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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
by 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.