11 ms·
Perhaps this pricing was brought about by the same head injury that caused someone in management to believe 8GB is an adequate base spec for RAM in 2020.
by justin66 6y ago
Perhaps this pricing was brought about by the same head injury that caused someone in management to believe 8GB is an adequate base spec for RAM in 2020.
- shakow 6y agoIt is definitely an adequate base spec. What would the random MacBook user fill 16GB of RAM with?
- robotmay 6y agoChrome?
- snazz 6y agoI don’t do any tab-hoarding in Chrome (that’s the job of Safari on my machine), but I’m pretty sure that it will suspend tabs long before you run out of RAM. 8 GB is still plenty for web browsing.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoI started surfing the net in the 90s with 8MB. :D
- o-__-o 6y agoBRB gonna fire up Netscape on my brand new MacBook Air
- mixmastamyk 6y agoNetscape?! That's for the kids, we used NCSA Mosaic and liked it. I suspect lynx is still around in some form.
- marcolussetti 6y agoLynx is definitely still around. Useful for a quick "can I actually get to this site" sanity checks on servers.
- encom 6y agoLynx is bloatware. Just use telnet.
- snazz 6y agoUnless it’s HTTPS-only, which is most sites these days.... (I’m definitely not arguing that that’s a bad thing; it just makes Telnet more annoying)
- johnisgood 6y agoYeah, but I need both browser + IntelliJ. I run out of 8 GB pretty damn quickly.
- justin66 6y agoMore than one electron app?
- rbanffy 6y agoWe are not looking at a typical Mac user here, are we?
- wlesieutre 6y agoSlack, Whatsapp, Discord, and Skype, pick any two and I don't think it's unusual.
- ibejoeb 6y agoNever measured whatsapp but it's really pretty performant. Is it heavy? Slack and discord, on the other hand, are real drags.
- jcelerier 6y ago> Never measured whatsapp but it's really pretty performant are we really talking about the same whatsapp ? it takes a good 4 seconds to load here. I don't remember ever waiting for MSN Messenger to load, on potato-powered computers.
- mesid 6y agoI think that's because it's trying to connect to your phone since that's where the messages etc are stored.
- djsumdog 6y agoElectron is cancer .. but Skype is native (for now, at least on Linux. Although I'm sure they'll switch to the Teams codebase and Skype native will disappear forever too)
- 6y ago
- sg47 6y agoChrome, Slack, Zoom, Docker, k8s, VS Code, etc.
- threeseed 6y agoYour definition of random user seems a little off.
- CydeWeys 6y agoThe median Macbook user is not a developer. A web browser and videocalling are the only two from that list you'd expect the median user to be doing with a Macbook.
- rbanffy 6y agoAlso Office. Lots of open Word documents. My "typical Mac user" in this case, is my wife. Her 8GB MBP is holding up very well.
- domano 6y agoDoes macOS handle memory in a way where it just lets RAM fill up to some point before actively doing something about it? Because on my 16gig Macbook 8 gigs are gone just with browsing & spotify.
- foldr 6y agoThey're not really "gone", they've just been put to use because there's no point in leaving RAM empty. You can do much more than run a browser and Spotify with 8GB of RAM.
- domano 6y agoThanks, memory stats sure look different than with linux. Switched a short while back & was surprised, but that would explain it.
- 6y ago
- TuringNYC 6y agoChrome, Slack, Docker. Pick 1 (and only 1)!
- api 6y agoElectron apps.
- domano 6y agoOn my MBP with Catalina just browsing will get me over 8 gigs. Reaching 16 is another thing, that i did not manage even with Docker and mutiple IDEs in a typical day.
- iwasakabukiman 6y agoFor a $1,000 laptop? I disagree. It’s fine for a $500 one but Apple doesn’t sell those.
- ramenmeal 6y agoThat $500 difference goes towards a higher quality product with good support, not necessarily just system specs.
- coolreader18 6y agoI think what they're saying is that they'd expect a $500 price increase to update specs as well.
- coldtea 6y agoThere are tons of $1000 PC laptops with worse build and 8GB
- NikolaNovak 6y agoI have Firefox, Slack, MS Team, MS Word, MS Excel, and Onenote opened. The world's most boring office worker use case. I know it's a deceptive metric but Task Manager shows 12.5GB "In Use". 16.2 Committed. Each Firefox tab has between 250mb and 1g "Memory (Active Working Area)". HUUUUUGeeeee long tail of 100MB trailing down to 20MB services and things. Adobe has half a dozen at all times, etc etc etc. I'm game to use any other "more realistic" specification or monitor as I know that with memory paging and virtualization things are wonky. I don't think this indicates I MUST have 12 or 16 or 32GB - I have a 4GB media PC that works just fine. But I do believe it's an indicator average user can use 16GB, if it's available. Or in other words, if I buy a $1000USD laptop, I don't think 16GB is going to waste away unused with zero benefit ever :-\ Again, perfectly willing to be educated :).
- slumdev 6y ago> Slack You're lucky any of those other applications opened at all!
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoYes, largely because two of those are (bad) Electron apps that eat way more memory than they have any right to.
- sincerely 6y agoWhat is the person buying a laptop supposed to do about that?
- NikolaNovak 6y agoOh, I don't disagree even remotely! We can have a nice thread about optimized apps and 4k demos :) But in context of expectations in the $1k laptop market, my point was that perfectly normal usage can grow to benefit from over 8GB of RAM these days, whatever the background reasons may be.
- saagarjha 6y agoThose apps will use memory as they are given it, for the most part.
- pottertheotter 6y agoI personally wouldn't buy something without 32GB these days. But I would tell family/friends to get at least 16GB. With 32GB, I rarely have to think about RAM. But I'm probably 85%+ utilization all the time. I'll admit that I'm a "power user", but my wife has a fairly new laptop with 8GB and it fills up FAST, even when doing nothing serious. It's at 81% right now with just Firefox, Word, and Evernote. If I were going for a desktop it'd be at least 64GB.
- wetpaws 6y agoDefinitely not the random user, but the moment you start running docker containers, you are screwed.
- nojito 6y ago>8GB is an adequate base spec for RAM in 2020. Why wouldn't it be? The iPad Pros max out at 6gb and yet they overperform the vast majority of laptops out there.
- beaner 6y agoDo they overperform for laptop use cases or for iPad use cases?
- foldr 6y agoVideo encoding is one example of a laptop use case where the iPad Pro has very competitive performance. Gaming is another.
- mantap 6y agoWe're talking about RAM. RAM usage is a direct function of how many apps you have open at the same time. For an iPad that number is a lot smaller than for a laptop.
- foldr 6y agoI don't think that's the reason the iPad Pro performs well at video encoding (or else you'd be able to say the same thing for any Android tablet). It's a combination of dedicated hardware and a fast CPU.
- mantap 6y agoWhat I'm saying is that just because the iPad Pro is good at video encoding it doesn't mean that it is capable of running a windowed OS with real multitasking. For that you need more RAM. The iPad is built for a specific workflow where you use one or two apps at a time, laptops are designed for a workflow that involves more multitasking. What Apple appears to have done is transpose the hardware from iPad to Mac without thinking about the different requirements of each. There is a reason that RAM is not part of the package on laptop CPUs. This might work for casual users but people spending $$$ on a "pro" computer will wise up pretty fast.
- ajharrison 6y agoMore ram is patch for components that aren’t hyper-optimized to work together. The whole point of what apple is doing with their own silicon is to create that optimization, thus reducing the need for excessive ram. It’s worked for them for iPad and iPhone. Samsung et all would boast more ram but oddly enough iPhones were and remain faster
- ajharrison 6y agoNot sure the downvoting ... Even with 16, 32gb of ram, Android phones still don’t have buttery smooth 60 FPS while iOS has never been smoother
- AncientPC 6y agoYou're confusing CPU and memory pressure, and attributing blame to the wrong component. Android's lack of smoothness is due to thread contention, whereas the iOS kernel uses a dedicated UI thread running at high priority. RAM size has no impact on UI performance, beyond a sufficient amount for the kernel.
- Fogest 6y agoTo add on to this, the person you are replying to is also quite wrong. Android devices definitely can be smooth and many go past 60hz now and have higher refresh rates than Apple products.
- AncientPC 6y agoI don't care that the p90 UI latency performance is better, the p99 performance on Android devices is terrible (UI stuttering). I use a Pixel 3 and iPhone 8 on a daily basis.
- isatty 6y agoAgreed. I have a pixel work phone and iPhone (XS/12 pro) for personal usage. Even though the Android is also current gen it can be unresponsive at times and also the face unlock is terrible on the android. I can’t remember the last time faceid failed but on Android it’s atleast 2-3 times a day.
- ajharrison 6y agoSeriously though what’s the connection between it being 2020 and there being more default RAM? Are you suggesting that in the year 2030 we should expect 100gb of RAM? The goal shouldn’t be to increase ageing technology but to replace it with something better.
- brailsafe 6y agoWell, I get where you're coming from, but would compare it maybe to electric or hydrogen vs gas cars. If I was in the market for a new car and drove certain distances regularly, I probably wouldn't be the first to buy something that could only go half the distance less conveniently, but does it faster.
- lostgame 6y agoIf you do anything like virtualization 8GB of RAM is absolutely paltry, borderline unusable - due to the need, e.g. to allocate a specific amount of RAM to a running VM. To be honest, I find even 16GB to be limiting. The lack of offering of a 32GB configuration killed the immediate sale for me, absolutely no exaggeration. Because you can't upgrade it post-market, I'd consider these to be some of the least future-proofed releases from Apple in a while.
- ben-schaaf 6y ago> Are you suggesting that in the year 2030 we should expect 100gb of RAM? 100GB sounds like paltry for 10 years of technological advancement. In 2010 DDR4 didn't exist yet and DDR3 only supported up to 16GB per ram stick (8 on Intel at the time). Now we have ram sticks with capacities up to 256GB. The 2010 MacBook Pro only came with 4GB! But really "640K ought to be enough for anybody", am I right?
- ajharrison 6y agoIf I have to complain in 2030 that my device doesn’t have enough ram, technology will have failed.
- phaemon 6y ago> Are you suggesting that in the year 2030 we should expect 100gb of RAM? You can buy a Thinkpad P15 with 128GB of RAM today, so I'd expect more like multi-TB RAM by 2030.
- kabacha 6y agoI really don't get it. How much difference could 8 to 16gb be in terms of price? Is Apple really doing this to save 20$ per machine? Even if you somehow could argue that 8 is all you need now, what about in few years? No one should ever buy this device.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThey aren't doing it to save 20$ per machine, they are doing it to make the higher price of a 16GB machine seem more reasonable than if it was the base model.
- Fogest 6y agoYeah this screams classic Apple. Advertise the cost of the Mac as lower, but with a shitty option that most people will have to upgrade. Majority are not going to want to buy a 8gb laptop for that kind of money and not just bump it up to 16gb. This reminds me of how movie theatres offer a small, medium and large but the large popcorn only costs slightly more than the medium, thus enticing you to go for the large.
- enos_feedler 6y agoYes, not just classic Apple but classic lots of things. Cars are sold the same way
- mxcrossb 6y agoI’ll add classic Lenovo to the list, whose base level thinkpad are underspeced and have terrible screens. The fact that apple doesnt perpetually claim their machines are on sale is their last bastion of superiority
- Spooky23 6y agoWhat do you mean? I scored a sweet ThinkPad deal — $2,000 off using code “SUCKER” at checkout!
- saagarjha 6y agoNot everyone is you.
- dweekly 6y agoDon't forget - with unified memory that means that the GPU has to pull from the same pool, so your usable RAM after display buffers is likely much less.
- zeusk 6y agoThat's the case for any integrated GPU, even the Intel ones Apple has been using since 2000s
- coldtea 6y ago>that caused someone in management to believe 8GB is an adequate base spec for RAM in 2020. And yet most PC laptops, with same or higher prices, have the same base spec, so there's that...