There were a number of exciting announcements from Apple at WWDC 2024, from macOS Sequoia to Apple Intelligence. However, a subtle addition to Xcode 16 — the development environment for Apple platforms, like iOS and macOS — is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple’s claim that 8GB of unified memory was enough for base-model Apple silicon Macs, you won’t be able to use it. There’s a memory requirement for Predictive Code Completion in Xcode 16, and it’s the closest thing we’ll get from Apple to an admission that 8GB of memory isn’t really enough for a new Mac in 2024.
HP seems to think 4 GB is an acceptable amount of RAM to put in a modern notebook (although they don’t charge even close to what Apple charges).
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Micro-edge-Microsoft-14-dq0040nr-Snowflake/dp/B0947BJ67M
Edit: Thinking about it, this is worse. Apple isn’t targeting low-income people. This is HP selling the poor a computer that doesn’t work properly.
Shipping with Windows S. That’s Microsoft’s version of a Chromebook for some light web browsing for 188 dollars. I wouldn’t buy it but this doesn’t look like a rip off at this price point.
S mode does allow you to turn it off, so it’s more like a hobbled version of home.
The computer is as bad as one I saw several years ago with 64g emmc and “Quad core processor.” not a quad core, it was literally the name that showed in system. It did have 4 cores: at 400Mhz, boosting to 1.1Ghz. Buyer changed their mind and we couldn’t give it away.
Of course that notebook is bad but for the price point of shitty hardware, you get shitty hardware. Apple sells shitty hardware at the cost of premium hardware.
Sounds about right for HP.
Opens chrome on a 8GB Mac. Sees lifespan of SSD being reduced by 50%. After 2-3 years of heavy usage SSD starts to get errors. Apple solution: buy a new one. No wonder they are 2nd/3rd wealthiest company on the planet.
And now all the fan boys and girls will go out and buy another MacBook. That’s planned obsolescence for ya
And why they solder the RAM, or even worse make it part of the SoC.
There are real world performance benefits to ram being as close as possible to the CPU, so it’s not entirely without merit. But that’s what CAMM modules are for.
Apple’s SoC long predates CAMM.
Dell first showed off CAMM in 2022, and it only became JEDEC standardised in December 2023.
That said, if Dell can create a really good memory standard and get JEDEC to make it an industry standard, so can Apple. They just chose not to.
BUT BUT you’ll get 5% fasTEr SpeED!!! And MOrE seCuRiTy!!!
Well. The claim they made still holds true, despit how I dislike this design choice. It is faster, and more secure (though attacks on NAND chips are hard and require high skill levels that most attacker won’t posses).
And add one more: it saves power when using LPDDR5 rather DDR5. To a laptop that battery life matters a lot, I agree that’s important. However, I have no idea how much standby or active time it gain by using LPDDR5.
In this particular case the RAM is part of the chip as an attempt to squeeze more performance. Nowadays, processors have become too fast but it’s useless if the rest of the components don’t catch up. The traditional memory architecture has become a bottleneck the same way HDDs were before the introduction of SSDs.
You’ll see this same trend extend to Windows laptops as they shift to Snapdragon processors too.
People do like to downplay this, but SoC is the future. There’s no way to get performance over a system bus anymore.
And the apple haters will keep making this exact same comment on every post using their 3rd laptop in ten years while I’m still using my 2014 MacBook daily with no issues.
Be more original.
This is pretty much it. People really just want to find reasons to hate Apple over the past 2 - 3 years. You’re right, though, your Mac can run easily for 10+ years. You’re good basically until the web browsers no longer support your OS version, which is more in the 12-15 year range.
Nice attempt to justify planned obsolescence. To think apple hasn’t done this time and time again, you’d have to be a fool
👍
-posted from my ten year old MacBook which shows no need for replacement
And is what, 3 or 4 operating systems behind due to it being obsolete
They should do 4Gb. I hear M3 mac’s make it seem like 8Gb.
If you allocate it right, you can add 200GB of swap space and then that 4GB of RAM will feel like 408GB!
I think you mean gigabytes, not gigabits.
8 Gb = 1 GB
You mean they can even make 0.5GB appear as 8GB?! That’s 16x! That apple silicon is just something else!
They moved to on-die RAM for a reason: To nickel and dime yo ass.
I needed to expense a Mac Mini for iOS development, and everyone (Me, the company, our purchasing department) was baffled at how much it cost to get 16 GB. And they only go up to 24GB. Imagine how much they’ll charge for 32 in a year!
Mac Mini is meant to be sort of the starter desktop. For higher end uses, they want you on the Mac Studio, an iMac, or a Mac Pro.
I assumed that the Mini was the effectively a Mac without a monitor. Is it relatively underpowered too?
As far as I understand, the Mac lineup don’t have screens, the IMacs are stationary and do have a screen, the MacBooks are the laptops.
Its not underpowered for average users, but it’s not meant for professional uses beyond basic office work.
Similar to the mini they offer the Studio which doesn’t have a monitor built in https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/compare/?modelList=Mac-studio-2023,Mac-mini-M2
Then for the higher end uses they offer a more typical tower format https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
But would an M1 Mini be similar to an M1 iMac?
Why do they struggle so much with some “obvious things” sometimes ? We wouldn’t have a type-C iphone if the EU didn’t pressured them to do make the switch
💸💸💸
Oh man, I remember so many people defended 8GB since the M1 first came out (and since).
I always argued it would significantly reduce the lifetimes of these machines if you bought one, not just because you’d be swapping a lot more on the (soldered in BTW) ssd, but because after a few years of updates it would become unbearably slow, or hardware would fail, or both.
Didn’t stop people constantly “tHe aRchITecTuRE iS cOmPlETelY diFFeRenT!!!”
Sure it’s different, but it’s still just a computer. A technical person can still look at the spec sheet and calculate effective performance accounting for bus widths etc.
Disclosure: I bought a top spec 16GB M1 Mac Air on launch and have been extremely happy with it - it’s still going strong.
8GB of dedicated VRAM is hardly enough these days…
Especially with 4k
This is my biggest lament about getting a 2060 without knowing how important vram is. I can make it perform better and more efficiently a bunch of different ways, but to my knowledge, I can’t get around the 6GB vram wall.
This isn’t a big deal.
If you’re developing in Xcode, you did not buy an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years.
If you are just using your Mac for Facebook and email, I don’t think you know what RAM is.
If you know what RAM is, and you bought an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years, then you are likely self-aware of your limited demands and/or made an informed compromise.
If you know what RAM is, and you bought an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years, then you are likely self-aware of your limited demands and/or made an informed compromise.
Or you simply refuse to pay $200+ to get a proper machine. Like seriously, 8GB Mac’s should have disappeared long ago, but nope, Apple stick to them with their planned obsolescence tactics on their hardware, and stubbornly refusing to admit that in 2023 releasing a MacBook with soldered 8Gb of RAM is wholy inadequate.
I get around this by simply not buying a Mac. Free’s up so much money for ram.
Yeah, the 8GB model’s purpose is to make an “starting at $xxxx” price tag possible.
deleted by creator
Funny: knowing that you only get one shot, I bought 32GB of RAM for my Mac Mini like 1.5 years ago. I figured that it gave me the best shot of keeping it usable past 5 years.
imagine showing this post to someone in 1995
shit has gotten too bloated these days. i mean even in my head 8GB still sounds like ‘a lot’ of RAM and 16GB feels extravagant
I chalk it up to lazy rushed development. Good code is art.
That’s not true at all. The code doesn’t take much space. The content does. Your high quality high res photos, 4K HDR videos, lossless 96kHz audio, etc.
But there are lots of shortcuts now. Asset packs and coding environments that come bundled with all kinds of things you don’t need. People import packages that consume a lot of space to use one tiny piece of it.
To be clear, I’m not talking about videos and images. You’d have these either way.
All these packages don’t take much memory. Also tree shaking is a thing. For example, one of the projects I currently work on has over 5 gigs of dependencies, but once I compile it for production, the whole code based is mere 3 megs and that’s including inlined styles and icons. The code itself is pretty much non-existent.
On the other hand I have 100KB of text translations just for the English language alone. Because there’s shit loads of text. And over 100MB of images, which are part of the build. And then there’s a remote storage with gigabytes of documents.
Even if I double the code base by copy pasting it will be a drop in a bucket.
You can always switch to a text based terminal and free up your memory. Just don’t compain that YouTube doesn’t play 4K videos anymore.
We measure success by how many GB’s we have consumed when the only keys depressed from power on to desktop is our password. This shit right here is the real issue.
You just have to watch your favorite tablet get slower year after year to understand that a lot of this is artificial. They could make applications that don’t need those resources but would never do so.
I have a VPS that uses 1GB of RAM, it has 6-7 apps running in docker containers which isn’t the most ram efficient method of running apps.
A light OS really helps, plus the most used app that uses a lot of RAM actually reduce their consumption if needed, but use more when memory is free, the web browser. On one computer I have chrome running with some hundreds of MB used, instead of the usual GBs because RAM is running out.
So it appears that memory is full,but you can actually have a bit more memory available that is “hidden”
This is resource reservation, it happens at an OS level. If chrome is using what appears to be alot of ram, it will be freed up once either the OS or another application requires it.
It just exists so that an application knows that if it needs that resource it can use X amount for now.
Same here. When idle, the apps basically consume nothing. If they are just a webserver that calls to some PHP script, it basically takes no RAM at all when idle, and some RAM when actually used.
Websites and phone apps are such an unoptimized pieces if garbage that they are the sole reason for high RAM requirements. Also lots of background bloatware.
I once went for lower CAS timing 2x 128MB ram sticks (256 MB) instead of 2x 256s with slower speeds because I thought 512MB was insane overkill. Realized how wrong I was when trying to play Star Wars galaxies mmorpg when a lot of people were on the screen it started swapping to disk. Look up the specs for an IBM Aptiva, first computer my parents bought, and you’ll understand how 512MB can seem like a lot.
Now my current computer has 64 GB (most gaming computers go for 32GB) at the time I built it. My workstation at work has 128GB which really isn’t even enough for some workloads we have that use a lot of in-memory cache… And large servers can have multiple TB of RAM. My mind has been blown multiple times.
Absolutely.
Bad, rushed software that wires together 200 different giant libraries just to use a fraction of them and then run it in a sandboxed container with three daemons it needs for some reason doesn’t mean “8 Gb isn’t enough”, it means write tighter, better software.
deleted by creator
Guy from '95: “I bet it’s lightning fast though…”
No dude. It peaks pretty soon. In my time, Microsoft is touting a chat program that starts in under 10 seconds. And they’re genuinely proud of it.
8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment. Heck my M1 Macbook Air is even good with basic Photoshop/Illustrator work and light AV editing. I certainly prefer my PC laptop with 32GB and a dedicated GPU but its power adapter weighs more than a Macbook Air.
8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment.
The thing is, basic office/school/work tasks can be done on any laptop that costs twice less than an 8GB MacBook.
This is true for part time or casual use but for all day work use including travel you get better build quality and far less problems with a pro grade machine. We spend the same on a macbook, thinkpad, surface or probook for our basic full time users.
While it may be a bit overkill for someone who spends their day in word, excel, chrome and zoom we save money in the long term due to reliability. There is far less downtime and IT time spent on each user over the life of the system (3-4 years). The same is true about higher quality computer accessories.
I mean I develop software on an 8GB laptop. Most of the time it’s fine, when I need more I have a desktop with 128GB ram available.
Really depends what type of software you’re making. If you’re using python a few TB might be required.
Every time I compare specs to prices on Apples website, I get irrationally angry.
I have a macbook air m2 with 8gb of ram and I can even run ollama, never had ram problems, I don’t get all the hate
Which model with how many parameters du you use in ollama? With 8GB you should only be able to use the smallest models, which ist faaaar from ideal:
You should have at least 8 GB of RAM available to run the 7B models, 16 GB to run the 13B models, and 32 GB to run the 33B models.
llama3:8b, I know it’s “far from ideal” but only really specific use cases require more advanced models to run locally, if you do software development, graphic design or video editing 8gb is enough
edit: just tried it after some time and it works better than I remembered showcase
removed by mod
If you choose to be a weak little quiet corporate Stan then that’s up to you. Apple is well aware that third party apps exist and they’re well aware that machines with less ram will need replaced far sooner than machines with more. RAM is cheap and Apples intigrated memory is no different in the regard. The only reason to use less is planned obsolescence. If you don’t believe that then you’re either Tim Cook or you’re an idiot.
What is the obsession with shitting on people’s choices? I don’t understand the irony of demanding choice in this industry, then shitting on people when they make a choice you don’t agree with.
No one is shitting on other people’s choices. They are criticizing a major corporations choices to skimp on specs while charging a premium price. Specs that can’t be upgraded and will absolutely lead to a shorter usable life. I find it odd that people get upset about criticism that isn’t aimed at them at all. The only thing I can think is maybe they realize they were ripped off after putting so much money into Apple products and they need to defend their financial decisions. Even then I don’t fully understand. I’ve purchased overpriced junk many times and don’t feel the need to defend the offending company. Maybe it’s because Apple has managed to make their customers feel like they’re in an exclusive club even though everyone uses Apple products these days. A publicly traded company is around to make money and nothing more. They should never be held in reverence.
What is the obsession with shitting on people’s choices?
As much as people want to act like they are better than they were, say, 100 years ago, it’s not really true. Humans are really just advanced monkeys running around and very few can actually surpass that nature.
This we can agree on.
Sorry, boo, everyone wants to hate Apple these days. It’s the Zeitgeist. Even if you say something reasonable or perhaps factual, the people are against you and will react violently.
Accurate.
Well, 2000€ for a “Pro” model of the Macbook 14" with only 8GB RAM sounds a bit strange, tbf. And +230€ for +8GB is straight up greedy.
They said “Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems” and well , that’s definitely not the case for their upcoming AI usecases, because - and many people seem to overlook that - their RAM is shared RAM (or as they call it “unified memory”), which means that the GPU is limited by these 8GB of (V)RAM because it can only use what is left by the System usage.
removed by mod
The unreasonable escalation of your response really makes you come across as exceedingly insecure.
See the OP’s ending sentence for reference.
I was quite literally illustrating the absurdity by being similarly absurd. Telling people to shut the fuck up about an issue is funny as hell to respond with a similar statement.
The Voyager space probes disagree.
