The sheer idea of selling a 8gb machine in 2023 is kinda wild
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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8 gigs of ram for some shitty laptop is fine. Like the air shipping with 8 gigs of ram is fine (not great, but fine)
But for a "Pro" machine, let alone a 1600 dollar computer is insane.
MacBook Air is a $1000 computer too though :/ I bought a Thinkpad t480s with 8gb of (upgradable) ram for less than that back in 2019. currently running it with 24gb.
Even Lenovo is starting to drop upgradable ram from their machines. T480 was the last T*4 series with dual upgradeable ram slots. T490 and up all have at least 1 soldered stick, and the AMD machines now don't come with any upgradeable ram. Their prices to upgrade are at least reasonable unlike Apples.
Shit I got a T16 gen 3(?) for my mom a few months ago and it came with only 8 gigs of soldered ram. That machine is even worse than Apple because AMD locks away 1.5 gigs of ram for just the APU. Intel at least only hard reserves like 256MB or something. Apple gives you the full 8 gigs of ram to play with, no duplicates in CPU memory and GPU memory, plus their really fast swap.
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My kid grabbed an 8/256 M2 Air when they first launched last year, and is still overjoyed with its performance. He has a PS5 for gaming, so the Mac is for uni work and downloading shit. 8gb RAM isn't inherently bad.
It's just as you said though; it's bad for a "Pro" machine.
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I've been using an 8GB laptop for a few years now and don't feel the need to have more. But if I'm paying that much I'd expect at least 16GB.
That's my problem with the 8GB. I even have the Air with that much memory. It's fine... but I also got it secondhand. For new, I can't pay that much money for entry level RAM specs.
Yeah I have 8GB of RAM on my Macbook Air and it works fine, I just need to manage my browser tabs and restart Chrome sometimes. But if I was paying $1600 or more for a "Pro" laptop......the fuck?
My company computer had 4 GBs of RAM... And an HDD with Windows 11, the worst fucking experience.
HDD in 2023? Why?
Meanwhile my i7 thinkpad with nvme somehow is not compatible with windows 11.
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For $1,599 you'd at least expect 16GB+ RAM given how cheap RAM is...
I think Apple gets all their RAM from 2008, because they charge $50/GB for it.
Don't they also solder it to the motherboard so you can't upgrade your RAM as well?
It’s not so much soldered to the motherboard as much as part of the same package as the CPU. As in: there are no separate memory chips.
But they did indeed solder it in before that, on their old Intel laptops. I think they started doing that in 2013 or 2014 but I forget exactly.
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Apple loves under ramming (to give a word a new meaning) and forcing everyone to pay for upgrades. The problem is there are always people that buy the base.
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The people to whom this discussion ought to matter (the prospective buyers of an 8GB RAM machine) are utterly oblivious to this discussion. They’ll continue to walk into an Apple Store and buy these machines. We are like body builders arguing about how obese people should stop eating shit.
Us power lifters over here looking around nervously while double fisting big macs lol.
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Maybe we should all start calling it the "MacBook Semi-Pro".
8gb ram has been common for over a decade now. It's what I would expect in a sub-$400 laptop.
Or a raspberry pi.
$75, 8gb, and this isn't even the latest model. https://www.microcenter.com/product/622539/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-8gb-ddr4
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Apple had to know these reviews were coming. A new iteration on their custom SOC is obviously going to make every tech site go bananas benchmarking and their claim that 8GB = 16GB is going to make them punish the machine even harder.
It's like they decided a few bad reviews would cost them less than cutting their markup on RAM to make a 16GB entry level Pro machine for less than $2k.
What's worse is that their "8GB = 16GB" claim has a tiny bit of truth in it: many apps that are GPU-accelerated usually load/generate stuff on host RAM and then transfer it to the GPU RAM to launch some shaders/kernels on it and they do this repeatedly. The idea with Apple (also AMD when you consider APUs) is that since the RAM is "unified" you just have one RAM and you probably don't have that redundancy anymore if those apps are built with that in mind, so in a sense if previously you had a 1GB buffer that had to live on both CPU and GPU RAM, this time it will only live in as a single 1GB buffer on Apple's "unified" RAM. That's still very different from the "8GB = 16GB" deceptive marketing by Apple.
You don't have to put unified in quotes, it's the proper term for an SoC that shares the same memory between the CPU and GPU.
The major advantage of unified memory is that it doesn't have the copy overhead. When using a discrete GPU you need to load data onto the host and then copy it over to the GPU. And then if data on the GPU needs to be processed separately by the CPU (saved to a file, sent over the network, etc) you incur more overhead again. And let's ignore more specific technologies like Direct I/O and io_uring for this discussion.
On an SoC with unified memory you don't have this overhead. The CPU can (in theory) access the same memory space as the GPU with zero overhead, and it makes the performance hit from shuttling the data back and forth non-existent.
But there's a massive downside, and it's that it drastically cuts down your available memory, because now the CPU and GPU have only a single 8GB pool to use for both. Whereas in a system without unified memory and a discreet GPU would have the 8GB for the CPU in addition to whatever the GPU has. They don't step on each other's toes.
For example, if I use a system with 8GB of host RAM and a GPU with 6GB of VRAM to run a model of some kind (let's say stable diffusion), it will load the model into the VRAM and not clog up the host RAM. Yes, the host will initially use system RAM to load the file descriptors and then shuttle the data to the GPU, but once that's done the model isn't kept on the host.
On a Mac it would load it onto the only memory available and the CPU would not have the full 8GB available to it the way an x86 system would have.
The point I'm making is that because of the unified architecture the 8GB is effectively even less than 8GB in a discrete GPU system. It's worse.
The worst part is that in many retail chains like Costco, you can only get the 8GB version. I suspect the review reading segment of the population is smaller than we’d expect for such an expensive purchase. Previously they’ve crippled M1 machines that have 256Gb storage, only including one controller instead of two as in the 512+ machines. It’s a shame for MacBook Air, but totally unacceptable for a computer marketed as “Pro”
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Ah it's cool, you can just open the little door in the back and upgrade the RAM anytime you want.
Right??
Sir, this is apple.
Gotta buy their apple 5 point screwdriver
Open back
Remove adhesive & battery
Dismount motherboard and keyboard
Find out it's soldered ram
Kill self
With a hot air rework station anything is upgradable, laptops, phones, babies... ok not babies, but like lots of other stuff.
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It’s hard to take the Mac seriously. This is even more dumbfounding because they have an excellent processor. Then they pair it with anemic RAM and make demonstrably false statements about the system’s performance. I don’t get it.
soldering in an unusably low amount of memory or storage into the base model is classic bait and switch. they get to advertise a much lower price than what you will end up paying
My four year old phone has more RAM than an expensive macbook? LMFAO 🤭🤭🤭
Um actthually mac is so oPtimized so 1gb mac = 12.3gb windows 🤓
STFU it physically has less ram than a potato while costing the price of a nasa rocket
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With that kind of memory swapping, the soldered ssd gonna be toasts within 1 or 2 yrs. Its already a known problem in previous macbooks, where people runs memory intensive programs and find thier mac book dead after even 6 months to 1 yr
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My 350€ three-year old phone has an SoC with 12GB of RAM.
They'll still sell like hot cakes 😂
Apple is the proof Marketting >> Quality.
They sell the premium dream making the user think it's the best.
My current phone, and my last phone both had more ram. For significantly less money.
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Perhaps with an SSD, memory swapping is less intrusive, hence you won't noticed any performance issues. This is referring to the vast majority of users. At least for a few years. They will have an intolerable machine later though, when the OS becomes more bloated, and they can't figure out how to upgrade those soldered RAM modules.
This is referring to the vast majority of users. At least for a few years
The “vast majority of users” do not know what RAM is and they don’t know what expandable memory means. Nor will they ever open their own laptops. If the laptop is slow after a few years they will just get a new one.
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