But but the memory is more efficient, 8 is actually 16!
LMAOOOOOOO 🤡
To be fair I had an 8Gb M1 Mac mini for about a year and never even once felt 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.
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.
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.
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You didn’t even ask which several things OP was referring to.
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
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…
Some of the YouTubers comparing the new MacBook found that the 16GB Air smoked the 8GB version for creative tasks and rendering, but they found no difference between 16 GB and 24GB. Seems like Apple could up the RAM to 12 GB and see a big improvement.
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 conventional PC architecture.
MacOS is also designed specifically to leverage the hardware, so practical use is the only legitimate comparison to a PC.
Maybe PC Gamer isn’t the most informed reviewer of technology outside of PCs.
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!!!
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.
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.
They’ll continue selling these, purely because of two reasons:
- On an Air, 8gb is the bare minimum that is realistically viable, for people who don’t do anything than browse the web, who they can later upsell, when they get a new machine.
- They can immediately upsell you for every extra memory tier you would need. This makes them a colossal amount of money.
Practically all of us know that the difference between these memory modules is pocket change, when mass produced like this, but for those extra couple cents, they get an extra 100$ from you
On an Air, 8gb is the bare minimum that is realistically viable, for people who don’t do anything than browse the web
Thanks to the modern web, web browsing of one of the most RAM intensive tasks. Add a few Electron based apps and you’re in hell.
For browsing the web 4 GB is enough, unless you do some multitasking. Still I wouldn’t buy a computer with less than 8 GB of RAM nowadays.
For browsing the web 4 GB is enough, unless you do some multitasking.
Multitasking = more than one tab and the background tabs not immediately put to sleep.
When they charge many $100s for an extra 8gb the value of the bare minimum 8gb doesn’t look so terrible (if only comparing to Apple). Especially considering the performance of swap on a fast SSD.
my 3 year old phone has more RAM than that
This is nothing to brag about, when Android needs this to run smoothly, compared to the same performance of a 6 GB RAM iPhone.
Edit: Just look at benchmarks and every day use cases. How exactly has any Android smartphone ever achieved any significant speed gains by using huge amounts of RAM compared to the then-current iPhone model? I agree with the Apple criticism when it comes to computers. When it comes to efficiency of smartphones, Android just seems to have tons of overhead and has always needed significantly more RAM than iPhones while not being faster at all. Maybe we can put the „look at how edgy I am for not using Apple devices“ aside for a moment.
Android has a garbage collector, meaning it requires an additional 2GB of RAM of overhead to keep things smooth. iPhones run significantly hotter than Androids, and consume more energy to achieve their performance gains.
It’s not true to simply state “one is better than the other”. There’s various metrics in which either one may be better.
That‘s exactly what I was criticizing. So how is “more RAM = better“ as an absolute statement right, then?
jfc this is inane.
there’s this thing called multitasking, you might have heard of it. when you want to open more than one app and use them all at the same time, GUESS WHAT BRIGHT LIGHTS? Takes more memory.
This is the dumbest shit take I’ve ever seen.
I‘m talking about smartphones. Funny that you‘d call me bright lights when you even lack the basic skill of reading.
Never had any problems with „multitasking“ there since the iPhone 5.
LOL, you think people don’t multitask on smart phones and tablets?
oof… and yes, on android you can have both open on the same screen at the same time. I don’t know about fischer price unix, er, aye-aye-aye-os…
nah, didn’t misread, you’re def the sharpest tool in the spoon drawer.
Sure. I have just never encountered any problems. I used to, to be honest, as mentioned back with the iPhone 4 where Safari tabs were reloading because of the lack of RAM. But Android had its own problems back then, for example with the update policy of most manufacturers leaving my wife‘s Android phone obsolete after only one year.
What exactly do you do? Hook up your smartphone as a desktop replacement with a bulky USB dongle, firing up some CAD software on two 6K displays while rendering an 8K HDR video in the background? People never disappoint creating completely made-up scenarios just to discredit.
Never talked about tablets, so it’s reading – again!
Well, more RAM will always help. An iPhone with more RAM will allow it to perform better than one with less RAM. Similarly, too little RAM will hamper performance regardless of the device.
Okay. But why is it that Android phones don‘t all just have 128 GB of RAM built in, then? I‘m still talking about smartphones only. And there, RAM is completely irrelevant for users unless it‘s a necessity for the OS and for apps to run well. This is the case for Android smartphones. This is not the case for iPhones. Because everything you want to do just works, without thinking about RAM. This has been the case since the iPhone X.
But here it seems to be really hard to accept that getting an iPhone is the far superior choice for many people, also for tech savvy people. While others choose an Android smartphone and are happy with that.
And for computers: just accept that it‘s plain economy calculus to offer 8 GB RAM as standard because this will lead more buyers to choose an upgrade and pay more than the standard price, instead of accusing Apple to offer this without this plan in mind. Just don‘t buy these machines and continue your life as a superior tech being, where companies like Samsung or Dell have the sole purpose to make as little profit as possible.
this is a trap to upsell you 16 GB or sell you upgrade
for grossly inflated pricing, in proud apple tradition.
It’s also a nice way to tax their poorest customers more. A lot of people are keeping their machines way past what apple provides updates for, if the ssd that can’t be changed dies (because of constant swapping) faster than what they intended or could keep the machine for, I guess it’s too bad for them.
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.
My 6 year old CHROMEBOOK has 16gb…
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
Such a weird hill to die on for Apple. How much does it really cost to just add 8GB more RAM? $5?
This is just like the iPhone (lack of) storage and the (lack of) SD cards. Apple is trying to maximize profits by using less RAM and by forcing people into buying more hardware in a few years. Apple does a lot of stuff very well but then they also pull this crap.
Acknowledging that 8GB only delivers mediocre performance at best would upset anyone who already bought a device with only 8GB. And as later upgrades are not supported by Apple it would abandon these users like buyers of a 1st gen Apple device…
My guess is they’re going to sell like hotcakes to clueless parents whose kids insist their first laptop needs to be apple
Its all on-die not on the board, so Apple gets to charge you more.
The 8gb ram MacBook works great for your average Mac user. The person who uses it for writing resumes and surfing YouTube which I’m sure is a huge chunk of the market. Devs/Gamers/power users can’t make do with 8gb, but my sister in law who just does paper work and teams meetings all day is served well by her 2016 laptop, and wouldn’t have any issue with an 8gb MacBook.
Except it’s cost 3x more than average 8GB ram laptops
Not cost effective by any means, but then again none buys apple for cost effective anything. Some people just the brand it seems 🤦
If the alternative is Windows which is increasingly filled with ads or Linux which shifts the burden of computer administration to a user who might not have a clue about what they’re supposed to do if their WiFi doesn’t “just work”, paying for a managed walled garden that doesn’t try to install candy crush without you asking for it isn’t such a bad option.
How long is the average laptop usable, though? I still have a 2012 MacBook Air with 4GB of ram that gets daily use with no visible issues. I don’t feel like it’s slow. I don’t feel like there’s much (the only issue is usually flash) daily business it can’t do (mostly web/email/pdfs/virtual meetings or classes/excel/word). I’ve never had it repaired or upgraded. I’ve also had about 4 windows laptops since about 2011. My primary desktop is a windows gaming PC and I complain more about its quirks than I do about the Mac.
If your use case doesn’t require a lot, it’s not really going to matter mac or windows… If you’re spending the same amount of money. I have a 2010 Dell m11x that’s just fine for productivity. It was $900ish then.
My 2009 Macbook became slow as heck after installing Mountain Lion on it 4 years after I got it, taking half an hour to even boot up. Ironically, Windows on it was a lot more usable. I agree that yea, there are cheap Windows laptops that are pretty bad but all the laptops I’ve had after that which I paid similar or slightly less for, have been far more reliable and longer lasting than my Macbook ever had.
And as for complaints, doesn’t that really depend on what you’re used to? Every time I have to use a Mac, I find a quirk that I can complain about every other minute but that’s just because I’m used to the Windows workflow or Linux where I can modify it to work the way I want it to.
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Given how terrible Teams performes, I’d dread to have merely 8GB to run it on.
Yeah it works fine by swapping and eating away the SSD
The 8gb ram MacBook works great for […] writing resumes…
Um I’m not sure where you heard that but ChatGPT requires a shit ton of memory
(Sorry, I’ll show myself out)
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 daily drove a laptop with 8gb of RAM less than a year ago. Works just fine for most tasks. Granted, at Apples typical price point, I’d want more than that, but it is far from unusable. Running VMs wasn’t fun though.
How did you do that? My laptop is at 14gb now and I am not using it (typing on phone)
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.
laughs in 64GB ram
Me, with my PC that has 32 gb of ram: 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
The reality distortion field is collapsing.
Apple has their niche, but you’ll never find me owning a Mac. They are not useful for me. And fuck the proprietary nature of Apple in general.
That being said, I run 64GB of RAM and it’s glorious!
