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Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB on a PC
- sccxy 3y ago"Chromebook exec defends 8GB in $499 Chromebook" would be fine but not in $1599 MacBook "Pro".
- jeffbee 3y agoGoogle had marketed several expensive Chromebooks with 8gb. They all worked fine.
- spacechild1 3y ago> "Actually 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently," Interesting. So my sound samples magically shrink by a factor of two?
- jowea 3y agoYou use the processor power to compress it 2x! /s
- pornel 3y agoThey literally do. Since 10.9, before paging to disk, they try compress the memory instead. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/
- spacechild1 3y agoAs do Windows and Linux. Just in case someone takes this as a serious argument in favor of Apple :)
- cesarb 3y ago> As do Windows and Linux Just to nitpick, on Linux it depends on your distribution (or yourself) having enabled zram; some modern distributions enable it by default on recent releases, but yours might not have.
- jowea 3y agoAnd for anyone who is on a distro who hasn't IMHO you absolute should enable it yourself on your personal machine unless you have 128GB or something.
- ebb_earl_co 3y agoI’m using Pop!_OS 22.04: how can I go about checking if this is enabled and enable it if not?
- jowea 3y agoSays here it's enabled by default now https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/104kbs4/zram_now_enabled_by_default_in_pop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/104kbs4/zram_now_en... You can run 'zramctl' to see the current status of the zram devices.
- TheAdamist 3y ago16GB pc isn't even the correct comparison, on apple its 8GB unified between cpu+gpu+more. The 16GB pc equivalent, especially for equivalent pricing of a mbp is going to have a video card with dedicated vram in addition. A $1549 dell xps has a 6GB Nvidia card, with options for 4GB-8GB cards. 8GB equivalent to 22GB is the real comparison we should be making and the answer is obviously no. Especially with all the other io performance cuts apple has been making. Now you will say theres far more bloatware on the windows laptop, especially in a corporate environment necessitating all that ram, and thats true. For light use 8gb would be plenty, but its not going to cut it for power users. Im also curious what the "memory compression" they use is, i would imagine its similar to linux compressed in memory swap. Unless they are just talking standard gpu texture compression and such.
- cjk 3y agomacOS has been doing memory compression for years. Basically, apps and background processes that are idle have their memory compressed, and then upon exiting idle (due to user interaction, a timer firing, etc.), the memory is decompressed. The compressed memory doesn’t touch swap. It’s possible that Apple Silicon has some hardware acceleration for doing this in-place memory compression, but otherwise it’s pretty old news, which makes this marketing shtick even more frustrating. 8GB was borderline not enough even back when memory compression was added to macOS (maybe ~10 years ago?).
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago> macOS has been doing memory compression for years So has Windows. With multi-core CPUs, it’s easy to do so without impacting performance in most cases.
- spacechild1 3y agoAnd Linux (although not enabled by default on some distros).
- RetroTechie 3y agoSo any working set that fits into 16 GB but exceeds 8 GB, eats into cpu performance and/or SSD longevity. That's fine for a low-end laptop in 2023, and if you're upfront about that tradeoff. For a ~$1500 laptop, that's just marketing bs.
- kgbcia 3y agoIt's like the toilet paper companies saying 16 rolls is the equivalent of 32 rolls. Marketing smoke and mirrors
- kibibu 3y ago"it's basically equivalent because with ours you can use both sides"
- leosanchez 3y agoI mean if your using Chrome it is going to hog your RAM anyway right ? Or is there something special about Macs I don't know.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoYou're supposed to be using Safari
- QwertyPi 3y agoPresumably if you care about memory usage you're not gonna use chrome to begin with
- sgarland 3y agoWhile I have no idea what an equivalent Windows laptop feels like with 8 GiB of RAM, in Apple’s defense, most end-users are unlikely to notice the inevitable swapping that occurs. The NVMe drives, save for the M2 lower-spec’s units, are absurdly fast. I have a base M1 Air, and didn’t think anything was swapping until I bothered to actually check. The only times I’ve ever known that I needed more than 8 GiB on my Air is working with VMs. This is presumably a common use case for devs via Docker, but for anything else I question the actual need for more.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoWon't they they notice when their drives suffer from write exhaustion much sooner than larger memory models used for similar purposes?
- nullindividual 3y agoThis isn’t going to happen within the device’s useful lifetime.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoWon't it? Devices can live a long time. And if the drives are user replaceable then even longer!
- bravetraveler 3y agoThey last for years with constant writes; on the order of magnitude with petabytes The properties surely vary among drives... but this isn't worth much concern I'd throw a computer swapping this much out the window before the NAND would give up
- curt15 3y agoA typical Samsung SSD is warrantied for between 100 and 500 TBW[1]. [1] https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/internal-ssd/870evo/ https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/intern...
- mrkeen 3y agoYou only need 8GB RAM per mouse button.
- henriquez 3y ago8GB of RAM per Chrome tab, fortunately Safari triple-compresses the memory to an effective total of 48gb per gb
- throwaway22032 3y ago8GB on a non-toy laptop in 2023 just seems like e-waste to me. Come on. Smartphones have 8GB ram now.
- sixothree 3y agoOn top of that the $3999 Macbook Pro comes with a 1TB ssd. I wish I was joking.
- cesarb 3y ago> Smartphones have 8GB ram now. I took a quick look at the site of a major retailer here, and the first smartphone I clicked on (Moto E22) has 4GB of RAM; I then clicked on five other smartphone models, and of them, three also have 4GB of RAM (the other two have 2GB and 3GB). My own main smartphone (which is neither of these models, and is a reasonably high-end model) also has 4GB of RAM. From this quick look, it seems 8GB of RAM isn't that common for smartphones.
- sccxy 3y ago> Moto E22 Your example phone is less than $100 and they can provide 4GB RAM in that price range. MacBook Pro with 8GB is $1600. I guess your comment just proved parent comments point.
- Woshiwuja 3y ago8 GB is fairly common in >500 euros phones
- rchaud 3y agocomparing Apples to Acers. My 2021 Samsung Fold has 12GB RAM.
- race_condition 3y agoGoogle Pixel 7 has 8GB of RAM. Motorola Edge (2023), $349.99 (USD) has 8GB of RAM.
- lacrimacida 3y agoI think the only reasoning for this is to charge a much higher premium for 16Gb+ It’s like a marketing gimmick…
- wand3r 3y agoI almost commented this earlier. Wtf is going on in the papergoods space. Papertowel packages literally say 4=12 rolls. Baffling
- erkt 3y agoIs no one using AI models for inferencing on Apple hardware? I imagine you can’t compress memory you are actively using. These computers must blue screen for even thinking of going to huggingface.
- jondwillis 3y agoI paid for a 64GB M1 Max two years ago and don’t even do local inference in a serious way.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoYeah, Apple and AI is effectively a meme, not unlike the PlayStation 2 missile crisis: https://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-intelligence-dismisses-ps2-missile-fears/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-intelligence-dismisses-ps2-...
- underseacables 3y agoMy gut tells me this is more of the Apple distortion field.
- hospitalJail 3y agoYou can literally see the mind control they have ITT. Its incredible and scary.
- pier25 3y agoThe exec is head of product marketing. The technical people at Apple must be doing triple facepalms.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- r0ckarong 3y agoAnd yet the fanboys will lap it up and defend their double efficiency memory.
- Woshiwuja 3y agoAh yes, 8 = 16. Silly me
- supermatt 3y agoWhen the m1 came out I got the 8GB version and at the time I felt that it did indeed feel like it was like 16GB. I’m not sure what has changed, but it definitely doesn’t feel like that anymore, even after a fresh reinstall.
- taylodl 3y agoYou don't want to buy Apple's entry-level tier. Buy up - it'll last a lot longer. My daily driver is a 2012 MBP. I'm looking to replace it (it's 11.5 years old and is still running just fine). To me it looks like the machine to go for to replace my daily driver is the MBP with the M3 Pro and 36 GB of RAM. It costs $400 less than what I paid for my existing machine in 2012 - and that's in 2023 dollars. $3199 in 2012 is worth $4200 today. @2800 vs. $4200. That's $1400 cheaper, in today's dollars, than what I paid back then - and I'm getting a helluva lot better machine for it, and I should be able to get a machine I can use for at least 8-10 years. Is it the cheapest route? Probably not. Is MacOS the best OS today? For my purposes, yes, but it's not a hands-down yes. Yes, this machine costs more than $1599, $1200 more. But it's a machine I'm planning on using for 10 years so that works out to $10 per month. I think it's worth it.
- sccxy 3y agoIt is MacBook "Pro". Entry level tier should be MacBook Air then. Apple is just tricking people that they get "Pro" machine, but in reality it is not "Pro".
- taylodl 3y agoThat's a good point, a machine having the moniker "Pro" should have more than 8 Gb of RAM for its entry-level configuration.
- Hyzer 3y agoI suddenly needed to replace my maxed out M1 Pro Max with a new laptop a couple months ago. The base M2 Air 8GB was the only one that would ship to me quickly. I was reluctant because I figured it would barely be functional with that much memory - before I got rid of my Pro, I loaded up my usual workload and checked how much memory was being used in total, and it was easily more than 8GB. But I've been doing my usual (Firefox with many tabs, VS Code with a bunch of tabs and a couple windows, a Next.js dev server or two, multiple terminals, sometimes even more apps open) and I haven't noticed even a slight struggle to handle the load, no frame drops or anything. Of course, it only supports 1 external monitor instead of the 2 I was using with the Pro. I'm sure it would struggle with the heavier VM/docker workloads. But it handles medium demands just fine.
- djaro 3y agoFor more demanding tasks like video editing, even 16gb is not that much. Especially when you're working on big projects with hundreds of files and 100GB+ of footage. I can't see how any "pro" device only has 8gb in 2023
- sneed_chucker 3y agoIt really sucks that Apple continues to make these E-waste base models. I quite like their hardware as well as their software, but moves like this continue to sully my view of the company.
- solarkraft 3y agoThey're kind of right. They work differently from what you're probably used to from older/different systems. They don't run into a brick wall when swapping, in fact they swap all the time (very heavily; a lot of a running Application can be swapped-out on normal use). You're never really "out of RAM", you're just increasing memory pressure which gradually impacts the system's responsiveness. Though I might add is that at some point they do fail catastrophically (extreme lag sometimes leading to crashes) once the pressure goes into the red.