8 ms·
Apple argues in favor of selling Macs with only 8GB of RAM
- valianteffort 3y ago[flagged]
- moe_sc 3y agoNonody argues they know better than Apple, they argue apple deliberatly sells devices that are borderline unusable (not saying they are).
- encom 3y ago>deliberatly sells devices that are borderline unusable Some of us remember how Apple stuck with hard drives in many of their models (iMac, notably), long after SSDs were mainstream. They absolutely will sell borderline unusable machines.
- FireBeyond 3y agoWhat's the lifetime write capacity on those SSDs? 150TB? Fire up Teams, Outlook, and a couple of tabs in Chrome and you'll see 8-10MB/s of paging. That's approximately 30GB/hr of SSD writes. Even using for office tasks that's 1.2TB of writes a week just for memory paging. > They're not going to produce devices people won't buy. They ARE going to produce devices people will replace.
- washadjeffmad 3y ago>150TB It's more. We've got a few hundred launch M1s and have seen no exclusive storage failures yet, a big contrast to the T2s. We're defintiely past the 150 week mark, but if we start seeing the bathtub curve in effect before the 5-yr warranties burn, I'll post back.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoI don't think disagreeing with you will change Apple's mind or make what you say any less true. People don't realize how much storage and memory characteristics have changed. Between sub-usec latency and multi-GB throughput, it's no longer a two-week trek through the Yukon for every disk access, and there's no performance benefit to buying the largest ice chest you can afford to store your rations to prevent swapping. Mac storage is faster today than memory was back when they were maxing it out.
- postalrat 3y agoHow dare they suggest they know what they want better than Apple.
- mvkel 3y agoBecause they're sustaining record quarterly profits. Ask the average person: "would you rather pay $200 more for the base model, but get 8gb more ram?" The person would respond "what is ram?" People say they hate how media always portrays negative news. But bad news always gets the most views.
- kirso 3y agoYou can tell by the outrage every single time the new MBA/MBP model comes out.
- smcleod 3y agoWhile 8GB might be able to run macOS quite quickly for basic tasks, there's no way less than 16GB should ever be an option for people using the modern internet or applications. Given the popularity of bloatware such as Electron, Chrome etc.... even 16GB is a stretch. Heck even Apple's own Music app easily uses over 2GB of RAM at times.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoThe majority of Apple owners are not using them for anything more than office productivity, light multimedia consumption, and web browsing. They rarely use more than two of those applications at a time. Given iPhones have 6GB of RAM, I think 8GB is fairly generous for the average Apple user.
- smcleod 3y agoI think you're making massive assumptions on how people use computers these days. Also, iPhones don't have to run anything like the same software, no Electron, no Chrome etc....
- nozzlegear 3y ago> I think you're making massive assumptions on how people use computers these days. I hear this a lot, but my own experience doesn’t stack up. It’s just anecdata or whatever the cool kids say, but: my mother, two sisters and brother all have their own laptops. None of them work in tech, and I’ve never put my finger on the scale to persuade them to get a laptop either — if anything I’ve tried to persuade them to get iPads in the past so I don’t have to play IT department when something goes wrong. For reference, my mother is a nurse practitioner, sister 1 is a daycare director, sister 2 is self-employed working for her husband’s construction company, and my brother just has odd jobs working at gas stations and youth counseling. All four of them have asked me for some kind of help or advice about their laptops in the last couple of months, so I know they actively use them. My sister with the daycare called me just a couple days ago to help her get her laptop connected to a projector so she could give a PowerPoint presentation to her employees.
- FireBeyond 3y ago> Apple’s VP of hardware engineering, praised Apple Silicon chips for their unified memory architecture "Apple exec praises Apple decisions". Teams, Outlook, and Chrome open on an 8GB Mac are enough to make it page 8-10MB/second steadily.
- fingerlocks 3y agoHow are you measuring these page faults? Are you including the shared CoW regions? I’m not getting the same results
- dangus 3y ago~Two~ four things are/can be simultaneously true: - 8GB is enough for the base model buyer. I did stuff that most consumers don't do on an 8GB M1 MBA like editing 4K video in Final Cut Pro and I didn't notice any performance issues. If you just want a computer that gets some work done and you're willing to refrain from being a huge Chrome tab hoarder, it's fine. It handles 10-30 tabs just fine and that should be enough for anyone. - Apple shouldn't offer 8GB as the base model simply because the component cost of 16GB is incredibly trivial, and they're offering a product that works fine now but they know won't be sufficient in the near future. A $200 upgrade is completely unacceptable to get to 16GB because it's close to 10x the retail cost of a stick of 8GB DDR5 memory. - The base model is a price anchor and Apple intends to upsell many/most buyers to their desired average selling price. This argument is just a dismissal of a persistent question that won't go away. - The average buyer shouldn't stress out about this and just pretend the cost is higher. Just say to yourself "The MacBook Air 15" is $1699" and compare it with other computers on that basis. You'd be surprised at how competitive it is. E.g., compare to the XPS 14 16GB/512GB at the exact same price, very similar-performing processor/integrated graphics, with a lower resolution screen (you'd have to add another $300 to get something that is considered high DPI). [1] I assume that the M series chips are cheaper for Apple. The fact that Apple's design is in-house and subsidized by sharing the design with the world's most popular smartphone should mean that they are saving a significant amount of cost compared to buying processors from Intel.
- darkhorn 3y agoI wonder why Apple didn't continue to use retina display. They were arguing that its resolution was enough for the ayes and more resolution will not be noticible. Now same stories for RAM.
- nunez 3y agoAll it takes to push an 8GB Mac over the edge these days is a video call on Zoom or Teams and a bunch of tabs open in Chrome.