9 ms·

If 32GB is the max, why not just make that the one and only model and get rid of this weird segmentation. That's a ridiculously low minimum and only just barely

If 32GB is the max, why not just make that the one and only model and get rid of this weird segmentation. That's a ridiculously low minimum and only just barely adequate. 8GB was practically criminal. Or -- and I know this is crazy -- slottable RAM on a device that is designed for things other than portability. Wild, I know.

stu2b50 2y ago
The ram is on the package for more than portability. It’s necessary for fast enough transfer speeds for the iGPU.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  > necessary for fast enough transfer speeds Source?
  - stu2b50 2y ago
    When was the last time you saw a GPU with slottable memory? For transfer speeds, look at the data sheets for the M series. Much faster than DDR4 or DDR5 RAM. In the ballpark of GPU memory.
    - Wytwwww 2y ago
      Would the people who were buying the baseline 8GB model (presumably just for general computing/office work) care about the GPU being slightly slower, though? I bet that the extreme lag when you run out of memory because you have an Electron app or two, several browser tabs and something like Excel is way more noticeable. Hardly anyone is using Macs for gaming these days and almost anybody who does something GPU intense would need more than 16GB anyway.
  - KoolKat23 2y ago
    https://www.apple.com/ie/newsroom/2020/11/apple-unleashes-m1/ https://www.apple.com/ie/newsroom/2020/11/apple-unleashes-m1...
  - ankleturtle 2y ago
    This has been the approach since the M1s. See: https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwidth_memory_performance/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwid... > The SoC has access to 16GB of unified memory. This uses 4266 MT/s LPDDR4X SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) and is mounted with the SoC using a system-in-package (SiP) design. A SoC is built from a single semiconductor die whereas a SiP connects two or more semiconductor dies.
  - aseipp 2y ago
    Source for what? Parallel RAM interfaces have strict timing and electrical requirements. Classic DDR sockets are modular at the cost of peak bandwidth and bus width. The wider your bus, the more traces you have to run in parallel from the socket to the compute complex, which becomes harder and harder. You don't see sockets for HBM or GDDR for a good reason. The proof is there. LPCAMM solutions mentioned upthread resolve some of this by making the problem more "three dimensional" from what I can tell. They reduce the length of the traces by making the pinout more "square" (as opposed to thin and rectangular) and stacking them closer to the actual dies they connect to. This allows you to cram swappable memory into the same form factor, while retaining the same clock speeds/size/bus width, and without as many design complexities that come from complex socket traces. In Apple's case they connect their GPU to the same pool of memory that their CPU uses. This is a key piece of the puzzle for their design, because even if the CPU doesn't need 200GB/s of bandwidth, GPUs are a very different story. If you want them to do work, you have to feed them with something, so you need lots of memory bandwidth to do that. Note that Samsung's LPCAMM solutions are only 128-bits wide and reported around 120GB/s. Apple's gone as high as 1024-bit busses with hundreds of GB/s of bandwidth; the M1 Max was released years ago and does 400GB/s. LPCAMM is still useful and a good improvement over the status quo, of course, but I don't think you're even going to see 256-bit or 512-bit versions just so soon. And if your problem can be parallelized, then the higher your bus width, the lower your clock speeds can go, so you can get lower power while retaining the same level of performance. This same dynamic is how an A100 (1024-bit bus) can smoke a 3090 (384-bit) despite a far lower clock speed and power usage. There is no magical secret or magical trick. You will always get better performance, less noise, at lower power by directly integrating these components together. It's a matter of if it makes sense given the rest of your design decisions -- like whether your GPU shares the memory pool or not. There are alternative memory solutions like IBM using serial interfaces for disaggregating RAM and driving the clock speeds higher in the Power10 series, allowing you to kind of "socket-ify" GDDR. But these are mostly unobtainium and nobody is doing them in consumer stuff.
- jsheard 2y ago
  Then again, the rest of the industry has figured out a way to make slottable RAM almost as fast and compact as soldered RAM with the new CAMM2/LPCAMM2 standards. The M4 has LPDDR5X-7500 120GB/sec memory and there are already LPCAMM2-7500 120GB/sec modules, with even faster ones on the way: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21390/micron-ships-crucialbranded-lpcamm2-memory-modules https://www.anandtech.com/show/21390/micron-ships-crucialbra... Two of those modules working in parallel would hit "M Pro" speeds as well. I doubt Apple will be adopting them though, for the same reason they don't offer standard M.2 SSD slots even on systems that could obviously support them with minimal design compromises.
  - randmeerkat 2y ago
    > Then again, the rest of the industry has figured out a way to make slottable RAM almost as fast and compact as soldered RAM… Just be patient, the EU will take a large stick and force Apple to allow users to replace their RAM soon too.
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      Very unlikely. Apple can argue that less than 1% of computers users ever upgrade their memory (which is true), and after all, did the EU intervene when GPUs dropped their slotted memory?
      - jsheard 2y ago
        > did the EU intervene when GPUs dropped their slotted memory? The difference there is that slotted GPU memory is demonstrably impactical, but the memory on the M4 isn't demonstrably better than the LPCAMM2 module above. It's literally the exact same spec. Not that I expect the EU to do anything either when they didn't act on Apples soldered-in SSDs, which definitely aren't any better than standardized M.2 drives.
        gjsman-1000 2y ago
        Actually, incorrect. On some scenarios, you’d need up to 4 CAMM2 slots to do what Apple does. This is due to CAMM2 maxing out at 128 bit busses; but M3 Max chips are currently at 512. Needless to say, battery life most affected. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40287592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40287592
- wpwpwpw 2y ago
  For SSD speeds, that was already dismistified with iBoff new adapter which makes an M1 Macbook Air upgradable and faster. I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true for RAM using the CAMM standard positioned near the CPU. Or maybe even better, slotted memory chips like in the old days, with a memory controller ready to accept multiple chip sizes.
causal 2y ago
Yeah I'm a huge fan of Apple hardware and even I can't handle this. The different in price between 8GB and 16GB for the M3 Air was like $500 at Costco. My air from 2016 came with 8GB.
gjsman-1000 2y ago
> That's a ridiculously low minimum and only just barely adequate. What are you doing? I'm still doing web development with Chrome, JetBrains, and Docker on a 16GB M1 Pro and it isn't a problem. For the average Chrome-using citizen, 16GB should be fine.
- emadabdulrahim 2y ago
  Opening large files, such as large Figma files, eats up RAM like no tomorrow
- HeuristicsCG 2y ago
  I'm over here doing hobbyist C++ development and web browsing on an 8gb m1 air without any issues.
- dialup_sounds 2y ago
  There are Chromebooks currently shipping with 4GB of RAM. People don't understand how low the bar is for normies.
Hamuko 2y ago
32 GB seems plenty for me for the target audience. The iMac is aimed at a rather casual computer user, especially now that they nixed the larger screen size one.
- bearjaws 2y ago
  I agree, I run 32gb on a dev Macbook pro and it's enough, even our largest app is around 20k files and the language server uses 5gb of ram. I often sit around 22-24gb of usage with Docker running. For most people 32gb is not going to hold them back.
  - seanw444 2y ago
    Wow. And I thought several hundred MiB for my langservers was absurd.
observationist 2y ago
Arbitrary markup based on whatever they can maximally extract from their consumers is the name of the game. Product segmentation is just one of a variety of tools used to that purpose.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  > Product segmentation is just one of a variety of tools used to that purpose. I think people here forget that Apple is targeting a certain profit margin. Currently, their gross profit margin is about 45%. If you're rolling this out on the Mac line, it's okay to have a profit margin closer to 35% on the base model; but maybe with 55%-65% margins on the higher-tier professional equipment, to "balance" it out. It also turns out, professionals have money, and will pay despite the grumbling. The RAM prices are basically a progressive tax.
- briandear 2y ago
  Isn’t that the name of every game?
ChadNauseam 2y ago
I’ve never felt memory limited on my 16gb macbook pro, on which I code, run rust-analyzer (major memory hog), video edit, etc. Most people definitely don’t need 32GB
- Eric_WVGG 2y ago
  Agreed. I was XCode'ing on an 8gb M1 back during the lockdown, it was great. It's nice to see more RAM and Apple was being very stingy about it, but the real-world is totally overblown.
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    If you use your PC to only run a single application at any time then yes, 8GB might be usable. If you need to have an Electron app opened, a few browser tabs and XCode (let alone some less efficient IDE)? Your compute will grind to a halt...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Eric_WVGG 2y ago
      Well yeah… like, that's why Electron apps are terrible, though, I bend over backward to avoid them.
      - Wytwwww 2y ago
        Well... that doesn't really matter if you have to use Teams/Slack or whatever?
- linux2647 2y ago
  I’ve definitely been memory limited on a 32GB MacBook Pro. Though it’s probably due to Docker, Slack, multiple IDEs, and dozens and dozens of browser tabs all open at the same time. Consider me part of the exception.
- 2y ago
perihelions 2y ago
Presumably, their career economists found that this "weird" pricing scheme is actually optimal—that selling tiny RAM upgrades for $200 or $400 is empirically, measurably an effective way to sort their consumers by purchasing power, and optimally drain their wallets. It goes by many names, the "microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
- mmastrac 2y ago
  > optimally drain their wallets I mean, that's basically it. The difference between part costs of 8GB/16GB/32GB RAM chips is nearly a rounding error, and they're probably eating a bunch more costs stocking and adding assembly for different RAM SKUs.
  - simonh 2y ago
    That explains it then. The extra cost of supporting extra RAM SKUs has to be recouped somehow. What better way than by stocking extra RAM SKUs and charging a premium? :)
epolanski 2y ago
How else can they upsell 16GB of ram worth 50 euros for 400?
- anticensor 2y ago
  it's actually worth 5 euro, not 50
samatman 2y ago
On the one hand, sure, Apple loves to get that extra margin for more RAM and SSD, no doubt. On the other hand, the MacBook Air ships with 8GiB RAM standard, and it's robustly popular. One could suppose that all those customers are suffering from the lack of RAM, or one could suppose that for many use cases, it's an adequate amount. The latter is more likely. macOS manages memory well, and a fast SSD means that swapping is fast enough that it often results in no visible delays to the user.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  I'm not sure how can we tell. The Mac revenue has peaked back in 2022 and has been declining since. But assure, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people use their Macs as they would an iPad (i.e. at most a single app and/or browser and 8GB might be enough for that).
  - samatman 2y ago
    How we can tell what? That they sell a lot of stock MacBook Airs? They do. I don't find the topic interesting enough to find a link, but I'm pretty confident on this one. > a lot of people use their Macs as they would an iPad A lot of people have pretty undemanding requirements in a laptop, yes. 8GiB is more than enough for some web browsing and light document editing, a bit of photo retouching, that kind of thing. There are many Chromebooks on the market right now with 4 GiB and they sell in numbers. The HN tilt trends toward systematically overestimating system requirements because development is fairly demanding of them.
    - Wytwwww 2y ago
      > but I'm pretty confident on this one. I just doubt there is actual meaningful data available (at least that's publicly accessible). We'd need to measure the proportion of base config MBA users who regularly get OOM warnings? > many Chromebooks Yes. People just have different use cases. I mean almost nobody who does anything that might require > 16-32 GB of memory would likely buy this iMac (even if Apple sold such configs). It's an entirely different product than the 27 inch "Pro" iMacs with Xeons from back in the day. Hardly anybody "needs" a desktop PC these days (outside of gaming and some niche applications). So this is just basically a generic office / front desk PC for people who don't need laptops.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
The vast majority of HN users are not the target customer for the iMac

stu2b50 2y ago

The ram is on the package for more than portability. It’s necessary for fast enough transfer speeds for the iGPU.

candiddevmike 2y ago
> necessary for fast enough transfer speeds Source?
- stu2b50 2y ago
  When was the last time you saw a GPU with slottable memory? For transfer speeds, look at the data sheets for the M series. Much faster than DDR4 or DDR5 RAM. In the ballpark of GPU memory.
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    Would the people who were buying the baseline 8GB model (presumably just for general computing/office work) care about the GPU being slightly slower, though? I bet that the extreme lag when you run out of memory because you have an Electron app or two, several browser tabs and something like Excel is way more noticeable. Hardly anyone is using Macs for gaming these days and almost anybody who does something GPU intense would need more than 16GB anyway.
- KoolKat23 2y ago
  https://www.apple.com/ie/newsroom/2020/11/apple-unleashes-m1/ https://www.apple.com/ie/newsroom/2020/11/apple-unleashes-m1...
- ankleturtle 2y ago
  This has been the approach since the M1s. See: https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwidth_memory_performance/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwid... > The SoC has access to 16GB of unified memory. This uses 4266 MT/s LPDDR4X SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) and is mounted with the SoC using a system-in-package (SiP) design. A SoC is built from a single semiconductor die whereas a SiP connects two or more semiconductor dies.
- aseipp 2y ago
  Source for what? Parallel RAM interfaces have strict timing and electrical requirements. Classic DDR sockets are modular at the cost of peak bandwidth and bus width. The wider your bus, the more traces you have to run in parallel from the socket to the compute complex, which becomes harder and harder. You don't see sockets for HBM or GDDR for a good reason. The proof is there. LPCAMM solutions mentioned upthread resolve some of this by making the problem more "three dimensional" from what I can tell. They reduce the length of the traces by making the pinout more "square" (as opposed to thin and rectangular) and stacking them closer to the actual dies they connect to. This allows you to cram swappable memory into the same form factor, while retaining the same clock speeds/size/bus width, and without as many design complexities that come from complex socket traces. In Apple's case they connect their GPU to the same pool of memory that their CPU uses. This is a key piece of the puzzle for their design, because even if the CPU doesn't need 200GB/s of bandwidth, GPUs are a very different story. If you want them to do work, you have to feed them with something, so you need lots of memory bandwidth to do that. Note that Samsung's LPCAMM solutions are only 128-bits wide and reported around 120GB/s. Apple's gone as high as 1024-bit busses with hundreds of GB/s of bandwidth; the M1 Max was released years ago and does 400GB/s. LPCAMM is still useful and a good improvement over the status quo, of course, but I don't think you're even going to see 256-bit or 512-bit versions just so soon. And if your problem can be parallelized, then the higher your bus width, the lower your clock speeds can go, so you can get lower power while retaining the same level of performance. This same dynamic is how an A100 (1024-bit bus) can smoke a 3090 (384-bit) despite a far lower clock speed and power usage. There is no magical secret or magical trick. You will always get better performance, less noise, at lower power by directly integrating these components together. It's a matter of if it makes sense given the rest of your design decisions -- like whether your GPU shares the memory pool or not. There are alternative memory solutions like IBM using serial interfaces for disaggregating RAM and driving the clock speeds higher in the Power10 series, allowing you to kind of "socket-ify" GDDR. But these are mostly unobtainium and nobody is doing them in consumer stuff.
jsheard 2y ago
Then again, the rest of the industry has figured out a way to make slottable RAM almost as fast and compact as soldered RAM with the new CAMM2/LPCAMM2 standards. The M4 has LPDDR5X-7500 120GB/sec memory and there are already LPCAMM2-7500 120GB/sec modules, with even faster ones on the way: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21390/micron-ships-crucialbranded-lpcamm2-memory-modules https://www.anandtech.com/show/21390/micron-ships-crucialbra... Two of those modules working in parallel would hit "M Pro" speeds as well. I doubt Apple will be adopting them though, for the same reason they don't offer standard M.2 SSD slots even on systems that could obviously support them with minimal design compromises.
- randmeerkat 2y ago
  > Then again, the rest of the industry has figured out a way to make slottable RAM almost as fast and compact as soldered RAM… Just be patient, the EU will take a large stick and force Apple to allow users to replace their RAM soon too.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    Very unlikely. Apple can argue that less than 1% of computers users ever upgrade their memory (which is true), and after all, did the EU intervene when GPUs dropped their slotted memory?
    - jsheard 2y ago
      > did the EU intervene when GPUs dropped their slotted memory? The difference there is that slotted GPU memory is demonstrably impactical, but the memory on the M4 isn't demonstrably better than the LPCAMM2 module above. It's literally the exact same spec. Not that I expect the EU to do anything either when they didn't act on Apples soldered-in SSDs, which definitely aren't any better than standardized M.2 drives.
      - gjsman-1000 2y ago
        Actually, incorrect. On some scenarios, you’d need up to 4 CAMM2 slots to do what Apple does. This is due to CAMM2 maxing out at 128 bit busses; but M3 Max chips are currently at 512. Needless to say, battery life most affected. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40287592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40287592
wpwpwpw 2y ago
For SSD speeds, that was already dismistified with iBoff new adapter which makes an M1 Macbook Air upgradable and faster. I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true for RAM using the CAMM standard positioned near the CPU. Or maybe even better, slotted memory chips like in the old days, with a memory controller ready to accept multiple chip sizes.

causal 2y ago

Yeah I'm a huge fan of Apple hardware and even I can't handle this. The different in price between 8GB and 16GB for the M3 Air was like $500 at Costco. My air from 2016 came with 8GB.

gjsman-1000 2y ago

> That's a ridiculously low minimum and only just barely adequate. What are you doing? I'm still doing web development with Chrome, JetBrains, and Docker on a 16GB M1 Pro and it isn't a problem. For the average Chrome-using citizen, 16GB should be fine.

emadabdulrahim 2y ago
Opening large files, such as large Figma files, eats up RAM like no tomorrow
HeuristicsCG 2y ago
I'm over here doing hobbyist C++ development and web browsing on an 8gb m1 air without any issues.
dialup_sounds 2y ago
There are Chromebooks currently shipping with 4GB of RAM. People don't understand how low the bar is for normies.

Hamuko 2y ago

32 GB seems plenty for me for the target audience. The iMac is aimed at a rather casual computer user, especially now that they nixed the larger screen size one.

bearjaws 2y ago
I agree, I run 32gb on a dev Macbook pro and it's enough, even our largest app is around 20k files and the language server uses 5gb of ram. I often sit around 22-24gb of usage with Docker running. For most people 32gb is not going to hold them back.
- seanw444 2y ago
  Wow. And I thought several hundred MiB for my langservers was absurd.

observationist 2y ago

Arbitrary markup based on whatever they can maximally extract from their consumers is the name of the game. Product segmentation is just one of a variety of tools used to that purpose.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
> Product segmentation is just one of a variety of tools used to that purpose. I think people here forget that Apple is targeting a certain profit margin. Currently, their gross profit margin is about 45%. If you're rolling this out on the Mac line, it's okay to have a profit margin closer to 35% on the base model; but maybe with 55%-65% margins on the higher-tier professional equipment, to "balance" it out. It also turns out, professionals have money, and will pay despite the grumbling. The RAM prices are basically a progressive tax.
briandear 2y ago
Isn’t that the name of every game?

ChadNauseam 2y ago

I’ve never felt memory limited on my 16gb macbook pro, on which I code, run rust-analyzer (major memory hog), video edit, etc. Most people definitely don’t need 32GB

Eric_WVGG 2y ago
Agreed. I was XCode'ing on an 8gb M1 back during the lockdown, it was great. It's nice to see more RAM and Apple was being very stingy about it, but the real-world is totally overblown.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  If you use your PC to only run a single application at any time then yes, 8GB might be usable. If you need to have an Electron app opened, a few browser tabs and XCode (let alone some less efficient IDE)? Your compute will grind to a halt...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Eric_WVGG 2y ago
    Well yeah… like, that's why Electron apps are terrible, though, I bend over backward to avoid them.
    - Wytwwww 2y ago
      Well... that doesn't really matter if you have to use Teams/Slack or whatever?
linux2647 2y ago
I’ve definitely been memory limited on a 32GB MacBook Pro. Though it’s probably due to Docker, Slack, multiple IDEs, and dozens and dozens of browser tabs all open at the same time. Consider me part of the exception.
2y ago

perihelions 2y ago

Presumably, their career economists found that this "weird" pricing scheme is actually optimal—that selling tiny RAM upgrades for $200 or $400 is empirically, measurably an effective way to sort their consumers by purchasing power, and optimally drain their wallets. It goes by many names, the "microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

mmastrac 2y ago
> optimally drain their wallets I mean, that's basically it. The difference between part costs of 8GB/16GB/32GB RAM chips is nearly a rounding error, and they're probably eating a bunch more costs stocking and adding assembly for different RAM SKUs.
- simonh 2y ago
  That explains it then. The extra cost of supporting extra RAM SKUs has to be recouped somehow. What better way than by stocking extra RAM SKUs and charging a premium? :)

epolanski 2y ago

How else can they upsell 16GB of ram worth 50 euros for 400?

anticensor 2y ago
it's actually worth 5 euro, not 50

samatman 2y ago

On the one hand, sure, Apple loves to get that extra margin for more RAM and SSD, no doubt. On the other hand, the MacBook Air ships with 8GiB RAM standard, and it's robustly popular. One could suppose that all those customers are suffering from the lack of RAM, or one could suppose that for many use cases, it's an adequate amount. The latter is more likely. macOS manages memory well, and a fast SSD means that swapping is fast enough that it often results in no visible delays to the user.

Wytwwww 2y ago
I'm not sure how can we tell. The Mac revenue has peaked back in 2022 and has been declining since. But assure, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people use their Macs as they would an iPad (i.e. at most a single app and/or browser and 8GB might be enough for that).
- samatman 2y ago
  How we can tell what? That they sell a lot of stock MacBook Airs? They do. I don't find the topic interesting enough to find a link, but I'm pretty confident on this one. > a lot of people use their Macs as they would an iPad A lot of people have pretty undemanding requirements in a laptop, yes. 8GiB is more than enough for some web browsing and light document editing, a bit of photo retouching, that kind of thing. There are many Chromebooks on the market right now with 4 GiB and they sell in numbers. The HN tilt trends toward systematically overestimating system requirements because development is fairly demanding of them.
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    > but I'm pretty confident on this one. I just doubt there is actual meaningful data available (at least that's publicly accessible). We'd need to measure the proportion of base config MBA users who regularly get OOM warnings? > many Chromebooks Yes. People just have different use cases. I mean almost nobody who does anything that might require > 16-32 GB of memory would likely buy this iMac (even if Apple sold such configs). It's an entirely different product than the 27 inch "Pro" iMacs with Xeons from back in the day. Hardly anybody "needs" a desktop PC these days (outside of gaming and some niche applications). So this is just basically a generic office / front desk PC for people who don't need laptops.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

The vast majority of HN users are not the target customer for the iMac