Isn’t Apple the company that charges $5k+ for 16GB? All while intentionally deprecating the hardware within 2 years. /s
I’ve had to support their products on a professional level for over a decade. I will NEVER buy an Apple product.
I’ve had to support their products on a professional level for over a decade.
Their enterprise stuff…can only be described as a quintessential example of an ill-conceived, horrendously executed fiasco, so utterly devoid of utility and coherence that it defies all logic and reasonable expectation. It stands as a paragon of dysfunction, a conflagration of conceptual failures so intense and egregious that it resembles a blazing inferno of pure, unadulterated refuse. It is, in every conceivable sense, a searing, molten heap of garbage—hot, steaming, and reeking with the unmistakable stench of profound ineptitude and sheer impracticality.
xServes were pretty cool though
That was…. poetry!
Oooo a whole 16 gigs! It can run Firefox with more than four tabs open!
My sister just bought a MacBook Air for college, and I had to beg her to spend the extra money on 16gb of memory. It feels like a scam that it appears cheap with the starting at price, but nobody should actually go with those “starting at” specs.
Yeah it’s about future proofing. 8 GB might be okay for basic browsing and text editing now, but in the future that might not be the case. Also in my experience people who only want to do basic browsing and word editing, end up inevitably wanting to do more complex things and not understanding that their device is not capable of it.
Exactly. I told her that 8gb might be fine for a year or two, but if she wants this thousand plus dollar laptop to last four years she needs to invest the extra money now. Especially once she told me she might want to play Minecraft or Shadow of the Tomb Raider on it
I know it’s not a like for like comparison, but the Pixel 9 Pro that launched this month has 16gb of RAM.
It’s a good comparison actually because Apple keeps saying that their ram is faster because it’s soldered (Which is true but only if you squint). I don’t really think it makes a difference because if you run out of space you still run out of space, the fact that you can access the limited space more quickly doesn’t really help.
Well phone RAM also tends to be solded onto the board too so it’s a pretty good comparison.
Yup, while the current iPhone 15 Pro is the only model which has 8 GB of RAM, with the regular iPhone 15 having 6 GB. All iPhone 16 models (launching next month) will still only have 8 GB according to rumors, which happens to be the bare minimum required to run Apple Intelligence.
Giving the new models only 8 GB seems a bit shortsighted and will likely mean that more complex AI models in future iOS versions won’t run on these devices. It could also mean that these devices won’t be able to keep a lot of apps ready in the background if running an AI model in-between.
16 GB is proper future-proofing on Google’s part (unless they lock new software features behind newer models anyway down the road), and Apple will likely only gradually increase memory on their devices.
If you were being cynical, you could say it was planned obsolescence and that when the new ai feature set rolls out that you have to get the new phone for them.
I think they got caught with their pants down when everybody started doing AI and they were like “hey, we have this cool VR headset”. Otherwise they would’ve at least prepared the regular iPhone 15 (6 GB) to be ready for Apple Intelligence. Every (Apple Silicon) device with 8 GB or more get Apple Intelligence, so M1 iPads from 2021 get it as well for example, even though the M1’s NPU is much weaker than some of the NPUs in unsupported devices with less RAM.
They are launching their AI (or at least everything under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella) with iOS 18.1 which won’t even release with the launch of the new iPhones, and it’ll be US only (or at least English only) with several of the features announced at WWDC still missing/coming later and it’s unclear how they proceed in the EU.
With how polished Apples AI on mobile was at launch compared to Gemini on Android at launch were it could not even do basics like timers I suspect Apple had it in the works for far longer and it would not have been a total surprise.
Also you are describing the situation at launch for new hardware, the software will evolve every year going forward and the requirements will likely increase every year. If I am buying a flagship phone right now I want it to last at least 3 years of updates, if not 5 years. The phone has to be able to cope with what is a very basic requirement that is enough RAM.
This isn’t some NPU thing, this is just basic common sense that more RAM is better for this, something the flagship iPhones could have benefited from for a while now.
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing or disagreeing with me here. Either way, hardware has a substantially longer turnaround time compared to software. The iPhone 15 would’ve been in development years before release (I’m assuming they’re developing multiple generations in parallel, which is very likely the case) and keep in mind that the internals are basically identical to the iPhone 14 Pro, featuring the same SoC.
AI and maybe AAA games like Resident Evil aside, 6 GB seems to work very well on iPhones. If I had a Pixel 6/7/8 Pro with 12 GB and an iPhone 12/13/14 Pro (or 15) with 6 GB, I likely wouldn’t notice the difference unless I specifically counted the number of recent applications I could reopen without them reloading. 6 GB keeps plenty of recent apps in memory on iOS.
But I’m not sure going with 8 GB in the new models knowing that AI is a thing and the minimum requirement for their first series of models is 8 GB is too reassuring. I’m sure these devices will get 5-8 years of software updates, but new AI features might be reduced or not present at all on these models then.
When talking about “AI” in this context I’m talking about everything new under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella, like LLMs and image generators. They’ve done what you’d call “AI” nowadays for many years on their devices, like photo analysis, computational photography, voice isolation, “Siri” recommendations etc.
I was under the impression that ios used sleight of hand with apps to reduce memory footprint for inactive apps rather than how android manages its recent apps list? Is it still requiring special permissions to run non apple apps in the background as active tasks? AI will need to run the background and will need a decent chunk of RAM to do so.
I completely agree that changing the processor or revising NPU or similar is too much to do late stage, I reject that for increasing RAM or storage, both can be changed closer than 12 months from release and I would also reject that apple had the AI changes planned for much less than 12 months out as well. It just feels like a big fuck you to anybody buying a flagship from apple this year as it wont last the length of time it should do for normal consumers who would expect all of the latest AI features to roll out during the supported window.
I would say it is more so they can advertise a lower price. But then expect you to get the more expensive ones as the bare minimum is just not enough.
For the base model yeah, but apple loves charging a packet for more memory so I don’t see it for the top of the range models. Would be typical for them to only offer 16gb with the increased storage as well, just to bump the price up
I don’t use Apple computers but if we’re going into phones, iOS is extremely memory efficient. I’m on a six year old XS max with 4GB and it works like the day I got it, running circles around Android phones half its age.
Pretty much what NVIDIA is doing with their GPUs. Refusing to provide adequate future proof amount of VRAM on their cards. That’s planned obsolescence in action.
And like Apple, Nvidia has no shortage of fanboys that insist the pitiful amounts of (V)RAM is enough. The marketing sway those two companies have is incredible.
It’s a complete joke that Sapphire had an 8GB version of the R9 290X, what, 11 years ago or something? And yet Nvidia is still selling 8GB cards now, for exorbitant prices.
The current GPU situation actually has me curious about AMDs upcoming Halo APU chips. They’re likely going to be pretty expensive relative to their potential GPU equivelent performance but if they work out similar to the combined price of a CPU and GPU then it might be worthwhile as they use onboard RAM as their VRAM. Probably a crazy idea but one I look forward to theory-building in spring when they release.
This happens if you sell your hardware as DRM key to use their software (i(Pad)OS, macOS etc. and Cuda)
Some phones have 24gb since 2 years ago already
Which phone(s) had 24Gb standard?
I didn’t think any of those are the base model. Anything with Pro or Ultra in the name should have more than 8Gb of RAM in my opinion. It also seems dominated by OnePlus as the others listed are not really players in the larger market. You could possibly argue that Xaomi is but I’ve never even seen one of these phones in the real world. In fact it looks like most of these are only available in China variant.
I am writing this using my Xiaomi poco x3 pro, although it have 8gb ram and 256gb memory, it also have headphone jack and micro SD slot
I remember back in the early 2000s when I saw a PDA with a 232mhz cpu and 64mb ram, and I realized how far technology had come since I got my computer with a 233mhz cpu and 64mb ram…
Obviously different architechtures, but damn that felt strange…
Has anyone ever successfully de-soldered Apple RAM and replaced it?
I think it’s proprietary ram as well so you can’t just get something off the market and solder it on. It has to be their ram or it won’t work.
Isn’t the RAM inside the actual SoC with the Apple Silicon line? I haven’t really opened any of 'em up.
As for older Macs - sure, I know someone who replaced 8 gigs with 16 on either an Air or Pro model that had 16 available as an option but was shipped with 8. It’s just something you do when you have way too many Mac boards lying around at work and your bosses say you can’t get a new work laptop.
Pretty sure it is baked in as part of the SOC, not soldered on after the fact?
dosdude on YouTube I think has done this
It’s because AI needs a not a ram. I think Apple did not expect or plan for ai which shows in the fact that only the latest pro phone can have Apple intelligence. It’s because that phone has enough ram.
Now they will boost ram across the board because Apple intelligence will not run well without it.
Depending on pricing, I may actually buy a MacBook in 2025.
I’ve wanted one since the m1, but I’ve held out until 16gb was the starting amount of ram.
Or you could just get just about any other non-mac system that lets you upgrade RAM easily when you need too…
Just stop supporting Apples soldered in BS
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but most things and light laptops have had soldered ram for many years now. There are exceptions, but they’re few and far between.
What? Lol nah plenty of laptops have removable RAM. It tended to show up often on the “Ultralight” tier, but outside of that and Chromebooks it’s been by no means the norm
It has kind of come with newer laptops being driven to be thinner, and for newer devices, because the old SODIMM format is no longer capable of the throughput/latencies needed for higher speed memory.
From memory, 2.1Ghz DDR5 is where it caps out. Anything faster, like 2.8 GHz either requires it to be soldered, or one of the new formats like the one Dell has started using.
The replacement you’re talking about is called [CAMM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module\)) and personally I’m excited about it. Not only does it support faster speeds than SO-DIMM, it takes up less physical space. And I believe you can’t even put LPDDR on a SODIMM, so CAMM should also use less power?
Bad news: literally all current CPU gen laptops use soldered RAM.
All of them. Every single one. No exceptions.
Hopefully that’ll change, but as it stands right now, if you want newest gen, you cannot get replaceable RAM.
And even before current gen, the vast majority of Windows laptops were soldered too.
I looked into it, yea current gen chips aren’t compatible with SODIMM
Because they’re compatible with the brand new removable RAM standard, CAMM2. It is confusing though, as everywhere I’ve looked both soldered and CAMM2 were listed as LPDDR5 which is what makes you think it’s just soldered RAM. So far it looks like if a spec sheet lists LPDDR5x it should be a CAMM2
CAMM2 is also very very new, so I’m sure a few manufacturers in their rush to get the new/current gen chips out the door just used soldered RAM.
CAMM2 is very exciting, it basically eats into all of Apples listed pros for having soldered in RAM as close to the CPU as possible while still being user removable. (Performance, efficiency etc)
I really don’t know where you’re looking because I only see that in business-class laptops and even then not all of them have soldered RAM.
And I’m already counting the ones with one expansion slot with the soldered bunch.
Of course, if you paid attention only to HP, Dell and Lenovo, then I’d see why you’d think so. But beyond those brands, you don’t have that soldered nonsense everywhere. At the very least, you have things like Clevo, Framework and the like to sell you laptops without soldered ram.
I bet there are even websites that let you filter laptop models without soldered ram. Personally, I only know about Germany-based websites like that, though.
You are looking at previous-gen platforms.
E.g. for Framework, you’re looking at APUs like the 7840U, which is not current gen. It’s two generations old. (7840U/Phoenix > 8850U/Hawk Point > AI 9 365 (awful naming btw AMD)/Strix Point).
Like I said, all current CPU gen laptops cannot use SODIMM.
And let me be clear here, I’m not exaggerating for effect; I do not mean most of them. I do not mean the vast majority of them. I do not mean practically all of them. I literally mean all of them. 100% of them. Every single one that exists.
AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm do not currently have compatibility with SODIMM on their newest gen mobile CPUs.
I hope that changes, and I expect it eventually will, but as it stands right now, no you cannot have SODIMM modules if you are buying any laptop with the newest gen CPUs.
Well fudge me sideways. Every day is a school day.
They’ve all got LPDDR5, so yeah, you’re unfortunately right. It feels kinda weird having to consider the 7000 and 8000-series last gen already; true as it is, though.
Don’t worry, the latest chips were just built to only handle CAMM2, a new removable RAM standard that replaced SODIMM
It’s a bit confusing though because both soldered and CAMM2 are listed as LPDDR5 on spec sheets, from what I’ve looked at it appears if there’s an x at the end of the LPDDR5 it should be CAMM2
It’s also brand BRAND new, so I’m sure quite a few manufacturers rushed out the door with the new chips just soldering on the RAM because they couldn’t get CAMM2 in it in time for whatever reason
I know what you mean, but I’m tired of window’s bullshit too.
I’d keep pc hardware if my work could happen on Linux, but it’s sadly not an option at the moment.
I don’t really care unless it has the same price point as the 8gb one.
But we all know it won’t be.
£15 more RAM. £150 more price.
$1000-$1100 is still a lot to ask of me specifically, but that is closer to market IMHO
I always thought 8gb was a fine amount for daily use if you never did anything too heavy, are apps really that ram intense now?
Yes. Just as 4GB was barely enough a decade ago.
I usually find myself either capping out the 8GN of RAM on my laptop, or getting close to it if I have Firefox, Discord and a word processor open. Especially if I have Youtube or Spotify going.
I can get over 8 GB just running Discord, Steam, Shapes2
I am pretty sure most of that is just discord.
Imagine how much more room we’d have if everything wasn’t dragging a big trailer full of Chrome behind it.
I’m pretty sure Chrome doesn’t even use the memory for anything it just likes it allocated.
Most of that is discord, they can’t manage a single good thing right Use more GPU than the game I’m playing? Check. Have an inefficient method of streaming a game? Check. Be laggy as fuck when no longer on GPU acceleration when lemmy and guilded is fine? Check.
RAM is cheaper than my time.
I kinda consider 32GB as a minimum for anyone working on my team.
Heavily depends on what you use, on a Linux server as a NAS I’m able to get away with 2gb, an orange pi zero 3 1gb but it essentially only ever ones one app at a time.
Im sure a hardcore rgb gamer could need 32gb pretty quick by leaving open twitch streams, discord, a couple games in the background, a couple chrome tabs open all on windows 11
Yep. I work in IT support, almost entirely Windows but similar concepts apply.
I see people pushing 6G+ with the OS and remote desktop applications open sometimes. My current shop does almost everything by VDI/remote desktop… So that’s literally the only thing they need to load, it’s just not good.
On the remote desktop side, we recently shifted from a balanced remote desktop server, over to a “memory optimised” VM, basically has more RAM but the same or similar CPU, because we kept running out of RAM for users, even though there was plenty of CPU available… It caused problems.
Memory is continually getting more important.
When I do the math on the bandwidth requirements to run everything, the next limit I think we’re likely to hit is RAM access speed and bandwidth. We’re just dealing with so much RAM at this point that the available bandwidth from the CPU to the RAM is less than the total memory allocation for the virtual system. Eg: 256G for the VM, and the CPU runs at, say, 288GB/s…
Luckily DDR 4/5 brings improvements here, though a lot of that stuff has yet to filter into datacenters
Imagine how far you can go on 8GB of RAM if every piece of software were still well optimized and free of bloat.
Recently I downloaded Chrome for some testing that I wanted to let separate from my Firefox browser. After a while I realized my computer was always getting hot every time I opened chrome. I took a look at the system monitor: chrome was using 30% of of my CPU power to play a single YouTube video in the background. What the fuck? I ended up switching the testing environment over the libreWolf and CPU load went down to only 10%.
I’d say to try chromium, but you basically need to compile it yourself to get support for all the video codecs.
Stop. You’re scaring todays companies. Optimization? That’s a no-no word.
Now please eat whole ass libraries imported for one function, or that react + laravel site which amounts to most stock bootsrap looking blog.
Naturally the price for the cheapest model will also be going to up several orders of magnitude more than the cost of materials, labor, and healthy profit margin to account for that as well I’m sure.
In 1999, the iBook was US$1599 (equivalent to $2925 in 2023) (source).
The 2010 13" Air was $1299 (more in today’s $) (source).
The current 13" M3 Air is $1099 (source).
So yeah, they may well raise prices, but the cost of Apple’s entry-level hardware has decreased in absolute terms over the years, and has decreased substantially if inflation is taken into account. Not to say the margins aren’t higher (no idea about that), but it’s interesting.
Yeah it’s when you need a reasonable amount of RAM or disk that they really bend you over.
Ooohhh, wowie!
Meanwhile.im looking into upgrading my 64 gigs to 128, in small part because I might need to, in large Bart because I CAN.
Stop buying apple crap
Why are apple products always so anemic on memory?
Because a huge part of their business model over the past twenty years has been the upsell.
I bought my first MacBook in 2007. It had 2gb of RAM as standard. I asked about upgrading it, the guy told me to pick some up online as it would be waaaay cheaper, and he was right. Did the same for the MacBook Pro that replaced it a few years later, but in the meantime they moved to the soldered model so had to swallow the cost of the 16gb ‘upgrade’ in my M2 Air.
To be fair, the cost over time of my Macs has been incredible. My 2011 MBP is still trucking along, these days running Linux Mint. With the cost to upgrade the RAM and replace the HDD with an SSD, all in it cost me around £1200. Less than £100 a year for a laptop that still works perfectly fine.
Because there are two types of mac users:
- People that ate buying them with their own money because they’re trendy and just using them as glorified Internet browsers. 16gb is plenty.
- People using them professionally so their company is paying and Apple can over charge for the necessary memory upgrade
I have an m2 8 gb. And it’s plenty. It’s just a browsing/discord/stream box basically.
This pretty much. I don’t care that much that a maxed out MBP is $6000 or whatever, my employer pays for that.
Greed, it lowers the advertised price, but once you spec it decently you’ve added a grand in extras
Price discrimination based on memory loadout is real, but it’s not specific to Apple, either.
“640k ought to be enough for anyone.”
i could run wing commander 2, ultima underworld, and lands of lore. who needs any more?
EMACS: Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
It’s amazing that with transparent huge pages in Linux I can have memory pages bigger than that entire 640k.
My CPU’s L1 cache is larger than that 640K system’s main memory.
It’s really sad that this needs to be an actual headline.
Lol, right? I had a dell laptop with 16GB in 2010. How are apple customers ok with this?
Even phones have been available with more than 8 gigs of ram for ~5 years
Considering that RAM is shared with the GPU, it’s still not enough.
I remember an Apple fanboy arguing that this made things better!
It does make some things better, but there are a number of downsides too. The biggest downside is that it’s not practical to make the memory socketed because of the speed that’s required.
“yeah but that’s like having 32GB on a lame PC”
It’s OK - for an extra $400 they’ll sell you one with an extra $50 worth of RAM.
$800 for $30 of ram
It doesn’t even cost that for them.
I think they meant what the end user would NORMALLY pay, which is the better comparison.
But Apple isn’t buying consumer ram, they’re spending $8 to put on a different chip instead. If other laptop manufacturers are charging $50, it’s because they think they can get away with it, like apple.
Think that’s not really what’s being compared, but ok
The point is that the scam is actually even worse.
It’s really not. Other companies with socketed RAM also upsell, they are just limited in how much they can ask because the customer has the option to DIY adding more RAM. So the cost these companies charge is roughly the price to the customer of upgrading their own RAM, plus a bit extra for the convenience of not having to do that.
For example, Framework upcharges by something like 20-50% for RAM and SSDs when comparing to equivalent parts. It’s not just Apple, all OEMs do it, but Apple can charge much more because the user can’t easily replace either on their own.
Linux requirements: CPU (optional)
i wonder if it’s actually possible to install linux on a machine without a CPU
These days, the CPU probably runs Linux on itself.
Storage drive control boards are basically small computers in their own right, now.
Linux is a bit heavy for embedded stuff.
Intel’s ME for an example, uses Minix.
Paper Linux, computing done olde world style 📜 🤖
