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8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests (www.macrumors.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests::Apple's new MacBook Pro models are powered by cutting-edge M3 Apple silicon, but the base configuration 14-inch model starting at $1,599...

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[–] 258 points 2 years ago (41 children)

The sheer idea of selling a 8gb machine in 2023 is kinda wild

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  • [–] 165 points 2 years ago (22 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 35 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago

    No doubt. Even wilder to me is the idea of buying a Mac with 8GB in 2023, speaking as a long time Mac owner. Mine is from several years ago. I wonder if Apple execs ever pull their heads out of their asses. This feels like the late 90s all over again.

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    [–] 138 points 2 years ago (34 children)

    For $1,599 you'd at least expect 16GB+ RAM given how cheap RAM is...

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  • [–] 82 points 2 years ago (27 children)

    I think Apple gets all their RAM from 2008, because they charge $50/GB for it.

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  • [–] 35 points 2 years ago (21 children)

    Don't they also solder it to the motherboard so you can't upgrade your RAM as well?

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  • [–] 49 points 2 years ago (13 children)

    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.

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    [–] 107 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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    [–] 72 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Maybe we should all start calling it the "MacBook Semi-Pro".

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  • [–] 50 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    8gb ram has been common for over a decade now. It's what I would expect in a sub-$400 laptop.

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    [–] 71 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    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.

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    • [–] 71 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Ah it's cool, you can just open the little door in the back and upgrade the RAM anytime you want.

    Right??

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    [–] 64 points 2 years ago (19 children)

    My four year old phone has more RAM than an expensive macbook? LMFAO 🤭🤭🤭

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  • [–] 49 points 2 years ago (18 children)

    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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    • [–] 61 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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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    • [–] 53 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    "Pro"

    Ahem. Yeah right

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    [–] 33 points 2 years ago

    My 350€ three-year old phone has an SoC with 12GB of RAM.

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    [–] 32 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    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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    [–] 30 points 2 years ago

    And then wonder why Mac sales tanked 27% in their last financial report. Selling 8Gb laptops is an offence.

    And seriously for their price, I would much prefer a laptop like Framework that I know I can easily swap components and make it workable even after a while.

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    [–] 27 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    They'll still sell like hot cakes 😂

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    [+] 25 points 2 years ago
    [deleted]
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    [–] 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    My current phone, and my last phone both had more ram. For significantly less money.

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    [–] 15 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    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.

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