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If these things will ever get MacOS support it will be useless with 8 GB of Ram. Such a waste of nice components.
by KeplerBoy 2y ago
If these things will ever get MacOS support it will be useless with 8 GB of Ram.
Such a waste of nice components.
- tamrix 2y agoWhy can't they just make it 12gb? It will sell far easier. It's all soldered on anyway.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoIt probably has a 128 bit buswidth. You need 32 bit per memory chip, so you end up with 4 chips. 3 GB ram chips probably exist, but are definitely not common.
- TheBigSalad 2y agoThe point is: 8GB of RAM is really, really cheap. Like $20 retail.
- greggsy 2y agoThis comes up frequently. 8GB is sufficient for most casual and light productivity use cases. Not everyone is a power user, in fact, most people aren’t.
- regularfry 2y agoMy dev laptop is an 8GB M1. It's fine. Mostly. I can't run podman, slack, teams, and llama3-8B in llama.cpp at the same time. Oddly enough, this is rarely a problem.
- prepend 2y agoIt’s the “Mostly” part that sucks. What’s the price difference between 8 and 16? Like $3 in wholesale prices. This just seems like lameness on Apple’s part.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoIt's not quite like that. Apple's RAM is in the SoC package, it might be closer to 20$, but still.
- TremendousJudge 2y agoThey have always done this, for some reason people buy it anyway, so they have no incentive to stop doing it.
- Aurornis 2y ago> What’s the price difference between 8 and 16? Like $3 in wholesale prices. Your estimates are not even close. You can't honestly think that LPDDR5 at leading edge speeds is only $3 per 64 Gb (aka 8GB), right? Your estimate is off my an order of magnitude. The memory Apple is using is closer to $40 for that increment, not $3. And yes, they include a markup, because nobody is integrating hardware parts and selling them at cost. But if you think the fastest LPDDR5 around only costs $3 for 8GB, that's completely out of touch with reality.
- moooo99 2y agoEven if taking raising market prices into account, your estimate for the RAM module price is waaaaaaay off. You can get 8GB of good quality DDR5 DIMMs for 40$, there is no way in hell that Apple is paying anywhere near that. Going from 8 to 16GBs is probably somewhere between 3-8$ purely in material costs for Apple, not taking into account any other costs associated
- smarx007 2y agoGP said "LPDDR5" and that Apple won't sell at component prices. You mention DIMMs and component prices instead. This is unhelpful. See https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/memory/774?s=N4IgjCBcpgLATFUBjKAzAhgGwM4FMAaEAeygG0QA2WABgGYAOSkAXSIAcAXKEAZU4BOASwB2AcxABfSUUSQKWdgBMlAgKytJQA https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/memory/774... for LPDDR5 prices. You can get a price of $48/chip at a volume of 2000 chips. Assuming that Apple got a deal of $30-40-ish at a few orders of magnitude larger order is quite fair. Though it certainly would be nicer if Apple priced 8GB increments not much above $80-120.
- flawsofar 2y agoLocal LLMs are sluggish on my M2 Air 8GB, but up until these these things I felt I could run whatever I wanted, including Baldur’s Gate 3.
- Aurornis 2y agoSame here. My secondary laptop is 8GB of RAM and it's fine. As devs and power users we'll always have an edge case for higher RAM usage, but the average consumer is going to be perfectly fine with 8GB of RAM. All of these comments about how 8GB of RAM is going to make it "unusable" or a "waste of components" are absurd.
- luyu_wu 2y agoThe point you're missing is that it's about the future. I generally agree, but it's obvious everything becomes more RAM intensive as time goes on. Hell, even games can take more than 8 GB of purely VRam these days.
- 6SixTy 2y agoIt's really not weird. The more you charge for the base product and upgrades, serving the bare minimum becomes less acceptable. It also doesn't help that the 4GB base models from years past aged super quickly compared to it's higher end cousins.
- camel-cdr 2y agoProgramming has a wierd way of requirering basically nothing some times, but other times you need to build the latest version of your toolchain, or you are working on some similarly huge project that takes ages to compile. I was using my 4gb ram pinebook pro in public transport yesterday, and decided to turn of all cores except for a single Cortex-A53, to safe some battery. I had no problems for my usecase of a text editor + shell to compile for doing some SIMD programming.
- internet101010 2y agoAt this point I don't think the frustration has much to do with the performance but rather RAM is so cheap that intentionally creating a bottleneck to extract another $150 from a customer comes across as greedy, and I am inclined to agree. Maybe the shared memory makes things more expensive but the upgrade cost has always been around the same amount. It's not quite in the same ballpark as showing apartment or airfare listings without mandatory fees but it is at the ticket booth outside of the stadium.
- jonfromsf 2y agoThe bigger problem is when you need a new machine fast, the apple store doesn't have anything but the base models in stock. In my org we bought a machine for a new developer who was leaving town, and were forced to buy an 8gb machine because the store didn't have other options (it was going to be a 2 week wait). As you can imagine, the machine sucked for running Docker etc and we had to sell it on facebook marketplace for a loss.
- gorbypark 2y agoI've never encountered an actual Apple Store not having specced up machines on hand (maybe not EVERY possible configuration, but a decent selection). If you go to a non-Apple retailer, afaik, they are limited to the base spec machines (RAM wise), it's not even a matter of them being out of stock. If you want anything other than 8GB (or whatever the base amount is for that model) of RAM you need to go through Apple directly. This was the case, at least in Canada a few years ago, correct me if I'm wrong/things have changed.
- oblio 2y agoI imagine you don't have browsers with many tabs.
- adastra22 2y agoI could never understand how people operate with more than a dozen or so open tabs.
- touristtam 2y agoThose are the type of "I'll go back later to it", The workflow on modern browser is broken. Instead of leveraging the bookmark functionality to improve the UX, we have this situation of user having 50+ tabs open, because they can. It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs to a more manageable numbers.
- oblio 2y agoWell, there are how many browser out there? 50? And opening tabs with something like Tree Style Tabs still is the best user experience. > It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs to a more manageable numbers. Or you just click the little chevron in Tree Style Tabs or equivalent and 100 tabs are just hidden in the UI.
- robin_reala 2y agoThe number of tabs you have doesn’t correlate to the number of active web views you have, if you use any browser that unloads background tabs while still saving their state.
- oblio 2y agoI'm fairly sure that if you open up the web messengers, Gmail, etc, the browser can't and won't unload them, because they're active in the background. It's fairly easy to hit a few GB of RAM used up just with those.
- GOONIMMUNE 2y ago
- gs17 2y agoMine is 8GB M1 and it is not fine. But the actual issue for me isn't RAM as much as it is disk space, I'm pretty confident if it wasn't also the 128 GB SSD model it would handle the small memory just fine. I'm still getting at least 16 GB on my next one though.
- regularfry 2y agoYeah, that's definitely a thing. Podman specifically eats a lot.
- gs17 2y agoMy exact-ish headache, I have to check my free disk space before launching Docker.
- kalleboo 2y agoYeah personally I find cheaping out on the storage far more egregious than cheaping out on the RAM. Even if you have most things offloaded onto the cloud, 128 GB was not even enough for that, and the 256 GB is still going to be a pain point even for many casual home users, and at the price point of Apple machines it's inexcusable to not add another $25 of flash
- seec 2y agoBoth are disgusting for the price asked. It would be a lot easier to excuse all the other compromises if the base was 16/512, which would cost Apple like 50 bucks tops per machine. But greed is unlimited, I guess.
- Pikamander2 2y agoThat would be fine if the 8GB model was also priced for casual and light productivity use cases. But alas, this is Apple we're talking about.
- wiseowise 2y agoMacBook Air starts at 1,199 euro. For insane battery life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the lightest chassis. Find me comparable laptop, I’ll wait.
- touristtam 2y agoThe screen is the killer. you can have a nice-ish 2nd corporate laptop with decent and swappable battery on which you can install a decent OS (non Windows) and get good milage but the screen is something else.
- wiseowise 2y agoForgot to mention that it must be completely silent.
- 6SixTy 2y agoAsking for a machine with "insane battery life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the lightest chassis" and oh, it must be completely silent is a loaded set of demands. Apple in the current market is essentially the only player that can actually make a laptop that can meet your demands, at least without doing a bunch of research into something that's equivalent and hoping the goal posts don't move again.
- paulmd 2y agothis is extremely funny in the context of the protracted argument up-thread about what you could reasonably be comparing the macbook air against. like, the $359 acer shitbox probably doesn't do all the exact same thing as the MBA either, but that's actually ok and really only demonstrates the MBA is an unaffordable luxury product, basically the same as a gold-plated diamond-encrusted flip-phone. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292839 Not your circus, not your clowns, but this is sort of the duality of apple: "it's all marketing and glitz, a luxury product, there's no reason to buy it, and the fact that they have a better product only PROVES it" vs "of course no PC manufacturer could possibly be expected to offer a top-notch 120hz mini-LED screen, a good keyboard, great trackpad, good speakers, and good SOC performance in a thin-n-light..."
- dialup_sounds 2y agoMost people that consider themselves "power users" aren't even power users, either. Like how being into cars doesn't make you a race car driver.
- 0x457 2y agoRace car drivers think they are pros and can't even rebuild the engine in their car. There are different categories of "power users"
- _gabe_ 2y agoRace car drivers. They are pros. Professional drivers. They definitely know how to drive a car much more efficiently than I do, or anyone that’s just into cars. I assume the race car engineers are the pros at rebuilding engines. And as for the parent comment’s point, being into cars doesn’t mean you’re as good as a professional race car driver.
- wvenable 2y agoIsn't this the "Pro" model?
- reustle 2y ago> If these things will ever get MacOS support The Macbook line will get iPadOS support long before they allow MacOS on this line. Full steam ahead towards the walled garden.
- bluescrn 2y agoiOS has become such a waste of great hardware, especially in the larger form factor of the iPad. M1 chips, great screens, precise pencil input and keyboard support, but we still aren't permitted a serious OS on it, to protect the monopolistic store. App Stores have beeen around long enough to prove that they're little more than laboratories in which to carry out accelerated enshittification experimentation. Everything so dumbed down and feature-light, yet demanding subscriptions or pushing endless scammy ads. And games that are a shameless introduction to gambling addiction, targeted at kids. Most of the 'apps' that people actually use shouldn't need to be native apps anyway, they should be websites. And now we get the further enshittification of trying to force people out of the browser and into apps, not for a better experience, but for a worse one, where more data can be harvested and ads can't so easily be blocked...
- seec 2y agoI feel sorry you got downvoted so much. But it looks like nowadays people don't like to hear the truth, at least when it comes to Apple stuff. I feel bad about all this because I advised my mother to buy an iPad Pro as it was sold as a laptop replacement but it never materialized anywhere near expectations and ended being an expensive mistake that can only offer compromised workflows with limitations that do not even come close to a MacBook she was used to (even in Apple own apps, even something like the Page app, yes). I think the iPad would be a fine device, if only they didn't try to upsell it and stopped pretending it is a "Pro" thing. If the whole lineup would get OLED displays, more RAM across the board and decent base storage for media at a more honest price it would be an easy recommendation. As it is, the entry level is lackluster because of the display (if you only buy for content consumption it is better to go with an Android OLED options) and the high-end variant are just stupid expensive for what they will actually allow you to do. But too many Apple customers have drunk the Kool-Aid so they don't have to care much about the reality and we just get expensive bullshit.
- Aurornis 2y agoI have a minimum of 64GB on my all my main developer machines (home, work, laptop), but I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM for lightweight travel. Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine. And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.
- hypercube33 2y agoProblem is yes it does run but it's probably paging to disk more than you think. I wonder if that lowers both performance and battery life.
- mananaysiempre 2y agoFor me personally, it’s not an issue of being out of touch. I did, in fact, use a 2014 Macbook with an i5 CPU and 16 GB of RAM for nearly a decade and know how often I hit swap and/or OOM on it even without attempting multicore shenanigans which its processor couldn’t have managed anyway. It’s rather an issue of selling deliberately underpowered hardware for no good reason other than to sell actually up-to-date versions for a difference in price that has no relation to the actual availability or price of the components. The sheer disconnect from any kind of reality offends me as a person whose job and alleged primary competency is to recognize reality then bend it to one’s will.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoI don't think we ever were at a point in computing were you could buy a high-end (even entry level macbooks have high-end pricing) laptop with the same amount of ram as you could 10 years earlier. 8 GB were the standard back then.
- 2y ago
- jiehong 2y agoPeople always complain dev should write more efficient software, so maybe that’s one way! At least, chrome wouldn’t run that many tabs on iPad for sure if it used the same engine as desktop chrome
- leptons 2y agoThese specific model of tablets won't ever get MacOS support. Apple will tell you when you're allowed to run MacOS on a tablet, and they'll make you buy a new tablet specifically for that.
- idontpost 2y ago[dead]
- trvz 2y agoUnlike seemingly everyone making this claim, I have used an M1 Mac mini with 8GB RAM. It's fine, and certainly not useless.
- emodendroket 2y agoIs the base M1 Macbook Air "useless"?