But but the memory is more efficient, 8 is actually 16!
LMAOOOOOOO π€‘
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
But but the memory is more efficient, 8 is actually 16!
LMAOOOOOOO π€‘
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 didnβt 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 arenβt 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 $2000+ PC at several things, which frustrates me greatly.
However... When running ableton live (or presumably anything that involves heavy image, video, or audio editing), 8gb of ram is honestly not enough. If you push it too hard, it hangs for a second, then the offending app will just close.
Also there is a weird delay in factorio, absolutely unacceptable.
They'll continue selling these, purely because of two reasons:
Practically all of us know that the difference between these memory modules is pocket change, when mass produced like this, but for those extra couple cents, they get an extra 100$ from you
On an Air, 8gb is the bare minimum that is realistically viable, for people who donβt 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.
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
This is called capturing consumer surplus through segmentation. There's a pretty good explanation of it here.
The long and short of it is that some people are just perfectly fine spending more money on a macbook, and apple wants to give them a good enough excuse to do so.
8 is fine for a tablet.
8 is not fine for a brand-fucking new state of the art laptop.
"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.
It's totally so they can list a really low "starting at" price and then upsell marked up parts in the configurator.
Disclaimer: I didn't read the article and just came in to shit on scummy business practices that I made assumptions about.
Your assumption is based and factual
8GB of RAM is perfectly usable for basic things, but on a new computer, with that price, non-upgradable... ech...
Less is more, removing features is a innovation - apple
removing features is ~~innovation~~ courage.
Zero reason why any modern computer should be less then 16gb
Honestly we're kinda edging up to the point where I think 32gb of ram should be the minimum, especially for heavy use cases like games and production jobs.
> most powerful chip available in a laptop and arguably one of the greatest overall laptops ever
> 8 gb ram
my phone has 12 GB of ram what the fuck is apple on
It's a strategy to push customers toward the more expensive models. Their markup is massive, it's a blatant profit move.
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.
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
Such a weird hill to die on for Apple. How much does it really cost to just add 8GB more RAM? $5?
My mid-range smartphone from 2022 has 8gb of ram. I paid $250 for it brand new.
I like Apple. Got Apple Watch, AirPods Pro and iPhone. I love the design of MacBooks however I refuse to ever buy MacBooks.
Overpriced like crazy. For half of the price you can get a really great laptop.
Iβm honestly even thinking to buy a β¬200 android device to get used to the system.
Iβm honestly even thinking to buy a β¬200 android device to get used to the system.
Don't. Unless it's a slightly older Pixel A-series 2nd hand phone. Manufacturers of cheap Android phones skimp on everything and add bullshit crapware. Shit like that is the cause of many "Android sucks" comments.
Iβm honestly even thinking to buy a β¬200 android device to get used to the system.
Don't do that, I can tell you from experience: Most of them suck, especially cheap Chinese ones.
The Google Pixel 7a is currently $350 and it will get cheaper when the 8a comes out. The 7a will get security updates until May 2028. If you want to get into mobile device privacy/security, a Pixel is an excellent choice. You can install an alternative operating system called GrapheneOS, it's a much more private and secure, improved version of Android. It doesn't include Google spyware and thus also improves battery life. It also extends your feature updates, by default the 7a would only get feature updates until 2026, but GrapheneOS provides Android feature updates as long as the device gets security updates. That would mean 2 additional years of Android feature updates. I highly recommend it!
It's weird how you draw the line at MacBooks for being overpriced, considering every other apple device you name dropped is equally overpriced.
And I'm here contemplating upgrading to 32 GB...
Yup. My MacBook Pro for work has 16GB and I keep running out of RAM. I can't fathom being limited to 8GB...
I guess it works for basic browsing and whatnot, but for any kind of professional work, you're going to have a bad time.
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.
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.
Given how terrible Teams performes, I'd dread to have merely 8GB to run it on.
Me, with my PC that has 32 gb of ram: πππππππππ
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!
I donβt 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 doesnβt have any reasonable grasp of memory management.
Pretty sure my phone has 8GB of RAM. Apple should probably rethink this.