7 ms·
8GB vs. 16GB M3 Mac
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThat Macrumors thread is pretty nasty. How is it that HN has stayed so relatively civilized for so long? I'm a newbie here, but I know HN is pretty old, and it's less nasty than the oldschool forums I remember.
- mahmoudhossam 3y agoThe answer is moderation, HN has some really experienced mods.
- seanw444 3y agoI think there's a culture on HN too that most of us enjoy and try to maintain. When a low-quality/low-effort or not at all relevant comment comes in, it gets downvoted to oblivion. Forming that culture from the beginning is the hardest part, but now that we're all used to it, maintaining it is a lot easier now.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoWhat filters to the front page is interesting too. For instance, I just saw what was clearly a artificially promoted post in /new with 17 upvotes... and no real responses? It wasn't even flagged. I think it was shadowbanned from the front page, and everyone looking at /new just collectively knew to ignore it. Another interesting bit is the flagging/vouching system. It would be in a disaster some places, but is very effective here.
- ianai 3y agoThey're more nasty. But I think it shows a wider push back against 8gb ram base models, too.
- hesdeadjim 3y agoYea and rightly so, 8GB in 2023 on a “Pro” model is egregiously profit motivated.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoYeah, it was already debated 12 hours ago. My take is it costs Apple more to make an 8GB SKU (they have to package with the CPU, test, support and so on) rather than just consolidating it down to a 16GB base. Even setting user requirements aside, it makes no economic sense unless you assume Apple is motivated by planned obsolescence and upselling. But still, there's a lot of insulting and vitriol on Macrumors. Not much "8GB is fine an here's a polite, thought out reason why..." and more "8GB is fine and you are an idiot jerk complainer (insert more unrelated personal attacks) for not even seeing that in the first place," and vice versa.
- BirAdam 3y agoThis marketing/labeling is what I find insane. I wouldn’t be bothered at all if the Air came with 8GB standard. A machine with low storage, low RAM, low GPU core count, and so on then being labeled as Pro is just insane. It kind of makes their product lines not make sense too. Why even have these distinctions? If the entry level Air and Pro have the same specs, why make two different products? Apple clearly generates more revenue than any company I’ve ever worked for, so I should probably shut my mouth, but their entire product naming and positioning of the last several years has seemed inconsistent and childish to me.
- jmull 3y agoThese seems quite illogical to me. If there was no 8GB option, the price of the base model would be higher -- going by the comments, apparently $200 higher. That would kind of screw over the people who don't open 20 Lightroom tabs or similar workloads, who might want that $200 for something else. I guess people are imagining that if the 8GB option didn't exist then 16GB could be had for the same price, but that isn't rational. I think all Apple customers would quite like their prices to be lower, of course, but it's not like they are suddenly about to change from a publicly traded for-profit company to a charity organization.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- solardev 3y agoWe have a dang. (Edited for proper awesomeness)
- rpmisms 3y agoPeople who think they're smart tend to get snippy. See: Ars Technica comments. We have a constant source of humility by being reminded that there are much smarter people out there, and we have excellent moderation.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoYeah. Politeness is part of the culture, but HN does have a conspicuously high chance of someone professionally involved in the discussed topic popping in.
- rpmisms 3y agoYeah, or the inventor of the technology. Seen that happen a few times. Always a treat.
- vehemenz 3y agoThere is a cross section of Macrumors that behaves like tech YouTube. That is, they're obsessed with on-paper specs (rather than real-world performance) and have a hair-trigger on calling out Apple for insufficient spec bumps. 8GB is still sufficient for many workloads, and where it isn't, memory optimization by macOS and fast SSD swap can make up the difference. I think many people fail to realize that the starting price is dependent on the 8GB configuration, and if Apple bumps it up, then we'll have the same people complaining about the entry-level price. There's no winning with some people.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago> the starting price is dependent on the 8GB configuration I disagree with this. I posit that it would save Apple money to chop off the 8GB SKU and sell the 16GB model (with the smaller SSD) as a base. This wasn't necessarily the case with the M1/M2. But 8GB of DRAM is dirt cheap these days.
- richardw 3y agoIt used to be incredibly civilised and while that has drifted it still has a memory. Plus amazing mod, who legend says can fork himself at will. Here is written the infinitely patient guidance of dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang Here are the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- raverbashing 3y agoInteresting test, which just goes to confirm how 8GB is limiting It would be fun to test a 16GB PC with similar software (lightroom, etc) just to see how it compares (the comments on TFA are something else, some people take criticism of Apple too personally it seems)
- lawlessone 3y agoSame amount of ram in the s22.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoAnd my (2018) Razer Phone 2.
- rcarr 3y agoThe higher end S22 Ultra models even have 12GB RAM which does go to show how ridiculous it is that Apple consider 8GB of RAM to be acceptable for a laptop at that price point in this day and age.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago> with similar software The interpretation of this is important, as many Windows PCs come with unspeakably bad bloatware out of the box, not to mention stuff that's piled on by users like questionable antivirus suites and huge background auto updaters. And then there's the question of hardware. Lets say the closest analogue to a Mac's low-noise GPU performance is an Asus G14... then you are factoring in discrete GPU RAM. If you just pick a decent AMD-7000 series IGP laptop, then its way cheaper than the Mac, but has less GPU oomph.
- binkHN 3y agoI just bought a brand new AMD ThinkPad with 64GB of memory for a good deal less than the 8GB Mac. No thank you.
- SamuelAdams 3y agoRam is not the only consideration in a laptop. In my experience Apple products have much better screens, trackpads, and speakers than any thinkpad product. Personally my machines have 16 GB of ram. If I ever need more I will ssh into an actual server (in my basement or cloud-hosted) and run a ram intensive workload there.
- bakugo 3y agoDoesn't really matter how great the rest of the hardware is if anything heavier than browsing the web brings it to its knees.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoI can do a lot more than browse the web without my 8GB Air being brought to its knees.
- piva00 3y agoWhich it doesn't, since a 16GB RAM M1 Air can be used for photo editing, light video editing, music production, programming, etc.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> In my experience Apple products have much better screens That depends on the definition of "better". Mac laptops' screens are ultra brittle. To me the first quality of a laptop's screen is how sturdy it is. My laptop (LG Gram) has a screen which I can literally bend/deform and whose previous owner (I bought it from a friend) stepped on it when he woke up. People love to make full of "MILSPEC" (MILitary SPEC) because "that means nothing" but my LG Gram can literally be thrown down concrete stairs and it'll still work, like this dude (not me) on Youtube tried (skip at 0:35): https://youtu.be/herYV5TJ_m8 https://youtu.be/herYV5TJ_m8 Try that with a Mac laptop. To me that's a "better screen" than my Mac M1's screen that broke after 13 months, overnight for no reason, just out of warranty (because I didn't pay the 20% additional Apple tax to have an extended warranty).
- aeturnum 3y agoThose tests are what I would expect but I will say that I think most people who buy base configuration macs are not doing heavy production workloads like those tested. Doubling your ram is certainly going to be the most cost efficient upgrade, but I'm not convinced that the majority of buyers of the base model would find that to be money well spent.
- karmakaze 3y agoWithout RAM upgradability, it's a risky bet even for those buyers.
- aeturnum 3y agoI generally agree - I recommend friends get at least 16gb - but I also know many non-technical people who just don't value "high performance" as much as I do. I would never put up with the way their computers perform, but they are totally disinterested in spending any more money on a computer. They are happy, even if by some metric they have bought a dumb configuration.
- faeriechangling 3y agoOh I knew somebody who bought the cheapest thing in the shop when it comes to electronics every time and would only upgrade if he absolutely could not make it work.
- wjnc 3y agoAt the end of the day Apple killed of the usability of the 32GB iPad with iPadOS 17. So future release expectations should be taken into account dealing with Apple. The economics are different if a stroke of Apple can diminish the life expectancy of a machine by years.
- Mister_Snuggles 3y agoThat's more about storage than RAM though. I don't think any iPad has 32G of RAM.
- jmull 3y agoThis is a fascinating psychological phenomenon: People can get absolutely furious when something is offered for sale that they don't personally want to buy. To me this attitude is bizarre, but apparently this is mortally offensive to some people.
- rs999gti 3y agoIt's the power of Brand Loyalty.
- vrosas 3y agoIt's more like, people complain that something you _are_ going to buy costs more than they want. Apple has had this exact pricing model for decades now. People are always complaining the base configuration (for macs, iphones, etc) are underpowered and they have to fork up the extra $$$ for the better specs but Apple knows they're going to do it anyway.
- martinald 3y agoI do feel it is starting to become a real joke now though which is affecting their brand. I think also over the lifetime of the M3 models it'll start to become a real issue for even 'basic' work as RAM usage continues to increase.
- whatever1 3y agoIt is enraging because I know that not technical people will buy it and then after suffering 2 years they will seek for an upgrade, not knowing that this is just a memory issue. Which btw could be an easy and cheap upgrade, but no, with apple you have to toss the 1600 machine altogether. Similar to the situation where apple was downgrading the iphone cpu after a year to hide their faulty batteries.
- pythonaut_16 3y agoI know multiple people coming up on their 3rd year with an 8gb base-model Macbook Air with no complaints or thoughts of upgrading.
- m3kw9 3y agoIs overall speed faster than M2, if yes then buy
- beebeepka 3y agoRAM is RAM. Saying yours is built with 50% more magic dust is always going to result in flamewars, sadly. They say there are no bad products, just bad price points.
- lloda 3y agoIf 8 GB is ok for you, you don't need an M3 chip with tons of cores, either. You can just keep using your old laptop. Apple has kept the same base memory on these machines for a decade and now they are horribly unbalanced.
- smlacy 3y agoOr maybe even just a $500 Chromebook?
- ajross 3y agoReally-very-performant 8G quad core Tiger Lake Chromebooks are sub-$300 now, actually. Moved to one (finally, after much delay and insistence that no-I-really-need-a-Linux-Thinkpad) for my everyday client and, other than a few old keybindings I can't get out of my muscle memory... I miss nothing. It's great. And contra Windows or Linux laptop integration, it really does have an all-day battery.
- binkHN 3y agoI love my Chrome machines; they really are diamonds in the rough for simple tasks, and you can take them much further with the built-in Linux VM/environment.
- grvdrm 3y agoDo you recommend a brand/model?
- askiiart 3y agoIf you're looking for a fairly cheap one, Lenovo *00e series has been good for me. EXCEPT for the 100e, that has a design flaw that makes it easy for pins to cross in the USB-C charging port, permanently bricking the device. So except for the 100e, that series is great. Walmart's marketplace has a 500e listed for $92 right now, and it's also mostly compatible with all operatimg systems via Chrultrabook.
- qalmakka 3y agoI got 8 GB of RAM with a ~€900 laptop back in 2012. 8 GB were a lot back then, but not an immense amount. How the heck does Apple justify selling 8 GB RAM laptops in 2023? My two years old phone has that amount of RAM. This is clearly a way to make their products look cheaper than they are.
- pieresqi 3y ago[dead]
- mastax 3y agoApple has finely tuned their pricing ladder to push people to spend more, and storage and memory are a big part of that. For example (pricing is from memory and probably incorrect, but illustrates the point) The base iPad is a pretty capable tablet and a good deal at $329, but it only has 64GB storage and I want to load it up with movies and games for long road trips. But upgrading to 256GB storage bumps the price to $479. At that price I may as well get the iPad (10th Gen) for $449 and get the nicer screen. But that only comes with 64GB storage and 256GB storage costs $599. But for that price I can get an iPad air and all the benefits that brings. But that only comes with 64GB storage... It may be illogical but I have personally gone through that process, starting out thinking I need a basic tablet for content consumption and ending up at the Apple store looking at iPad Pro because otherwise I'd feel like I was getting ripped off paying too much for storage. They do the same thing with the Mac lineup.
- zzzcsgo 3y agoYou are super confusing... Perhaps less than Apple though
- StillBored 3y agoThis seems like a case of someone needing to benchmark app switching with a fast camera. The compressed ram is going to do a good job of swapping out stuff that isn't really running, but then presumably swapping a browser tab, or app to the foreground and reactivating it should presumably have some additional lag.
- dvfjsdhgfv 3y agoI support this public shaming campaign and hope Apple listens this time. They do listen sometimes (hello ports in new MBPs!) but usually they do it with a delay, so I'm not sure about M4 but M5 should have 16 GB in the base model.