6 ms·

M3 MacBook Pro: Base Model Has Only 8GB RAM

25 points by behnamoh 3y ago

brucethemoose2 3y ago
Notably, its $1600 for 8GB/512GB.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  The iPhone 15 Pro Max 512GB is 1399. With a better camera but smaller screen.
  - zen_1 3y ago
    Which also has 8gb of dram. Funny how close these devices are becoming spec-wise
    - behnamoh 3y ago
      I wonder if an iPhone having 8GB of DRAM is a testament to how far we've come, or how stingy Apple is when it comes to the desktop/laptop lineups.
      - brucethemoose2 3y ago
        8GB is good, but not a technical limitation for mobile chips anymore. More LPDDR5X is peanuts in a $1400 phone.
smoldesu 3y ago
At first it was pretty cool to see the price drop, but the more I looked into these models the weirder it got. Why does a $1600 Macbook Pro ship with half the memory of a $400 Steam Deck? Why are the core configurations so weird? Why can't I get a Space Black laptop without buying the Pro models? It's... certainly an interesting decision. I'm doubtful most consumers would notice, but I am left scratching my head here.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  Yes, this year's M3's are certainly kinda odd. Makes me wonder what M3 Ultra will be like (probably not a significant improvement over M2 Ultra).
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    The might even skip it? Or rearchitect it. The M3 Max would need to have the silicon space to turn into an ultra right now, and thats a lot of die area to spend.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      My bet is a rearchitecture. The M1/M2 Ultra feels constrained by the thermal limitation of the Mac Studio. That's fine, but the current Mac Pro is a testament to how this doesn't really scale up very well. If you want my perverted guess, I think Apple has a skunkworks Mac Pro with a disabled/removed iGPU for testing dGPUs on Apple Silicon. If the eventual goal is to reprise the size, memory capacity and IO throughput of the old Mac Pro, you can't really keep scaling a mobile architecture. You can get pretty far, but the Mac Studio marks a line in the sand where Apple decided to go no further. If Apple sees that market as a valuable one to capture (which I think they do), I think they'll introduce a new Mac designed around the thermal envelope of the current rackmount Mac Pro. The desktop case would get a slight reworking to match it's capacity and specs. From there, I'd expect them to invest heavily in on-die PCI controllers and external GPU support on the software side. If they know what's good for them, it would also be cool to see them extend these features to lower-end Macs with eGPU support over Thunderbolt. Remove the VM limitation, document iBoot for the hardware owners and you've got yourself a surprisingly attractive Apple Silicon server/pro offering. It's a bit of a pipe dream, but it wouldn't shock me to see Apple reintroduce a proper Mac Pro as a "one more thing" moment for us frothing nerds.
      - brucethemoose2 3y ago
        I have heard rumors about a discrete Apple GPU actually. I was thinking its something VR related... But also, its possible that Apple does precisely none of this and just makes huge GPU tiles when their SOCs go tiled anyway. With their margins, they could sell something akin to a MI300A right now.
booi 3y ago
I don't know if this is more of a testament to what MacOS can do with so little RAM, or a confidence that their PCI-e SSD access is so fast you won't feel much difference.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
  Or an illusion of a choice. Frankly, a machine with a "pro" in their name and 8 GB RAM is an oxymoron. When you look at the apps Apple advertises as playing nicely with their M chips, most of them are memory hungry.
  - riscy 3y ago
    Wouldn't there have been widely circulated press about how those apps are unusable with 8GB RAM in the past however-many years it's been the base model? Do you think Apple would advertise that it is suited for those "pro" apps and workloads without having tested it with that model? Imagine the mountain of negative press if it were true that it can barely run Final Cut Pro.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      You can edit video on an iPad with 4gb of RAM, for all the power and comfort it's worth to you. For $1600, in 2023, a Pro machine ought to treat the user better. This thing is like those 4gb Macbook Pros, with the cruel twist that you can't upgrade the memory and make them usable again after an upgrade brings it to it's knees. If your "Pro" machine cannot upgrade it's storage or memory, it ought to ship with all the storage and memory you're going to need for the lifetime of the device. The old Macbook Pro base models did reflect that, even with the paltry phone-sized SSD they shipped. The 13" Macbook Pro had outdated specs that cannot be expected to last into the next decade. Replacing it with an even more expensive, even more outdated model is setting up their customers for regret. Without a doubt in my mind, I am certain that Apple could sell a 16gb Macbook Pro 14" at $1600 and still turn a profit. Their BOM is not tight, Apple margins are not like a console manufacturer.
- Boatfaceing 3y ago
based_gigachad2 3y ago
M3 Pro 14 is $1999 and has 18 Gigs of RAM. AFAIK M2 Pro 14 cost the same with 16, so at least there's a small improvement
- behnamoh 3y ago
  > so at least there's a small improvement Not really. the M3 line has less bandwidth and fewer P cores compared to M2.
  - based_gigachad2 3y ago
    We'll need to bench for waitmarks to be certain, Apple showed some good performance improvements for the new cores. And the GPU has ray tracing acceleration now
    - behnamoh 3y ago
      > Apple showed some good performance improvements for the new cores. Compared to "Intel" and M1 Macs...
      - based_gigachad2 3y ago
        Well, there were M2s in the comparisons too, I'd say the improvement is still good, but again we should bench for waitmarks before jumping to conclusions here
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    I bet the M3 has lower task energy (which is important on battery), so we will see.
  - huxley 3y ago
    No, only the M3 Pro processors have fewer P cores (5P+6E/6P+6E on M3 Pro vs 6P+4E/8P+4E on the M2 Pro) The entry level M3 has the same number of P cores and bandwidth as the M2 (both are 4P+4E (100GBps)) M3 Max has more P cores than the M2 Max and only the lower P core M3 Max model has less bandwidth (10P+4E (300GBps)/12P+4E (400GBps) vs 8P+4E (400GBps)).
crossroadsguy 3y ago
Enough to use iMessage, Mail, FaceTime etc. What else do you need in a so affordably priced $1600 Mac? Do you want Apple to go bankrupt? Or you’d want people to not be able to buy an “8GB base MacBook Pro”[1]. Oh, that would be unreasonable. [1] Yes, I swear it was a comment on another post from yesterday. HN is either that disconnected or desensitised when it comes to this company. As for why they do/did it? Because they can. There’s really no other reasoning here. Yes, the first part of my comment is rather snarky/sarcastic and maybe in poor taste but this is just pathetic and tomorrow I’d love to see the comments explaining how it makes sense and that maybe it is actually a price drop. And this post is from 2.5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27096022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27096022 (about 8GB RAM, yes)
- foldr 3y ago
  Most of the empirical comparisons I've seen of the 8GB vs. 16GB models show that you have to push the 8GB models pretty hard before they're noticeably slower. Most of the complaints seem to come from people who are obsessively checking memory usage and have a rather over-simplistic mental model of how RAM is allocated in a modern operating system. (For example, many apps, such as browsers, will happily use more RAM if you give them more RAM.)
  - melling 3y ago
    Strange. I’ve got a 10 year old Intel MBP with 16GB of RAM. Even 10 years ago I didn’t think 8GB was enough. You don’t buy a Pro model and let it swap with only 8GB
    - foldr 3y ago
      Yeah, I think a lot of people are assuming that 8GB will work as poorly on an Mx system as it would on an older Intel Mac. But it's widely reported that this is not the case. (The faster SSDs help, and I suspect that memory compression may work more effectively too.) See various anecdotal reports such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38103103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38103103 in this very thread.
_yb2s 3y ago
16gb of ram for PC laptops that still have upgradeable chips costs around $30 retail. Seems pretty crazy for Apple to severely cripple such an expensive machine with no real savings to them.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  I'd probably be ok with 8GB on a MacBook Air (but I'd still nag about it). But to put 8GB on a "Pro" model...
- josephcsible 3y ago
  It's not "pretty crazy": it's price discrimination. By making their base model almost unusably underspecced, even with almost zero cost savings, they make sure that nobody who can afford a really expensive one will buy a "cheap" one.
  - _yb2s 3y ago
    I don’t see how that could work in practice. Most people I know are confused about the difference between ram and storage… they are going to trust that “pro” means it will be fast for normal “non computer nerd” use cases, and when it isn’t they won’t buy from Apple next time. Many single apps used by non technical people like Adobe Photoshop require 16gb nowadays.
  - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    The iMac shows this off in so many ways. First there's no 27 inch option because Tim Apple wants to sell Studio Displays. But then the specs. Base model has 2 USB ports, no Ethernet, and a 256GB SSD. Given that I can go buy a pretty excellent 512GB PCIe 3.0 for $25, it just seems insulting to start so low. And then look at the frigging price of upgrade! It's $200 to upgrade to 512GB! Holy shit, I could go get a great 4TB Crucial P3 Plus for that. Ditto for $200 for 8GB->16GB. It's just wild what this company does.
  - seec 3y ago
    Well at least that is the theory. They are losing sales from people who could reason around compromising performance (speed mostly) but making the effort to get a "better" made computer with a system they like, but absolutely cannot work around the low storage and ram that are just handicapping for many workloads. Someone who just runs graphic software (either adobe or affinity) with a few other things will get severely limited by 8GB. And it is not a "pro" use case, enough to spend so much money on a computer. So, they get a 1K laptop that has all those things standard and will forget about Apple... Add to that the unhappy ones about their experience with the base model and the long term is not looking good. My cousin routinely tells me he is so upset about the 1.8k he had to spend on a base iMac that is extremely limited and terribly slow for many things because Apple was stingy about the SSD (stupid fusion drive with exceptionally low amount of actual SSD). When he needed a computer for video production (the irony) to cover sports competitions he went with a PC and a cheap video card. Even though the Mac Mini would be a good fit for that I doubt he would even consider it. Right now, what makes him angry is that he has all the data and software on Apple land and the switching cost is tremendous (especially time he does not necessarily have). But when his iMac becomes obsolete, maybe he will try when he sees the base price and remember his unfortunate experience... Apple has loyal fans more than ever, but it is not rosy at all ; the experience of common people does not match what the geeks are saying...
leetharris 3y ago
I am currently typing this from an M2 Max with 64gb of RAM and I have an M1 Pro with 16gb of RAM for personal use. In-between, I got a base M2 Mini with 8gb/256gb SSD. I did extensive dev work, played video games like WoW, and did lots of stuff on that Mini. It never once felt slower than my M2 Max except for the things it simply can't run (high end models, etc). I think people really underestimate what Mac can do with 8gb of RAM. I would obviously prefer 16gb as a base, but I was very pleasantly surprised.
- Zagitta 3y ago
  RAM was rarely about what you can do today but rather how long your device will last. Soldered on RAM and expensive upgrades are defacto planned obsolescence.
  - nateb2022 3y ago
    There are benefits to Apple's implementation of soldered RAM. Unified memory uses less power and helps to boost battery life. A thin chassis is also one of Apple's priorities and soldered memory helps them achieve that. SODIMM slots are relatively thick. Additionally, Apple's unified memory enables bandwidths 4-8x traditional DDR4. It's a matter of tradeoffs, and there are valid points on both sides; it is not merely "defacto planned obsolescence."
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  WoW was released in 2004, and its modern system requirements (including 8GB of RAM on Windows) are extremely modest. And either way, OSX being RAM efficient is no excuse for Apple to release a $1600 machine with 8GB in 2023. Thats just plain planned obsolescence/price discrimination.
lousken 3y ago
same meme as with iphone 6s having 16GBs of storage
- aranelsurion 3y ago
  I basically lost an otherwise perfectly working iPhone 6S+ because of that. Between OS and the apps getting ever larger, it became unusable, until the point I gave up and had to get another phone, and this one was added to the mountains of e-waste.
- BossingAround 3y ago
  Similarly annoying, yes (though some will prefer more SSD space and less RAM than vice versa)
PreInternet01 3y ago
Yes, it does, and it's one of the very few system metrics that Apple still feels worthy enough to list on its store page, so... Praise Be, I guess? It's quite obvious that RAM capacity in the M# world is closely tied to die space occupied by the CPU/GPU cores, and... it's not entirely obvious that this is unreasonable? (unlike, say, an iPhone with 64GB flash) My lowly 2020 M1 MacBook Air has 8GB as well, and it runs Outlook, Teams, Firefox, Xcode and JetBrains Rider just fine, concurrently, for up to an entire workday, on battery, without fan noise. Is that a "Pro" workload? Maybe, maybe not, since that moniker doesn't exactly have a fixed meaning, but it's definitely competitive with laptops in the same price range. If you want to run VMs/containers/whatever, or do heavy AI processing, you know you need more RAM, and, guess what, you can conveniently order an SKU containing just that from Apple. Or, you know, from MSI, Alienware or Lenovo in case 'RTX 4090' is the key to unlocking your "Pro" workflow...
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > It's quite obvious that RAM capacity in the M# world is closely tied to die space occupied by the CPU/GPU cores, and... it's not entirely obvious that this is unreasonable? (unlike, say, an iPhone with 64GB flash) That has nothing to do with the 8GB base. There are 3 different M chips each generation, and each one has a fixed number of memory channels that goes out to seperate RAM chips specced/packaged in a way similar to smartphone RAM. The base M3 is not capped at 8GB. Apple chose to use low capacity LPDDR5X chips in the base config. It was a business/marketing decision, not a technical one.
vasdae 3y ago
I have a laptop computer with 8 GB and it's fine. Obviously it's rubbish to sell a laptop with 8 GB nowadays for that price, but let's not pretend it's unusable.
AISnakeOil 3y ago
Are Apple's RAM chips made of solid gold? I can buy a 16GB DDR5 5200MT/s for $50 on amazon. Someone explain to me why this isn't the case with Macbooks?

25 points by behnamoh 3y ago

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Notably, its $1600 for 8GB/512GB.

karmakaze 3y ago
The iPhone 15 Pro Max 512GB is 1399. With a better camera but smaller screen.
- zen_1 3y ago
  Which also has 8gb of dram. Funny how close these devices are becoming spec-wise
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    I wonder if an iPhone having 8GB of DRAM is a testament to how far we've come, or how stingy Apple is when it comes to the desktop/laptop lineups.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      8GB is good, but not a technical limitation for mobile chips anymore. More LPDDR5X is peanuts in a $1400 phone.

smoldesu 3y ago

At first it was pretty cool to see the price drop, but the more I looked into these models the weirder it got. Why does a $1600 Macbook Pro ship with half the memory of a $400 Steam Deck? Why are the core configurations so weird? Why can't I get a Space Black laptop without buying the Pro models? It's... certainly an interesting decision. I'm doubtful most consumers would notice, but I am left scratching my head here.

behnamoh 3y ago
Yes, this year's M3's are certainly kinda odd. Makes me wonder what M3 Ultra will be like (probably not a significant improvement over M2 Ultra).
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  The might even skip it? Or rearchitect it. The M3 Max would need to have the silicon space to turn into an ultra right now, and thats a lot of die area to spend.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    My bet is a rearchitecture. The M1/M2 Ultra feels constrained by the thermal limitation of the Mac Studio. That's fine, but the current Mac Pro is a testament to how this doesn't really scale up very well. If you want my perverted guess, I think Apple has a skunkworks Mac Pro with a disabled/removed iGPU for testing dGPUs on Apple Silicon. If the eventual goal is to reprise the size, memory capacity and IO throughput of the old Mac Pro, you can't really keep scaling a mobile architecture. You can get pretty far, but the Mac Studio marks a line in the sand where Apple decided to go no further. If Apple sees that market as a valuable one to capture (which I think they do), I think they'll introduce a new Mac designed around the thermal envelope of the current rackmount Mac Pro. The desktop case would get a slight reworking to match it's capacity and specs. From there, I'd expect them to invest heavily in on-die PCI controllers and external GPU support on the software side. If they know what's good for them, it would also be cool to see them extend these features to lower-end Macs with eGPU support over Thunderbolt. Remove the VM limitation, document iBoot for the hardware owners and you've got yourself a surprisingly attractive Apple Silicon server/pro offering. It's a bit of a pipe dream, but it wouldn't shock me to see Apple reintroduce a proper Mac Pro as a "one more thing" moment for us frothing nerds.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      I have heard rumors about a discrete Apple GPU actually. I was thinking its something VR related... But also, its possible that Apple does precisely none of this and just makes huge GPU tiles when their SOCs go tiled anyway. With their margins, they could sell something akin to a MI300A right now.

booi 3y ago

I don't know if this is more of a testament to what MacOS can do with so little RAM, or a confidence that their PCI-e SSD access is so fast you won't feel much difference.

hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
Or an illusion of a choice. Frankly, a machine with a "pro" in their name and 8 GB RAM is an oxymoron. When you look at the apps Apple advertises as playing nicely with their M chips, most of them are memory hungry.
- riscy 3y ago
  Wouldn't there have been widely circulated press about how those apps are unusable with 8GB RAM in the past however-many years it's been the base model? Do you think Apple would advertise that it is suited for those "pro" apps and workloads without having tested it with that model? Imagine the mountain of negative press if it were true that it can barely run Final Cut Pro.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    You can edit video on an iPad with 4gb of RAM, for all the power and comfort it's worth to you. For $1600, in 2023, a Pro machine ought to treat the user better. This thing is like those 4gb Macbook Pros, with the cruel twist that you can't upgrade the memory and make them usable again after an upgrade brings it to it's knees. If your "Pro" machine cannot upgrade it's storage or memory, it ought to ship with all the storage and memory you're going to need for the lifetime of the device. The old Macbook Pro base models did reflect that, even with the paltry phone-sized SSD they shipped. The 13" Macbook Pro had outdated specs that cannot be expected to last into the next decade. Replacing it with an even more expensive, even more outdated model is setting up their customers for regret. Without a doubt in my mind, I am certain that Apple could sell a 16gb Macbook Pro 14" at $1600 and still turn a profit. Their BOM is not tight, Apple margins are not like a console manufacturer.
Boatfaceing 3y ago

based_gigachad2 3y ago

M3 Pro 14 is $1999 and has 18 Gigs of RAM. AFAIK M2 Pro 14 cost the same with 16, so at least there's a small improvement

behnamoh 3y ago
> so at least there's a small improvement Not really. the M3 line has less bandwidth and fewer P cores compared to M2.
- based_gigachad2 3y ago
  We'll need to bench for waitmarks to be certain, Apple showed some good performance improvements for the new cores. And the GPU has ray tracing acceleration now
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    > Apple showed some good performance improvements for the new cores. Compared to "Intel" and M1 Macs...
    - based_gigachad2 3y ago
      Well, there were M2s in the comparisons too, I'd say the improvement is still good, but again we should bench for waitmarks before jumping to conclusions here
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  I bet the M3 has lower task energy (which is important on battery), so we will see.
- huxley 3y ago
  No, only the M3 Pro processors have fewer P cores (5P+6E/6P+6E on M3 Pro vs 6P+4E/8P+4E on the M2 Pro) The entry level M3 has the same number of P cores and bandwidth as the M2 (both are 4P+4E (100GBps)) M3 Max has more P cores than the M2 Max and only the lower P core M3 Max model has less bandwidth (10P+4E (300GBps)/12P+4E (400GBps) vs 8P+4E (400GBps)).

crossroadsguy 3y ago

Enough to use iMessage, Mail, FaceTime etc. What else do you need in a so affordably priced $1600 Mac? Do you want Apple to go bankrupt? Or you’d want people to not be able to buy an “8GB base MacBook Pro”[1]. Oh, that would be unreasonable. [1] Yes, I swear it was a comment on another post from yesterday. HN is either that disconnected or desensitised when it comes to this company. As for why they do/did it? Because they can. There’s really no other reasoning here. Yes, the first part of my comment is rather snarky/sarcastic and maybe in poor taste but this is just pathetic and tomorrow I’d love to see the comments explaining how it makes sense and that maybe it is actually a price drop. And this post is from 2.5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27096022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27096022 (about 8GB RAM, yes)

foldr 3y ago
Most of the empirical comparisons I've seen of the 8GB vs. 16GB models show that you have to push the 8GB models pretty hard before they're noticeably slower. Most of the complaints seem to come from people who are obsessively checking memory usage and have a rather over-simplistic mental model of how RAM is allocated in a modern operating system. (For example, many apps, such as browsers, will happily use more RAM if you give them more RAM.)
- melling 3y ago
  Strange. I’ve got a 10 year old Intel MBP with 16GB of RAM. Even 10 years ago I didn’t think 8GB was enough. You don’t buy a Pro model and let it swap with only 8GB
  - foldr 3y ago
    Yeah, I think a lot of people are assuming that 8GB will work as poorly on an Mx system as it would on an older Intel Mac. But it's widely reported that this is not the case. (The faster SSDs help, and I suspect that memory compression may work more effectively too.) See various anecdotal reports such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38103103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38103103 in this very thread.

_yb2s 3y ago

16gb of ram for PC laptops that still have upgradeable chips costs around $30 retail. Seems pretty crazy for Apple to severely cripple such an expensive machine with no real savings to them.

behnamoh 3y ago
I'd probably be ok with 8GB on a MacBook Air (but I'd still nag about it). But to put 8GB on a "Pro" model...
josephcsible 3y ago
It's not "pretty crazy": it's price discrimination. By making their base model almost unusably underspecced, even with almost zero cost savings, they make sure that nobody who can afford a really expensive one will buy a "cheap" one.
- _yb2s 3y ago
  I don’t see how that could work in practice. Most people I know are confused about the difference between ram and storage… they are going to trust that “pro” means it will be fast for normal “non computer nerd” use cases, and when it isn’t they won’t buy from Apple next time. Many single apps used by non technical people like Adobe Photoshop require 16gb nowadays.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  The iMac shows this off in so many ways. First there's no 27 inch option because Tim Apple wants to sell Studio Displays. But then the specs. Base model has 2 USB ports, no Ethernet, and a 256GB SSD. Given that I can go buy a pretty excellent 512GB PCIe 3.0 for $25, it just seems insulting to start so low. And then look at the frigging price of upgrade! It's $200 to upgrade to 512GB! Holy shit, I could go get a great 4TB Crucial P3 Plus for that. Ditto for $200 for 8GB->16GB. It's just wild what this company does.
- seec 3y ago
  Well at least that is the theory. They are losing sales from people who could reason around compromising performance (speed mostly) but making the effort to get a "better" made computer with a system they like, but absolutely cannot work around the low storage and ram that are just handicapping for many workloads. Someone who just runs graphic software (either adobe or affinity) with a few other things will get severely limited by 8GB. And it is not a "pro" use case, enough to spend so much money on a computer. So, they get a 1K laptop that has all those things standard and will forget about Apple... Add to that the unhappy ones about their experience with the base model and the long term is not looking good. My cousin routinely tells me he is so upset about the 1.8k he had to spend on a base iMac that is extremely limited and terribly slow for many things because Apple was stingy about the SSD (stupid fusion drive with exceptionally low amount of actual SSD). When he needed a computer for video production (the irony) to cover sports competitions he went with a PC and a cheap video card. Even though the Mac Mini would be a good fit for that I doubt he would even consider it. Right now, what makes him angry is that he has all the data and software on Apple land and the switching cost is tremendous (especially time he does not necessarily have). But when his iMac becomes obsolete, maybe he will try when he sees the base price and remember his unfortunate experience... Apple has loyal fans more than ever, but it is not rosy at all ; the experience of common people does not match what the geeks are saying...

leetharris 3y ago

I am currently typing this from an M2 Max with 64gb of RAM and I have an M1 Pro with 16gb of RAM for personal use. In-between, I got a base M2 Mini with 8gb/256gb SSD. I did extensive dev work, played video games like WoW, and did lots of stuff on that Mini. It never once felt slower than my M2 Max except for the things it simply can't run (high end models, etc). I think people really underestimate what Mac can do with 8gb of RAM. I would obviously prefer 16gb as a base, but I was very pleasantly surprised.

Zagitta 3y ago
RAM was rarely about what you can do today but rather how long your device will last. Soldered on RAM and expensive upgrades are defacto planned obsolescence.
- nateb2022 3y ago
  There are benefits to Apple's implementation of soldered RAM. Unified memory uses less power and helps to boost battery life. A thin chassis is also one of Apple's priorities and soldered memory helps them achieve that. SODIMM slots are relatively thick. Additionally, Apple's unified memory enables bandwidths 4-8x traditional DDR4. It's a matter of tradeoffs, and there are valid points on both sides; it is not merely "defacto planned obsolescence."
brucethemoose2 3y ago
WoW was released in 2004, and its modern system requirements (including 8GB of RAM on Windows) are extremely modest. And either way, OSX being RAM efficient is no excuse for Apple to release a $1600 machine with 8GB in 2023. Thats just plain planned obsolescence/price discrimination.

lousken 3y ago

same meme as with iphone 6s having 16GBs of storage

aranelsurion 3y ago
I basically lost an otherwise perfectly working iPhone 6S+ because of that. Between OS and the apps getting ever larger, it became unusable, until the point I gave up and had to get another phone, and this one was added to the mountains of e-waste.
BossingAround 3y ago
Similarly annoying, yes (though some will prefer more SSD space and less RAM than vice versa)

PreInternet01 3y ago

Yes, it does, and it's one of the very few system metrics that Apple still feels worthy enough to list on its store page, so... Praise Be, I guess? It's quite obvious that RAM capacity in the M# world is closely tied to die space occupied by the CPU/GPU cores, and... it's not entirely obvious that this is unreasonable? (unlike, say, an iPhone with 64GB flash) My lowly 2020 M1 MacBook Air has 8GB as well, and it runs Outlook, Teams, Firefox, Xcode and JetBrains Rider just fine, concurrently, for up to an entire workday, on battery, without fan noise. Is that a "Pro" workload? Maybe, maybe not, since that moniker doesn't exactly have a fixed meaning, but it's definitely competitive with laptops in the same price range. If you want to run VMs/containers/whatever, or do heavy AI processing, you know you need more RAM, and, guess what, you can conveniently order an SKU containing just that from Apple. Or, you know, from MSI, Alienware or Lenovo in case 'RTX 4090' is the key to unlocking your "Pro" workflow...

brucethemoose2 3y ago
> It's quite obvious that RAM capacity in the M# world is closely tied to die space occupied by the CPU/GPU cores, and... it's not entirely obvious that this is unreasonable? (unlike, say, an iPhone with 64GB flash) That has nothing to do with the 8GB base. There are 3 different M chips each generation, and each one has a fixed number of memory channels that goes out to seperate RAM chips specced/packaged in a way similar to smartphone RAM. The base M3 is not capped at 8GB. Apple chose to use low capacity LPDDR5X chips in the base config. It was a business/marketing decision, not a technical one.

vasdae 3y ago

I have a laptop computer with 8 GB and it's fine. Obviously it's rubbish to sell a laptop with 8 GB nowadays for that price, but let's not pretend it's unusable.

AISnakeOil 3y ago

Are Apple's RAM chips made of solid gold? I can buy a 16GB DDR5 5200MT/s for $50 on amazon. Someone explain to me why this isn't the case with Macbooks?