My 6 year old CHROMEBOOK has 16gb…
Because Chrome takes up 75% of it.
Laugh. I made fun of Chrome.
My 13 year old MB has 16GB.
It came with 8GB and at some point I spent $50 or so to add another 8GB.
You know, back when upgrading Macs was a thing.
Ok Gramps, we need to get you to bed now
Pretty sad trolling effort
I disagree with this article.
I do all my development on the cheapest macbook air (M1 with 8GB of RAM). It was $500, which is cheaper than most Windows workstations. I’ve never noticed performance issues, and I work on some absolute monsters of projects, including game dev in Rust and Godot. It works waaaay better for Rust and TypeScript dev than my $3k Dell (fuck Dell), because unlike my Dell laptop it doesn’t crash every 3 hours and the battery lasts longer than 30 minutes.
But can it compile UE4 from source?
I try not compile things unnecessarily when a plugin would be just as good. Waste not want not. 🤷
Not trying to kink shame, I just don’t get off on wasting CPU cycles for no reason. You do you.
Please do educate me on as to how to get Unreal Engine 4 as a “plugin” (of what?) without building it.
The only ways I see to get UE4 on Linux is to install the AUR, which compiles from source, or Compile it with your own settings from the GitHub project.
Sorry, that didn’t work last time I tried.
sure it could! It would just take two weeks!
But not with the default option of using as many threads as there are CPU cores.
By any chance, does that dell run windows?
Just because you can get away with 8 does not mean you should. Go google around and find just how cheap an additional 8 gb of laptop RAM is these days.
Just because you can buy 64GB of RAM doesn’t mean you need it. Laptops these days are more powerful than supercomputers used to be. If you just spend a little time tuning your applications you barely need any RAM.
I didn’t say 64. I said 16 which is perfectly reasonable. Your comment reads like damage control from an apple employee.
8 is fine for a tablet.
8 is not fine for a brand-fucking new state of the art laptop.
It’s not even enough for a tablet and apple know it, which is why the iPad Pro has 16GB of RAM
“With an apple silicon architecture, 8gb is like 16gb” -some stupid apple flunkey
The irony is that it’s arguably the opposite, since the GPU and CPU just have a shared memory pool, rather than having dedicated memory and the shared memory pool.
So if you’re watching a 4k video, you might have lost a gigabyte or two just for VRAM.
It’s because they think that people only do one thing at a time.
New feature turns off the screen to flush graphics memory so the cpu can process data.
The “touch grass” mode.
That was just after face planting in a Scarface size pile of cocaine as is standard procedure with all apple marketing teams
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My iPad has 3GB RAM and honestly that’s enough. I don’t know what you do on your tablet, but for my everyday activities I have never felt limited
iPads don’t really multitask so it is super easy to hide the low ram with swap.
We’re talking about laptops though. I was just using tablets as a comparison point.
The ramifications of Apple standardizing on-die RAM are going to be felt all over.
PC (so, presumably meant for Windows) laptops with 4GB are still all over the place.
They’d probably work reasonably well under [not Windows]. How well they do with Windows is left as an exercise for the reader.
Macbooks are meant to be for creative professionals and those of us deluding ourselves into thinking we might one day be one of those
8G RAM for that purpose is NOT enough in 2024. Shit, it barely was when I went through college in 2016 with a macbook (which is why our models had 16)
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But but the memory is more efficient, 8 is actually 16!
LMAOOOOOOO 🤡
UM on an SoC is not the same thing as RAM on a PC with a CPU and GPU. It’s purely a storage liaison, since data is passed directly from core to core.
It’s not that it’s more efficient, it’s simply used less than in PC architecture.
Guessing you haven’t rear the article. That quote is from apple not author, he is actually 100% against it throughout the article.
It’s not that it’s more efficient, it’s simply used less than in conventional PC architecture.
It’s not that you’re wrong from a philosophical perspective with that, it’s that you’re factually incorrect. Memory addresses don’t suddenly shrink or expand depending on where they exist on the bus or the CPU. Being on the SoC doesn’t magically make RAM used less by the OS and applications, as the mach kernel, Darwin, and various MacOS layers still address the same amount of memory as they would on traditional PC architecture.
Memory is memory, just like glass is glass, and glass will still scratch at a level 7 just like 8GB of RAM holds the same amount of information as…8GB of RAM.
The article actually quantitatively tests this too by pointing out their memory usage with Chrome and different numbers of tabs open.
Looks like you didn’t read the article.
You should familiarize yourself with the architecture before commenting. The GPU is broken into several cores of the SoC, along with the roles of the CPU. The UM is not part of the SoC. However, data is passed from what could be referred to as the CPU to what could be referred to as the GPU without interacting with UM.
I’m actually deeply familiar with the architecture, and how caches, memory, and UM’s work. I understand all of that. None of that changes the storage available. Having high memory bandwidth to load/unload memory addresses doesn’t fix the issue of the environment easily exceeding 8GB. I also understand the caching principles and how you actually want RAM utilization to be higher for faster responsiveness. 8GB is still 8GB, and a joke.
Use your experience and analyze Apple’s M SoC before we continue this conversation.
A weeklong battery life, efficient cores, rapid response time, and great software environment make it a great choice…at 16GB for my needs. I will not recommend 8GB to any user at all going forward. It’s marketing malarkey with no future proofing, degrading the viable longevity of the machine.
There’s no conversation to continue. Glass is glass, and 8GB is 8GB, as well as being a joke.
If it’s great for your needs, the base model isn’t for you. You can stream video with have 30 tabs open in Safari and only use 4.6GB of UM on an M1 Mac. I just verified for you.
What a load of nonsense. You’ve got no idea how a computer works. RAM isn’t just used for passing data between cores. If anything that’s more the role of cache although even that isn’t strictly accurate.
Whether a system has a discrete GPU or not doesn’t really factor into the discussion one way or another, although even if it did having more RAM would be even more important without a discrete GPU because a portion of the system RAM gets utilized as VRAM.
This is a truly terrible article.
Like why not test these things? This just sounds like ai generated garbage.
That being said, 8gb is an abysmally low amount of ram in 2024. I had a mid range surface in 2014 that had that much ram. And the upcharge for more is quite ridiculous too.
I know it’s pc ram but I bought 64gb of ddr4 3600mhz for like $130. How on earth is apple charging $200 for 8!!!
Your 64 gigs of ram probably uses 10x the power and takes up significantly more space than the single memory chip that’s on the M1-M3s die. And yet it still has less bandwidth than the M1, and on top of that the M1 utilizes it more efficiently than a “normal” desktop or laptop can since there’s one pool of memory for RAM RAM and VRAM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1#:~:text=While the M1 SoC has 66.67GB/s memory bandwidth
Chat GPT guestimates 57GB/s for dual channel DDR4 at 3600mhz
$1000 for 8 gigs of RAM in the Air is whatever. $1200 for 8 gigs of ram in the Pro was not great. But 1600 for 8 gigs of ram in the new M3 MBP is really awful.
the M1 utilizes it more efficiently than a “normal” desktop or laptop can since there’s one pool of memory for RAM RAM and VRAM.
That’s not how it works, unfortunately.
A UMA (unified memory architecture) enables zero-copy texture uploads and frame buffer access, but that’s not likely to constitute notable memory savings outside games or GPU-accelerated photo editing. Most of the memory is going to be consumed by applications running on the CPU anyway, and that’s not something that can be improved by sharing memory between the CPU and GPU.
And yet [your 64 gigs of ram] still has less bandwidth than the M1
It’s by necessity that the M1 has higher memory bandwidth. UMA comes with the drawback of the GPU and CPU having to share that memory, and there’s only so much bandwidth to go around. GPU cores are bandwidth hungry, which is mitigated by either using a pile of L2 cache or by giving the system better memory bandwidth.
Memory bandwidth is useless if you run out of memory and need to swap.
GPU not having it’s own pool of memory is really going to help to.
Pigs fly in apple land.
Looks like you didn’t read the article either.
Overall, I’m using 12.5GB of memory and the only application I have open is Chrome. Oh, and did I mention I’m typing this on a 16GB MacBook Air? I used to have an 8GB Apple silicon Air and to be frank it was a nightmare, constantly running out of memory just browsing the web.
Earlier it’s mentioned that they have 15 tabs open. I don’t like a lot of things they do in “gaming journalism” but on this article they’re spot on. Apple is full of shit in saying 8GB is enough by today’s standards. 8GB is a fuckin joke, and you can’t add any RAM later.
That doesn’t make sense. I have the 8GB M2 and don’t have any issues with 20+ tabs, video calling, torrents, Luminar, Little Snitch, etc open right now.
15 tabs of Safari, which is demonstrably a better browser by some opinions due to its efficiency and available privacy configuration options. What if you prefer Chrome or Firefox?
I will argue in Apple’s defense that their stack includes very effective libraries that intrinsically made applications on Mac OS better in many regards, but 8GB is still 8GB, and an SoC isn’t upgradeable. Competition has far cheaper 16GB options, and Apple is back to looking like complete assholes again.
I’m using Chrome.
The fact you got downvoted for someone else’s assumption (that was upvoted) makes me chuckle. There’s some serious Apple hating going on here*.
*sometimes deserved. Not really in this case.
That’s because PC people try to equate specs in dissimilar architecture with an OS that is not written explicitly to utilize that architecture. They haven’t read enough about it or experienced it in practice to have an informed opinion. We can get downvoted together on our “sub standard hardware” that works wonderfully. lol
The only memory-utilization-related advantage gained by sharing memory between the CPU and GPU is zero-copy operations between the CPU and GPU. The occasional texture upload and framebuffer access is nowhere near enough to make 8 GiB the functional equivalent of 16 GiB.
If you want to see something “written explicitly to utilize [a unified memory] architecture,” look no further than the Nintendo Switch. The operating system and applications are designed specifically for the hardware, and even first-party titles are choked by the hardware’s memory capacity and bandwidth.
The Tegra is similar being an SoC, however it does not possess nearly as many dedicated independent processing cores designed around specialized processes.
The M1 has 10-core CPU with 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores, a 16-core GPU, a 16-core Neural Engine, and all with 200GB/s memory bandwidth.
Oh no I read the article, I just don’t consider that testing.
It’s not really apt to compare using ram on a browser on one computer and extract that to another, there’s a lot of complicated ram and cache management that happens in the background.
Testing would involve getting a 8gb ram Mac computer and running common tasks to see if you can measure poorer performance, be it lag, stutters or frame drops.
You do have a point, but I think the intent of the article is to convey the common understanding that Apple is leaning on sales tactics to convince people of a thing that anyone with technical acumen sees through immediately. Regardless of how efficient Mach/Darwin is, it’s still apples to apples (pun intended) to understand how quickly 8GB fills up in 2024. For those who need a fully quantitative performance measurement between 8 and 16GB, with enough applications loaded to display the thrashing that starts happening, they’re not really the audience. THAT audience is busy reading about gardening tips, lifestyle, and celebrity gossip.
Written by someone who apparently has no understanding of virtual memory. Chrome may claim 500MB per tab but I’ll eat my hat if the majority of that isn’t shared between tabs and paged out.
If I’m misunderstanding then how the fuck is chrome with it’s 35+ open tabs functioning on my 16GB M1 machine (with a full other application load including IDE’s and docker (with 8GB allocated)
To be fair I had an 8Gb M1 Mac mini for about a year and never even once fell like it was lacking memory. I could open as many things as I wanted and it didn’t slow down, so I can kinda see where they were going with this. Not saying it makes that situation much better though.
I think the current base iPhones with 4Gb or 6Gb suffer way more from lack of memory than the 8Gb Macs, and people aren’t taking about this enough.
The thing you didn’t notice is that you significantly decreased the service life of the permanent storage on the device, because it ABSOLUTELY dips into swap far more frequently than models with more memory, and all high-speed SSD technologies that I’m aware of have limited lifetime write capacity before performance and fidelity start to degrade.
The MBPs (MBAs too in my opinion, but that’s more debate as it’s the “entry level” laptop) should have a minimum ram config of 16gb. 8gb MBP is honestly a really dumb spec level to purchase anyways - if you want something with that little RAM in laptop form, get the MBA.
People have proven that this problem was massively exaggerated. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10-15 years the SSDs of the vast majority of these computers will be perfectly fine (but only time will tell)
People are, just not PC spec heads that like to compare numbers. Practical use is the only real comparison.
Actually the opposite is true for a basic spec. like RAM. People may not understand CPU/GPU naming conventions. BUT they understand something simple like 16>8.
They also understand their “old slow” PC probably had 8gb and they want to UPGRADE so when they see this “new” mac with same amount of ram they immediately think slow whether it is or not…
To be fair
NO! No fair.
I delivered a season of 4k animations for a network show using Motion, AE, C4D, Ps, AI…all using a base model M1 Mini (8/256), with zero problems.
Of course more would be better, but unless you’ve actually used one, it’s hard to imagine how well it works. I tried mentioning this in another post, but it’s all Apple hate all the way down here
I needed a cheap laptop for audio, so i decided to pick up a second hand m1 air a couple months ago.
It is honestly pretty impressive for the price, I generally don’t have issues either. Everything is snappy, and it handles multitasking fine. Its even faster than my $2000+ PC at several things, which frustrates me greatly.
However… When running ableton live (or presumably anything that involves heavy image, video, or audio editing), 8gb of ram is honestly not enough. If you push it too hard, it hangs for a second, then the offending app will just close.
Also there is a weird delay in factorio, absolutely unacceptable.
A 2k pc can game. You can’t really game on mac
faster than my $2000+ PC
tell me you run windows without telling me you run windows
Linux till I die, am I right.
This place is yawn at times.
yes, actually. windows could be nice if they let us remove all the bullshit, but since they dont, you get a slow 2k pc.
still beats me how this is acceptable but it is what it is.
Ya it’s kind of silly.
I dual boot if you were concerned
Base 8GB MacBooks also tend to have base storage, meaning a single NVMe controller instead of dual. If you’re relying on virtual memory then it would make sense to get the Mac that has double the SSD bandwidth. I bought a base M1 Mac Mini for the kids and it’s pretty good for their needs, but they tend to prefer the old i3 win 10 PC connected to the same monitor. The M1 Mini could run Intel Civ 6 faster than my 32GB i7 MacBook Pro could, which surprised me.
Yeah, audio and video workloads really need the ram. The base model is fine for content consumption though.
To be honest, I can still do most of my work on my old Core2Quad 4GB DDR2 PC, when using Linux.
And as long as I setup my swap properly, I can also keep as many Firefox tabs open as I want , as I tend to forget tabs (running out of brain memory) before I run out of RAM.But I just like my 64GB RAM.
Increasing swap on Linux is a great way to save money on cloud servers btw. One nice thing on Mac is that there is no swap file that you need to manage. System handles it transparently. Firefox (and really all modern browsers) require a ridiculous of RAM if you use them like you and I do.
Core2Quad?
That thing is a space heater that can do some math.
My point being, “I can work on it”, can be used even on a space heater.
Same for the IBM R52, which I no longer turn on, because a Pi would be better.
I have a old HP Elitebook with 8GB ram with Windows 10 and even on Windows I don’t notice slowdowns for daily tasks. Yes the machine swaps but because of the SSD you don’t notice much performance decrease. However, because it’s constant swapping the lifetime of the SSD will decrease and that’s exactly the problem of 8GB machines these days. Yes the machine stays fast (Windows or OSX it really does not matter) but there is extra load on the SSD.
Don’t believe Apple marketing bullshit that 8GB is enough because of the “super duper advanced memory management” of OSX. If it really was enough then Apple would not release MacBooks with 16+ GB ram. The only reason that the 8GB MBP still exists is to sell more 16+ GB machines.
I have an old 8GB Toshiba laptop that I threw an SSD into and slapped Pop_OS! on for fun. There are plenty of lightweight Linux distros that can breathe life into older hardware if you want to tinker with them. If nothing else, my old Toshiba is good for just basic Internet usage.
Less is more, removing features is a innovation - apple
removing features is
innovationcourage.and selling it with an extra apple logo is the newest thing.
This option kind of make sense. For those using laptops for very light use, such as basic web browsing, Document editing, replying to emails and want to have a Mac could buy them.
If apple could sell 16GB variant at the price of 8GB, then that would be the best.
I’m other words, base config is good for people needing a Chromebook but want an Apple device.
And wanting a macbook is a perfectly acceptable reason for getting a MacBook. I just get annoyed when people try to argue that it’s an actually sensible decision.
but for the price…
If that’s all you’re doing you could save a $1000+ and just get a cheap Chromebook. Or if you want to be sustainable and reduce e-waste you could spend around the same amount on a framework laptop that’s upgradeable and then spend a tiny fraction of that every few years keeping it up to date, rather than going the Apple approach and chucking the whole thing in the trash every few years and buying a brand new one.
No matter how you slice it, an 8GB macbook is a crap deal.
I said, want to have a Mac. Anyways you are right.
Indeed, many people must have a mac as it is a fashion accessory.
Some people prefer a Mac because it integrates nicely with the rest of the Apple ecosystem.
Some people prefer a Mac because it
integrates nicely with the rest of the Apple ecosystem.matches the rest of their overpriced wardrobe.
This stuff is almost ewaste.
This is just not enough memory to make a computer last, especially since you can’t upgrade.
Websites and apps that a lot of people use just aren’t really expecting to only have 8gb ram available. Any kind of multitasking could easily run out of ram
Macbooks, even these low spec ones tend to outlive other laptops substantially. The better build quality and higher resale value keeps them in use much longer.
The argument these devices are e-waste doesn’t make sense and doesn’t track.
I’m fairly sure my computer uses more than 8 GB of RAM every time I much as look at the Chrome icon.
This author needs to go back to a time where you had to manage 512MB of memory.
People back then would’ve killed for 8GB now.
The problem I see though is software developers having a field day with not caring about optimizing and not making their software bloated as possible so that it doesn’t require so much memory.
You realize that just because things used to be worse, doesn’t invalidate complaints about how things could be better now, right?
I think the comparison went over your head and I didn’t use a word wrong. Try not to think too much into it. Oh wait, you did.
the ‘problem’ is: you can’t upgrade; you’re stuck with that 8gb.
want more in a year or two? you have to buy a new mac. and that’s apple’s goal–sell more product. buyers will be back (because they’re hooked on the platform and ecosystem) to buy a new one sooner than they otherwise would have.
Well that’s what you get for being a tool and buying Apple products.
All of us PC users have had the convenience of upgrading anything we want. While Apple users just bitch about the choices they’ve made where a company decides how much they think they need and whether or not they can upgrade.
Wah wah wah.
Yes, no big deal. We can go back to having 640x480 displays too.
1.2 GB hard drives, too.
I had to think twice, it didn’t sound right…
The first HDD I ever bought was an 80 GB Maxtor. I have games now that wouldn’t even fit on that drive.
my first HDD was a whopping 40MB big (you could fit sooo many floppys on that!), weighed 10 pounds and was about the size of a watermelon. when starting wing commander i could determine - by the noises the motors in that thing made - at what point of the loading i was (like an acoustic progress bar lol).
That’s a daft take. The reason that software now requires more RAM is because it can do more than in 1998.
That doesn’t excuse the ridiculously high requirements.
Yeah it does because no one in 2024 expects those limitations to exist. You can find software that can run on 15mb of ram but what’s the point when 99% of systems won’t have that limitation?
Oh come on…640kb is more than enough for everyone…
He never said that, by the way.
No, and we all know it, but it’s still going to haunt him for the rest of his life.
Let’s put 100hp in this new apple truck that weighs 9000lbs!
What? Our competitors have 350hp? It doesn’t matter! Our 100hp is very efficient and performs just as well!*
*only when compared to light usage and not towing or driving on inclined roads
A more apt analogy would be to use the truck bed size. Horsepower is more akin to the CPU speed.
Most people don’t fill their truck bed just like most people don’t fill their RAM. I’ve had no issues with my family users who just do typical light laptop tasks on 8GB RAM. I think the memory upgrades need to be much, much cheaper, but 8GB works absolutely fine IME. I would like 16GB but it’d be a waste for the other users in my household.
You’re in the minority actually.
Why buy an overpriced Mac and not use it to its full potential?
Just for the logo on the back?
How do you know I’m in the minority when I didn’t say how I use my laptop? I don’t get it. I do use it to its potential, and there’s no logo on the back. It’s in a case.
Also not overpriced with the base model, which is what I have.
You just said you never utilize all of your ram, so it’s apparent that you don’t heavily utilize your machine
I did not say that. I said I’d actually like 16GB. It’s my family users (normal, non nerds) who have no issue with 8GB RAM and having 30+ tabs and two dozen apps running. Memory management handles multitasking very smoothly, and I’ve not found many apps that are limited by 8GB. I’d like 16 for the few times I edit on laptop, typically I use my desktop.
Fine, so why buy them an overpriced Mac if they don’t fully utilize it?
My original question is still valid
I disagree it’s overpriced. The base model Air at $850 is great, meets their needs, and decreases the amount of family sysadmin tasks I’d have to do for them if they had Windows or Linux laptops.
I can’t remember when I had such little RAM in a machine I own.
I can! It happened to be the last Mac I owned, which I bought in 2008.
My mid-range 2014 laptop has this little. This was considered the minimum for a productivity-oriented device a decade ago.
Much to my annoyance, it’s also one of the first (edit: modern) laptops with non-upgradeable RAM, which I didn’t know beforehand. It’s still usable, but I’m using Firefox instead of Chrome (so 50 tabs are no issue) and it’s never been my primary device.
I don’t disagree that 8GB is generally less than I would accept for normal usage, but the way this article is written you can tell the author really doesn’t have any reasonable grasp of memory management.
Pretty sure my phone has 8GB of RAM. Apple should probably rethink this.
They have, they want you to buy the more expensive model with greater profit margins.
Yeah they’ve spent $1 extra on manufacturing costs, but charge you an extra $2,000 for the privilege.
Who doesn’t love a 20,000% profit margin
8 GB non-upgradeable. Not unusable yet, but probably will be in a few years. Then they can sell you a new one.
