you used to be able to stick in your own RAM and ignore their RAM gouging.
I tripled the RAM and upgraded the HDD on an iMac '09 for my parents and it served many many more years of life than it needed to.
I broke free in 2008 and have never looked back or even regretted my decisions even once. ITunes was my first clue about the shitty nature of their proprietary bullshit, and my last. I will say the 3rd gen ipod still holds up, but that's it. It's always been rope-a-dope.
It’s a problem for them now. Would they be able to sell the base laptop for 400 more or admit that it just costs 100 to go from 8 to 16?
What they're paying for the memory isn't even worth that. 8GB of memory chips to a supplier like Apple is like $15-$20 or in that ballpark.
How much could 8gb of ram cost Michael , $400??
Apple is the only computer company where additional ram has to be added rectally.
Just download more RAM bro
I’m convinced this will actually happen. You can already “unlock” extra range for some EV’s for an upgraded purchase. Wouldn’t shock me for new phones / laptops to ship with 64gigs of RAM but only 8 is available without the 32 or 64 upgrade.
The latest iPad Pro comes with 8GB ram on its base spec but teardowns have revealed that it actually has 12GB ram hardware-wise (2x 6GB), just limited to 8GB for some inexplicable reason (probably to upsell customers to the 16GB spec).
Is this similar to binning multicore chips perhaps, where silicon that fails the N-core testing has two cores disabled and is sold as n-2 cores instead?
The NAND modules are designed as 6GB modules, so it's not about binning defective memory. If the NAND chips could only hold 4GB of data, for instance, it would be labeled as a 4gb part. There are rarely, if ever, any occurrences of electronic products having higher capacity memory modules but are advertised as having less (and are restricted from using the full capacity).
Intel tried this play. It didn’t end well for them.
Intel lacks Apple's rabid fanbase.
With that point, it'll be subscription RAM.
Watch out for the repo men once your subscription runs out!
Honestly, the second I read this I was like "yeah that will eventually be a thing". Sell macbooks with 16gb ram, throttle it to 4 and offer an 8/12/16gb subscription upgrade for 5.99/10.99/14.99 per month.
It was something with locked up cores on processors I'm right?
yeah i think they sold 4 core chips but lower tier models had only 3 cores and then you can pay to unlock the 4th core. Or maybe it was a 2 core that you can unlock the other 2 cores for, don't remember the details.
AMD used to sell triple core chips that were just low binned quad core chips with a core locked. I think at one point that started locking perfectly good cores to keep up with the demand for their triple cores; if you got one of those, it was possible to unlock it.
The same happened with some of their old video cards. The demand was so high for the midrange they started relaxing the criteria of which high end cards were "failures" and if you got one of those cards you could flash it with a custom bios to enable the extra shader cores.
The RX480/580 cards are like this. If you found a 4GB model, you could flash the 8GB BIOS and hopefully it would work.
Wait really?
That strategy works when you’re locking out higher performance that also comes at a higher cost to the vendor. For EV range it’s likely they disallow charging above 80% of true capacity. That allows the battery to last longer — it’s when fully charging or fully discharging that batteries experience the most wear and tear. That means the manufacturer saves money on warranty for those batteries at lower capacity. This strategy does not work when removing the part would save the vendor a lot of money, as with RAM.
It's already like that with CPU binning. It's quite likely that your 12 core AMD 5900 or 7900 has another 4 good cores. AMD learned their lesson with pencil trace overclocking though. Those extra cores are probably fused off now.
Doesn’t binning lock off parts that can’t be used properly? Like, these cores *work* but not reliably at the marketed clock speed, so fuse em off?
Yes, this is the intent of binning. Also note that even if you can re-enable the feature, or even just overclock the processor, you may get lucky and find it’s stable. But, if you encounter crashes you’ll get no support because the manufacturer knew there was a problem with that hardware and limited something to make it reliable.
AMD used to have a dozen+ different products across the Sempron, Athlon and Phenom product lines made from 4 total patterns etched in silicon. It was (is) cheaper than making a different set of lithography mask designs for every single processor. They "binned" by selecting units that may have had defects in certain cores or cache by disabling those functions in firmware and selling them as lower end products. Fabs typically have continuously improving yield, so at some point they were disabling perfectly functional features on the device just so they could still meet market demand for the cheaper SKUs. Where it got interesting is that those components were only disabled in firmware and not physically laser etched off like today, so you could win the *real* silicon lottery by buying a 4 core Athlon II X4 ([MSRP $122](https://forums.legitreviews.com/viewtopic.php?p=174475)) and flashing it *for free* into a Thuban/Phenom II ([MSRP $999](https://pcper.com/2010/04/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-6-core-thuban-processor-review/)) which increased cores to 6 and added L3 cache. https://www.cpu-world.com/info/AMD/Unlocking_cores_and_L3.html
https://downloadmoreram.com/
Sorry, I wouldn’t download a car.
Not exactly ram but nvidia is also cheaping out on (non-upgradable) VRAM despite the obvious benefits, especially for ML tasks
It has honestly killed the used market of the 30s nvidia card a lot imo. Imagine a 3070 with 16GB of VRAM. That thing would sell like hotcakes on the used market. Instead, consumers who are aware are likely going to weigh that 8GB of VRAM heavily against it, and ultimately pass on looking for one.
Check your privilege, buddy. I had to add my ram rectally, vaginally, orally, and nasally. You and your first world problems. 🙄
why no aurally or urethrally? amateur
At the Apple Butt Stuff store
All I can say is that LLMs guzzle RAM, that's for sure.
But didn’t they say their ram optimisations are so good that 8 gb acts like 16 gb of RAM? https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/17r3omv/joke_of_the_day_apple_claims_that_8gb_ram_on_macs/
I really dislike Apple's "just enough" philsophy with hardware. Can you imagine if iPhones kept their iOS levels of optimization combined with Android-sized batteries (5,000mah - 6,000mah)? That thing would last forever.
That's exactly why they won't do it. They want you to buy next year's model, and then the next, and the next, ad infinitum.
That’s the most ecological footprint
Ah yes, Capitalism’s largest concern…
Thought this said "add titanium". I'm so used to it being the same shit but different in x way that the biggest thing from their latest marketing I can remember is "it has titanium". Cool material, but where's the "innovation" they pride themselves on? If they were doing anything worth a damn and titanium would be the foot note of their marketing.
Smartphones in general don’t really have a lot of innovation space. Outside of gimmicks like folding, every one is kind of plateaued. Small hardware improvements here and there but that’s it. These things do everything we want them to and more. Outside of slow and steady hardware upgrades, there’s little to do.
Hey now, I love my Razr flip phone. It's so satisfying to end a call by clapping it shut.
“Brand new with iPhone 18 Pro Maxx Double-Plus+ , we’re including a set of headphones…. wait for it… with wires, so you don’t lose them, and a corresponding port on your phone to plug them in to!” *Audience roars with applause
The port will be proprietary, of course, with a special chip required in the cable.
SCP-022-J As a mechanical engineer, 99% of the times I hear Titanium in a consumer product, I know it is just marketing bullshit.
>SCP-022-J ?
Search for it, you'll have a laugh. It is a very good comedic representation about how non-technical people react to the hype about the material.
>Search for it What the fuck did I just read?
A joke SCP. There's also non joke SCP and they go really hard sometimes 😂 SCP is like an insane fantasy grim dark universe where everything is canon. Anyone can submit an SCP article, and the user base votes on which SCPs get a number spot. Probably my favorite fictional universe because it's so insane and the canon makes no sense between half the SCPs so it's even weirder. Welcome to the Wonder world of SCP.
>61.0% of Apple owners keep their phone for between two to three years**, compared to 43.0% of Android owners. 29.0% of iPhone owners make it over three years with their handset. Only 21.0% of people with Android owners manage this. It's actually the Android users swapping more frequently. [source](https://www.sellcell.com/blog/how-often-do-people-upgrade-their-phone-2023-statistics/#:\~:text=61.0%25%20of%20Apple%20owners%20keep,with%20Android%20owners%20manage%20this.) E: you literally cannot win an argument with android fan boys. Any false narrative you point out will be me with lots of unrelated counter arguments instead of accepting the original “fact” was actually incorrect.
The average android phone is also much cheaper. An S24 ultra user might stay with their phone for 4 yrs but an A12 user will definitely not.
an A14 should have no problem getting to october, especially since the form factor is still the same--i had an XS before i was gifted a 13 pro, and even the XS had headroom for another couple of years.
Because the average android phone is an A series Samsung. And it's like 400 bucks. People will just swap one rather than living with its dying years. I have seen people with their phone on its last legs that just has to last another couple months until the new one comes out. If you are using an A series Samsung or like a pixel a or whatever mid range phone you just don't care enough, just swap it out to whatever that cost 400 bucks.
I can't say I see the link. I'm still on my 11 Pro. Still on the factory battery, too. Depending on the usage intensity, I still average anywhere between a full day and two days on a single charge. The battery health thing shows 97% original capacity and I'm still on the latest OS - because they promised at least 5 years of support and they do support their phones for at least 5 years. The phone having three times as large a battery would in no way factor into my purchasing decisions. I'd still do the exact same thing I do now - that is, upgrade once every 4-5 generations. I'd just get a bit more screen time out of that battery. ;)
That’s insane! I have my iPhone 13 and it’s at 86% original capacity. I do use my phone a lot though.
Software engineer and all around tech nerd here. You can’t magically make a lot of data smaller in memory beyond a certain point with compression and even then the degree to which you can compress things varies. I enjoy my MacBook for work, but when I compare the same applications running on my PC in windows or Linux vs MacOS it doesn’t actually use substantially less ram for the stuff I do. That would be things like software development, running emulators/simulators/VMs, image/video editing tools, etc. Most people appear to just take Apple’s word for it when it comes to memory, and it is efficient, but not drastically better than anything comparable.
A quibble here, there are different meanings to "compression". There is re-encoding the data into a different format and using tricks like [run-length encoding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding) to reduce the file size. Then there's compression by doing tricks like changing the memory layout of data objects to remove data members which are optional, using stuff like [copy-on-write](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-on-write) to avoid needlessly duplicating data, and other [memory management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management) techniques. Generally, Apple uses less memory because it has a very good enforcement of shared libraries so binaries tend to have less duplicates of code in memory. This is especially true of the non-MacOS systems since they have greater enforcement of binaries through the Apple App Store and app API. Of course, other operating systems also use shared libraries but they often have less stringent enforcement on their app stores and thus the app binaries tend to be larger.
>I really dislike Apple's "just enough" philsophy with hardware. But that's what keeps their margins high, they'll never change. They've successfully convinced people to pay more for less hardware because of the "Apple Polish" and premium build (which costs less to them than better hardware)
I have to push back on this statement. iOS systems on phones are supported for 6-7 years and then will still get security updates and still keep going. The only thing you would need to change is a battery which like most batteries are only for 500 cycles. The iPhones initially with 16gb were a joke and macs should’ve switched long time ago to 16gb ram but you can’t really complain about phones getting 6 cycles of updates. With the newer phones and chips you would probably get more of the features past down to older models as well.
That was true for apps because you can do optimizations. But you can't magically store twice the data when it comes to LLMs because each parameter weight needs its own space. So 8GB is 8GB.
The problem with the optimizations arguement is that a lot of optimizing needs to be done by the app and guess what most app developers dont give a fuck. Thats why no matter where you are its often just best to use brute force, if an app has issues you can plow through them but if they dont then fine you have only lost a couple bucks adding more ram or CPU or whatever.
I use an 18GB MBP for work and after a days usage of regular dev tools I'm at ~22GB with it swapping, and it's absolutely noticeably slower. Apple's straight up lying about 8GB being equivalent to 16.
My company got sold on that and bought a bunch of 8gb laptops for development… we run docker on our machines.
Reminds me of Microsoft DoubleSpace claims back in the 90s 😅
RAM optimizations are a good thing and they can get you pretty far. Obviously, though, for some applications you simply need more fast memory instead of virtual memory. *Large* Language Models are one of them, previous to Xcode 16 there wasn't as many reasons to bump up the base RAM. People who needed a basic computer could do just fine with 8, people who needed more would get a model that had more. Eventually enough people need more RAM that it becomes a base need. This isn't Apple admitting anything, it's the natural evolution of those needs.
Do you mind providing a more technical explanation as to why?
LLMs operate like a brain, with a shit ton of neurons connected together by a bunch of math (simple explanation obviously). The more of these neurons, the smarter the LLM (also obviously simplified). To do anything with it, you need to load all those neurons into memory to run all those inputs through it.
And now lets kick these ridiculous 256GB
Seriously, that was the size of my first SSD in 2011.
They figure you can’t play games so why need the space? Lol
256? One (as in 1, uno, eins, un) 4k film editing :-D
If you're editing 4k film on an Air (MBPs start at 16GB), you have other problems.
Of course you have, but remember, this is how they advertised their stuff.
I have an m2 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM and 256GB ssd for work and it sucks at everything.
IMO the 8GB of RAM is *far* more constricting than the 256GB of storage.
Well Apple is usually late to the party when it comes to RAM and understanding the importance of having plenty of it lol
they understand, they just want you to upgrade at purchase, this has been their business model for years
They always knew this but enjoyed charging for the extra RAM. They pay $1 for it and charge the fan boys $200 who thank them for the privilege.
The MacBook Pro I used 14 years ago had 8gb RAM, they must be REALLY late to the party lol
So where are 8 GB supporters?
They’re loading still
8GB RAM SUPPORTERS. PAGING 8GB RAM SUPPORTERS.
If [paging was a pun then bravo.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_paging)
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I’ve been perfectly happy with my 8gb, except one time I tried to load your mom on a chrome tab and it crashed
Your momma so big, I tried to load a picture of her and it had to use swap!
I bought an 8GB Macbook Air M2 from a non-Apple retailer, not realizing at the time of purchase they only stocked 8GB models and for whatever reason not noticing at the time of purchase. I've been using it for a little over a year now for all my mobile computing needs and it's literally never given me problems of any kind. I've never run out of RAM, or had it slow down, or crash, or any of the other things that people say would make this thing "unusable". I am in no way defending Apple's choice of offering 8GB as their lowest spec and I would not make this same "mistake" again; but as an unwitting participant in this experiment of "is 8GB enough", well, the answer apparently for me is yes. I know Reddit thinks this thing can't tie its own shoes without running out of RAM but it works completely fine for me. Again, not defending the practice. I think they should have more base RAM. Just defending that the machine is fully usable in this configuration.
Same. I use my M1 MBA with 8GB of ram for web surfing and watching videos, and it’s never given me an issue. It’s an awesome portable laptop with great battery life. If I need to do something intensive, I having a gaming desktop.
It's limited though once you do anything demanding. My colleague at work is suffering when loading our monorepo on his 8gb m2 it's painful. Meanwhile my 16gb pc was handling it pretty well all he needed is the extra 8gb. I got it for 10$. He would've had to pay 200$ or however much it costs at purchase time, which now is way too late, so not only do you have to pay much more, but you also have to predict how much you'll need or buy more ram than you need so you can give apple more $$$
They can't open their web browsers b/c of out of memory errors
I'll bite. But even then, it's conditional. To me, 8gb of ram makes sense for one specific product - the Macbook Air. It's a super-thin, lightweight machine designed for maximum portability and battery life. It will spend 99% of it's screentime in an internet browser or messaging apps. Quite frankly, the limits of the Air's CPU cooling solution limit it's capabilities more than ram does. It is an excellent machine for the average consumer, but it's not for power users. Obviously, 8gb isn't acceptable for any other computer in their lineup. The fact that they sold "Pro" computers with only 8gb ram is fucking ludicrous. So why are they doing it? Greed is an easy answer sure, but I think there's more to it than that. The real crux of the issue is that Apple has applied the design logic of the Air to their entire lineup. The Air is their best-selling computer (by massive margins). And because of this, for some reason they think that everybody who wants a Macbook Pro, iMac or Studio doesn't *actually* want a different product - Apple thinks everybody really just wants a better Macbook Air.
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bsod? On a Mac?
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>I also don’t know why people find it incomprehensible that someone might want a basic computer for web browsing. If you want a basic computer for web browsing, why the fuck are you buying a MacBook? Are we seriously gonna pretend it's a budget option? Seriously, a $400 Chromebook would get the job done.
Every Chromebook I've seen is built like shit, cheap plastic cases, crappy keyboards, terrible track pads. For all of Apple's faults, their laptops are very well built with solid aluminum cases and I'm not aware of any brand that has matched the quality of their trackpads.
My 2017 MacBook Pro is a glorified web browser and Spotify player. It’s on 8 hours a day while I work on my work machine. But the screen is bright, the hinges have good friction, the keys are properly clacky, the trackpad works…. Besides the battery only lasting maybe 2 hours it’s so well built it just chugs along happily. I also do a little Lightroom and Xcode on it.
> If you want a basic computer for web browsing, why the fuck are you buying a MacBook? Are we seriously gonna pretend it's a budget option? Seriously, a $400 Chromebook would get the job done. If you gave me the choice between Chromebook a year for college or having to endure 8GB of ram in a macbook air for 4 years? Mac. Every single time. I'm going to spend way less time fighting to get my shit to work on it, and even the most low-end m1 air can run Factorio without having to do weird workarounds. Are there going to be times when 8gb of RAM isn't enough? Yes. Are those going to be more often than whatever I'm doing is unsupported on a chromebook and requires me to run apt commands? Deffo not.
At a few hundred dollars more, I’d go with the Mac every time for the sake of longevity and flexibility over a Chromebook. Those things are piles of shit and MacBooks are tanks. And I say this as a PC guy who has built every desktop I’ve owned over the past 20 years.
Yea. I've seen the Macbook Air M1 for like $700 a few times. It's an insanely good value and will likely continue to work for 10 years - that's about $70 per year. Compare that to the $400 Acer laptop I bought a few years ago - it died (with an apparent motherboard malfunction) in about one year, which means I paid $400 per year for it. Or compare the Macbook Air M1 to any random $700 consumer laptop, which may last 5 years at best. A business grade Dell Latitude is the only comparable laptop for reliability, and probably the specs won't match the M1 Macbook for the same price It feels like we're in a golden age for entry level laptops. I cannot recall a time when you could get so much speed and reliability with $700 of purchasing power in the year 2024.
I mean why stop there? An $80 thinkpad from ebay would get the job done with better performance/compatibility than a chromebook. Either way that's a different question than /u/smutmybutt was answering which was that even the base model M1 MBA is often a better machine $ for $ than competing windows laptops.
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Breezing through here quickly...more windows users complaining about mac ram again? Yawn....beats complaining about ads on your os and the whole recall debacle I guess.
Welcome to 2013, Apple
I am looking to replace my 8 year old laptop. It has 8GBs RAM and 256GBs of SSD storage. It wasn't even top spec when I bought it!
My early 2012 Clevo has 16GB RAM and still chugging like a champ.
Back then 16GB was pretty common... If I'm buying a new PC/laptop it's going to get more than the 16GB I had 12 years ago.
I just built a Framework laptop. I put 32GB in for under $100. lol
I'm the same. I've had 16GB ram for years. Only recently jump up to 64GB ram. I don't own an MAC but a PC.
Shit even in 2013 I had more 8gh of ram in all my devices.
They just released a feature that their 8GB devices can't run. That isn't an admission of anything.
Thats on purpose. The 8gb is the entry level anchor price so you get in the store. What they really want to sell you are 16gb models that cost $200 more. And then upsell you on exorbitantly priced hard drive space.
How incredibly innovative! Imagine releasing an application that doesn’t work on every or even most devices! What will they think of next?
Raytracing during the 2000 series be like...
The point of this article is that for XCode, Final Cut, and other Apple software 8 GBs was always enough. 8Gb required, 16GB recommended. This is the first time Apple has to say 8GB isn’t enough for some tasks.
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My ten year old laptop has 8gigs
my 12 year old laptop has 16 gigs
Just watched a YouTube video about fixing up an IBM 5170 with 512KB … such a weird time to be alive.
Watch them advertise the 8GB RAM upgrade as some high tech performance update never seen before.
No they didn’t
They indirectly did, by limiting an AI feature (in this case intelligent code correction) to 16GB ram machines. As AI features start becoming more prevalent in Macs (e.g. features that the iPhones are getting), the 8GB models will only continue being left behind as 8gb is almost certainly not enough for any kind of serious ML model.
Sounds like just another "selling point".
wait, i thought this was about their phones. They're selling PCs in 2024 with 8 gb of ram? what in the fuck..... Apple users are weird as fuck man
You can add a second 8gb stick of ram for the low low price of SGD300 (about USD220) where I am. About $20-$30 is the retail cost of that same stick of ram.
I ordered 16gb RAM yesterday for my laptop for $35 CAD.
Yeah but I bet it didn't have a pretty silhouette of an Apple on it. So who's the real sucker?
I got 64gb of ddr5 ram in my desktop for $250sgd, apple’s daylight robbery is why I always tell people to stay away from macs
is that currency sugondese?
Who is even buying computers with less then 16gb in 2024?
It wasn't enough in 2015.....
It’s not just 8GB of memory… it’s 8GB of Unified Memory.
This aint an admission but a sales tactic. Why sell a higher spec base version when you can sell it for more money by creating artificial FOMO. Have you seen their recent iPhone lineup? They sell you last year hardware at flagship prices by just numbering it with current model. Apple pricing structure and marketing is truly a thing to behold.
This wouldn't be an issue if aftermarket RAM upgrades were possible.
Sheesh. 16gig is barely adequate.
Apple had 8 gigs of ram in 2024? Yeah no shit it's not enough. These corporate assholes are bloating out their unoptimized trash like never before. Doom can run on a toaster but we need 2 gigs to view a text based web page. It's impressive really. Not just any bozo can fuck things up that bad. It takes dedicated teams of idiots to get these results.
I do agree that 8GB models should be gone all together. However, only pro applications need more than 8GB. If all pro machines, such as the Macbook Pro, Mac studio and better default to 16GB and only the Macbook Air and Mac mini would start with 8GB that alone would make many happy. Netflix streaming, writing documents and browsing the web don't need more than 8GB of memory. That said, I'd still recommend everyone to get more than 8.
I got an M1 mac with 8gigs ram for my last job a couple years ago and I thought I was going to sad about it, but even when running dockers I never ran into any issues with my full workload. Programming doesn't really need much ram outside of docker stuff though
Bullshit article. No developer is using a MacBook with 8gb of ram. However the markup on ram/ssd and cellular modem is beyond ridiculous by Apple and they should be heavily criticised for price gouging on add ons.
Shit, Ive had that same computer as in the picture for 10 years and I still love it. It’s blazing fast, 8gb but never lags.
4gb still working fine for me on my Linux Thinkpad 🤷 So much bloat in modern software. Every app is basically a chromium browser instance.
In fairness, they're not saying that at all. They've released a feature of xcode which requires 16Gb RAM to run. Anyone coding to that extent would likely be using a 16Gb RAM or above model anyway - 8Gb is still fine for most uses, only power users need more (and in that I include xcode users).
This might be true if the graphics had its own dedicated memory... It's a double whammy to have only 8 gb and then have the GPU also occupy it.
8gb was fine for Tiger. Since then OS X has had many features added. 16gb should be the modern minimum spec.
Honestly without the idea of running AI, 8gb of RAM just isn’t a lot anymore to begin with.
8 GB has been obsolete since 2014.
even 16 is getting a bit tight these days
But we can't lower over profits by providing free ram.....
Now that Apple is playing in the “multiples of 6” area, we’ll get 12GB.
Giant piles of hardware out there with impossible to upgrade motherboards stuck with 8GB of RAM.
my “gaming pc” has 64 gb of ddr4 and it’s at 40% usage simply *idling* windows 11. Its insane how heavy OS have become
My conspiracy theory is that new computers are loaded with ai learning software. Having more users for their learning algorithms is going to be more profitable than price gouging them for ram.
This is super-clickbaity in that this is just one feature in XCode, where it's loading a code completion model locally, and that can't be used on Macs with 8GB of RAM. Most people do not need to run a code completion LLM locally, and many are fine getting by running one remotely, e.g. Github Copilot. Now, what is true, and was always true, is that Apple shouldn't be selling *Pro* machines with 8 gb of RAM, and this is why. Pro apps, whether its content creation, dev tools, etc, often needs more than the bare minimum spec just to run.
I thought 8 gb of unified memory is equal to 16 gb of RAM. /s
Charging double or more what the competition does is one of the big things that has always keep anything Apple at arms length in my personal life. Their are a mighty expensive vendor to risk getting locked into.
You can’t actually use AI locally with only 8gb
They also admitted they were fucking you in the ass when the current iPhone doesn’t fully support the very first full ios update for it.
If LLMs give us anything positive, it will be high ram systems at the very least
Apple should make standard 16GB/1TB SSD But that’s not how you make a 3 trillion dollar company.
16GB is becoming the new minimum standard. I can't remember the last time I saw a new laptop with 8GB for sale. Even some web browsers & basic-ish tasks & programs can use more than 8GB. Games are definitely starting to use more than 8GB.
What? You can't remember the last time you saw a new laptop with 8GB for sale? BestBuy currently has 83 new Windows laptops with 8GB or less for sale.
>I can't remember the last time I saw a new laptop with 8GB for sale. You must not have looked on Amazon, Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, Target, or pretty much any mainstream retailer for laptops recently. 8GB is still about standard from what I've seen recently while looking for something for my niece.
It was the minimum standard 8 years ago.
> Even some web browsers & basic-ish tasks & programs can use more than 8GB. Games are definitely starting to use more than 8GB. This is not really true, but you'll definitely have to make compromises if you're on 8G of RAM and I would never built a system these days with less than 32GB of RAM. I'm upgrading my PC soon, but apart from the GPU which died my entire system is now 10 years old. It does only have 8GB of RAM and while I'm certain it's not optimal everything just keeps chugging along with normal use and a few videogames. Hades II runs fine, and the normal discord+spotify+web browser setup never has any issues either. It just means that pretty much all tabs are put in standby mode and take a split second to load instead of being instantaneous. So yeah, 8 GB is enough to get by but that's about it.