Putting 8Gb of ram in any laptop computer in todays market is a fucking insult to it’s users, let alone someone paying the Apple price tag.
apple is literally poverty grade
Tons of people with college debt pay hundreds, if not, thousands of dollars for Apple e-waste. Tons of unbelievably stupid people who clearly went to college in vain.
I love a Mac but I bought a non-expandable 8gb iMac once and I’ll never make that mistake again.
The amazing thing is 8GB might not even be enough for the iPhone anymore, the stuttering and frame spikes in Resident Evil could easily be caused by not having enough RAM and having to shuffle art assets between storage and memory.
On the other hand, it’s a hard game to actually recommend playing on an iPhone. Performance is compromised with frequent frame-time spikes and punctuated occasionally by severe bouts of stutter.
If this is how the iPhone handle Village, RE4 on the other hand is going to be a slaughter for the Pro iPhones lmao
It has more implications for the 8gb MacBooks, minis, and iPads. If their pedaling gaming, 8gb of system memory is not enough for AAA games.
could easily be caused by not having enough RAM and having to shuffle art assets between storage and memory
In iOS there is no swap:
In iOS, there is no backing store and so pages are are never paged out to disk, but read-only pages are still be paged in from disk as needed.
Which counterintuitively actually makes it more RAM capacity demanding than macOS. macOS’s 2-stage swapping with compression (and absurdly fast NVME) is in fact quite good, iOS has to fit in RAM and RAM only.
i have both an m1 mac mini 8 gb, and a m1 pro max 32 gb mac studio. from my experience, 8gb is enough for any hobbyist basic stuff. even music production which i was doing unless youre doing professional level 100+ channel heavy sample based VST instruments… 8gb is enough. i used it on a professional level for 2 years with 8gb before i upgraded to the 32 gb mac studio
Yup. I upgraded from Intel to M3 Pro this week and do music production outside of work (IT). Love the ports, love the colour and battery life. Salary sacrificed so it’s around 40% cheaper too. It’s a great machine
I don’t understand it anyway, I just got 32gb ddr5 for my pc for a little over €100. Why would they hold out on something that important in a 1800+ bucks product?
My biggest issues is that on some lines (like MBA, iMac, non-Pro mini) 16GB is only available as BTO. They don’t offer say a 16/512 configuration that retailers like BestBuy and Costco and Amazon (although Amazon has been covering through 3rd party more BTO options) carry and discount regularly. So it ends up cost much more than $200 extra to upgrade the RAM since you lose out on all the great retail sales/discounts.
I use a MacBook for basic needs. I have an 8GB M2 Air, I don’t really need a MacBook for what I use it for, but I’m in the ecosystem and enjoy what Mac has to offer within it, I love knowing that if and when I’m ready to push my MacBook further, I’ll be able to comfortably. 8GB is enough for me and likely always will be enough.
Everybody of course is different, but I’m an average user and it’s more than plenty for me
This is why I’m considering a M2 MBA. The most I do is digital art and pixel art, neither of which are generally super intensive unless I’m working on something particularly high res—even then I’ve only hit the RAM layer limit in Procreate exactly one time on my IPP.
if only mba was 499$, but now, with talks about gaming which require 16gb at least, it won’t even run on most popular apple computer
i dont get the point of this discussion.
if your workload requires 8gb or less on a daily bassis, then get the 8gb. if it requires 16, then get 16.
it’s that simple.
For the most part this video just says “more RAM = better performance”. That is true of any PC setup and isn’t unique to 8gb vs 16gb Macs — any comparison to a higher RAM machine will show the higher RAM device performing better.
The real question is whether the worse performance is so bad that it matters to its buyer base, which includes consumers who wanted an XDR display (which is not available on the Air) and lot of enterprise customers who previously were buying 13” Pros for their staff.
The video makes it clear that professional creators should not buy the 8GB machine, but I have a feeling most professionals already knew this.
The problem is Apple and the apologists will tout how fast Apple silicon is and how great they perform and how you really really need that performance…
… Until it comes to RAM, when suddenly no one really needs the performance.
It’s a stupid lie, and it’s one that no one really believes.
The whole point of offering the limited entry specs is to push buyers into higher spec machines where the margins are fatter.
The video makes it clear that professional creators should not buy the 8GB machine, but I have a feeling most professionals already knew this.
Nobody should be buying 8GB machine in 2023/4 that can’t be upgraded latter (ok, if it was some $400-500 laptop it could be discussed, but Apple is nowhere near that market segment), it’s effectively a ticking e-waste bomb. Given how Apple tries to push it’s environmental image and “shit just works” it shouldn’t even be offered at all, it’s purely cynical to do.
Using browser with few tabs and Lightroom isn’t a “Pro” usage at all.
Somehow in iPhones we went from 2GB to 6GB (6S to 14) in base model, but in same timeframe cheapest Apple laptop went from 8GB to 8GB (2016 MBA to current) and somehow it should be fine, while computers have real multitasking (excessive swapping would hide all issues from user and there’s no downsides to it, amirite?)
Don’t understand the fuss, if you need more than 8gb then just upgrade it, it’s not like it’s not available.
Feel bad for the people buying it for Logic. My 2019 8gb did not last long before I realized how much 16gbs was needed.
Apple either pull antics or disrupts to keep them in the conversation. This seems more like the former but I’ll wait for the tests.
Don’t link MaxTech. They were one of the idiots originally making the 8GB == 16GB claim. They have no idea what they’re doing.
MaxTech constantly makes inaccurate comparisons and does not accurately gather data for the workloads they run. Not saying they are wrong here, but they’ve been disproven MANY times in the past.
Exactly. Tech YouTubers know NOTHING about tech, they just know clicks. They will avoid straying from a trend or groupthink as it means less views for them.
You should look at iJustine 🌈 to others as Engadget
I wholeheartedly agree about MaxTech on average, but in this particular instance… the video is actually pretty good.
Or rather, if one watches it correctly, the material presented that remains after the filter is quite good. Namely, one should discard all claims based on pure numerology - numbers from the config, current year, “RAM used” shown by activity monitor (a big chunk of that figure is very optional file cache that only marginally improves perf, but uses up the more RAM the more you give it, for starters, + a lot more), etc.
The actual experiments with applications done on the machine, performance measurements (seconds, etc), demonstrations of responsiveness (switching from tab to tab on camera) are actually quite well done, in fact, the other youtube videos on the subject rarely include quantifiable performance / timing measurements and limit themselves to demos (or pure handwaving and numerology).
Of course, conclusions, “recommendations”, etc. in their exact wording also need to be taken with a half a metric ton of salt, but there is still a lot of surprisingly good signal in that video, as noted.
Glad I’m not alone remembering the bullshit they spewed when the m1 came out.
8gb is great for high memory pressure and being dependent on slow swap memory