I spent about a year arguing with C-levels that our fleet running 8GB was slowing down productivity, with evidence to prove it. It was like pulling teeth to procure some SODIMMs.
I’d still say this article is coming at things from the wrong perspective. That $700 Walmart M1 MBA is more than adequate for most kids doing school work, and/or grandparents farting around on FB. If you have a family and had to grab a few identical laptops, and you aren’t able/willing to be tech support, it really makes a lot of sense financially.
If you were just going to use it for browsing the web then you don’t need anything that’s capable as an M1 processor, you’re just paying for performance overhead. Just buy a cheap Lenovo. Yeah I know we don’t like Windows but it’s a well-known operating system and when it inevitably breaks you don’t have to go to Apple to fix it. Any random PC repair shop will be able to deal with it.
Do not take anyone that buys a mac seriously. In any way.
32GB has been my minimum laptop memory for YEARS now. My current laptop was 64GB from the factory and 2 years later I made it 128GB. Nice socketed ECC RAM. If the RAM or SSD is soldered on a laptop, I’m not buying it.
Admitted, I haven’t read all the comments. I bought a refurbished M2 Mini to use as a cheap media server last week, and so I can use AirMessage with apple users in my life. The M2 Mini is a step down in every way from my ancient mid 2012 MacBook Pro except heat and efficiency. RAM, gotta pay extra for it. Disk space, gotta pay out the ass for it too, and you can’t even get a Mini with the amount of apace I put in my mid 2012 MBP. (4TB)I want to like it, but it’s SO LIMITING without paying out the ass and getting nickel and dimed for everything. I love macOS, especially compared to the disaster that is windows 10 and 11, but it’s ridiculous and so anti consumer nowadays! Which to be fair, Steve Jobs’ ultimate goal with all their products was to make it this way. Want to backup an iPad and iPhone? Good luck. You run out of space almost immediately with the 256GB of storage. Want to use an external disk for those backups? Use symbolic links and terminal, but you’ll have to manually move them to the Mac if you ever need to restore. I have a 6tb external disk attached to it now, but I’m afraid I’m still gonna be hamstrung somehow. All my photos, time machine backups, and media are on the external for obvious reasons. I was also going to pick up a MacBook Air 15" m3 (with upgrades) from Apple, but I’m really rethinking it right now, macOS or not.
No one needed more than 64k of memory at the time, and that was true they didn’t need more at the time.
Adding more memory than you actually need doesn’t do anything it just sits there taking up an expansion port and doing nothing. It’s like having a multi-core processor and then running single core apps, there’s no point.
The 8gb ram MacBook works great for your average Mac user. The person who uses it for writing resumes and surfing YouTube which I’m sure is a huge chunk of the market. Devs/Gamers/power users can’t make do with 8gb, but my sister in law who just does paper work and teams meetings all day is served well by her 2016 laptop, and wouldn’t have any issue with an 8gb MacBook.
Pretty sure it’d still drastically outperform every single other 8gb ram laptop out there though, perhaps even 3x faster. Not saying it shouldn’t have a ton more ram though, 8gb on anything expensive is pretty rude.
Maybe if you compare CPU performance but most people only use it for web browsing and documents editing which is most averages laptop can do the same and maybe more because it’s not running Mac OS
If the alternative is Windows which is increasingly filled with ads or Linux which shifts the burden of computer administration to a user who might not have a clue about what they’re supposed to do if their WiFi doesn’t “just work”, paying for a managed walled garden that doesn’t try to install candy crush without you asking for it isn’t such a bad option.
How long is the average laptop usable, though? I still have a 2012 MacBook Air with 4GB of ram that gets daily use with no visible issues. I don’t feel like it’s slow. I don’t feel like there’s much (the only issue is usually flash) daily business it can’t do (mostly web/email/pdfs/virtual meetings or classes/excel/word). I’ve never had it repaired or upgraded. I’ve also had about 4 windows laptops since about 2011. My primary desktop is a windows gaming PC and I complain more about its quirks than I do about the Mac.
Rocking a Dell latitude 3460 Core i5-5200U (2016?) with SSD and upgraded 16gb ram with win 11 running fine. It’s a flimsy pos I think it was meant for the Indian market, but I paid sub $100 for it 4+ years ago. Sure, I’m not gaming on it, but it works just fine for laptop activities.
If your use case doesn’t require a lot, it’s not really going to matter mac or windows… If you’re spending the same amount of money. I have a 2010 Dell m11x that’s just fine for productivity. It was $900ish then.
My 2009 Macbook became slow as heck after installing Mountain Lion on it 4 years after I got it, taking half an hour to even boot up. Ironically, Windows on it was a lot more usable. I agree that yea, there are cheap Windows laptops that are pretty bad but all the laptops I’ve had after that which I paid similar or slightly less for, have been far more reliable and longer lasting than my Macbook ever had.
And as for complaints, doesn’t that really depend on what you’re used to? Every time I have to use a Mac, I find a quirk that I can complain about every other minute but that’s just because I’m used to the Windows workflow or Linux where I can modify it to work the way I want it to.
It has terrible future proofing however. Sure, apple is generally good at supporting their devices, but I’m sure a device with more than 8 would remain usable for a longer time.
Generally good at supporting phones but not at supporting computers, a 5-6 years lifetime is unacceptable from an environmental point of view.
I experienced it last week when I turned on an old Mac with MacOS 10.7. It can’t run anything. Everything that you download doesn’t run anymore, Firefox and chrome are limited to some ancient version like 40 that breaks every modern website and due to some expired SSL root certificate you can’t access any website that’s using let’s encrypt which is a big chunk.
And it’s like this not from recently but at least 5 years, so it was put in a corner and never turned on anymore until last week
It can theoretically be updated to some newer version but the updater to 10.8 has been delisted from the store so you have to alternatively source that.
For comparison, a PC that was purchased the year prior to that Mac is running the latest version of windows 10 without any issue (except slowness due to the 1st gen core architecture)
What kind of stupid world is it where 8GB of RAM is actually not enough? I’m not doing anything that fundamentally different to what I was doing 10 years ago, and back then 2GB was fine on the low end of things.
Because ram is incredibly cheap and developer hours are incredibly expensive. I think it’s a bit silly too but there’s just no financial incentive for companies to care about memory usage when they know most consumer devices have tons of extra headroom.
It’s like adding lanes to a highway, it doesn’t reduce traffic, it increases demand. Developers will create software that needs more ram just cause they can. So unless you want to be running office 2010 then it’s necessary.
Not gonna lie, writing code in various ways can be more efficient processing time wise, but often at the cost of complexity, or readability or time to code it.
As phones have gotten faster, and depending on what I’m working on, I’ll often take the easier to code and read route than the absolutely best optimized route.
Although there are definitely times you still need to optimize
It’s less about individual developers writing bad code and more about whole inefficient frameworks gaining popularity because of ease of use or deployment
I’d argue that’s true in some cases, for example web apps might work well enough on modern device hardware but they’ll never meet the performance of even mid-tier native apps
Their silicon is really good. I’d argue it is mostly because they have a node advantage but it is what it is.
But especially in the MacBook Air it can only really show off its stuff in the short-bursty workloads of casual users (and Geekbench). My four-year-old PC would pull ahead quite quickly on any task when you actually have to run it at load for a while.
It also is perfectly fine for running a few minute long compile cycles - without running into thermal throttling. I guess if you do some hour long stuff it might eventually become an issue - but generally the CPUs available in the Airs seem to be perfectly fine with passive cooling even for longer peak loads. Definitely usable as a developer machine, though, if you can live with the low memory (16GB for the M1, which I have).
I bought some Apple hardware for a customer project - which was pretty much first time seriously touching Apple stuff since the 90s, as i’m not much of a friend of them - and was pretty surprised about performance as well as lack of heat. That thing is now running Linux, and it made me replace my aging Thinkpad x230 with a Macbook Pro - where active cooling clearly is required, but you also get a lot of performance out of it.
The real big thing is that they managed to scale power usage nicely over the complete load range. For the Max/Ultra variants you get comparable performance (and power draw/heat) on high load to the top Ryzen mobile CPUs - but for low load you still get a responsive system at significantly less power draw than the Ryzens.
Intel is playing a completely different game - they did manage to catch up a bit, but generally are still running hot, and are power hogs. Currently it’s just a race between Apple and AMD - and AMD is gimped by nobody building proper notebooks with their CPUs. Prices Apple is charging for RAM and SSDs are insane, though - they do get additional performance out of their design (unlike pretty much all x86 notebooks, where soldered RAM will offer the same throughput as a socketed on), but having a M.2 slot for a lower speed extra SSD would be very welcome.
Not entirely sure about that. I have a bunch of systems with the current 8cx, and that’s pretty much 10 years behind Apple performance wise, while being similar in heat and power consumed. It is perfectly fine for the average office and webbrowsing workload, though - a 10 year old mobile i7 still is an acceptable CPU for that nowadays, the more problematic areas of IO speed are better with the Snapdragon. (That’s also the reason why Apple is getting away with that 8GB thing - the performance impact caused by that still keeps a usable system for the average user. The lie is not that it doesn’t work - the lie is that it doesn’t have an impact).
From the articles I see about the Snapdragon Elite it seems to have something like double the multicore performance of the 8cx - which is a nice improvement, but still quite a bit away from catching up to the Apple chips. You could have a large percentage of office workers use them and be happy - but for demanding workloads you’d still need to go intel/AMD/Apple. I don’t think many companies will go for Windows/Arm when they can’t really switch everybody over. Plus, the deployment tools for ARM are not very stable yet - and big parts of what you’d need for doing deployments in an organization have just been available for ARM for a few months now (I’ve been waiting for that, but didn’t have a time to evaluate if they’re working).
And, since the ram is soldered to the fucking mobo, you can’t upgrade it yourself. It’s a ridiculous and craven strategy for a company already nickel and diming their customers.
The irony is that it’s arguably the opposite, since the GPU and CPU just have a shared memory pool, rather than having dedicated memory and the shared memory pool.
So if you’re watching a 4k video, you might have lost a gigabyte or two just for VRAM.
This is nothing to brag about, when Android needs this to run smoothly, compared to the same performance of a 6 GB RAM iPhone.
Edit: Just look at benchmarks and every day use cases. How exactly has any Android smartphone ever achieved any significant speed gains by using huge amounts of RAM compared to the then-current iPhone model? I agree with the Apple criticism when it comes to computers. When it comes to efficiency of smartphones, Android just seems to have tons of overhead and has always needed significantly more RAM than iPhones while not being faster at all. Maybe we can put the „look at how edgy I am for not using Apple devices“ aside for a moment.
Android has a garbage collector, meaning it requires an additional 2GB of RAM of overhead to keep things smooth. iPhones run significantly hotter than Androids, and consume more energy to achieve their performance gains.
It’s not true to simply state “one is better than the other”. There’s various metrics in which either one may be better.
Well, more RAM will always help. An iPhone with more RAM will allow it to perform better than one with less RAM. Similarly, too little RAM will hamper performance regardless of the device.
Okay. But why is it that Android phones don‘t all just have 128 GB of RAM built in, then? I‘m still talking about smartphones only. And there, RAM is completely irrelevant for users unless it‘s a necessity for the OS and for apps to run well. This is the case for Android smartphones. This is not the case for iPhones. Because everything you want to do just works, without thinking about RAM. This has been the case since the iPhone X.
But here it seems to be really hard to accept that getting an iPhone is the far superior choice for many people, also for tech savvy people. While others choose an Android smartphone and are happy with that.
And for computers: just accept that it‘s plain economy calculus to offer 8 GB RAM as standard because this will lead more buyers to choose an upgrade and pay more than the standard price, instead of accusing Apple to offer this without this plan in mind. Just don‘t buy these machines and continue your life as a superior tech being, where companies like Samsung or Dell have the sole purpose to make as little profit as possible.
there’s this thing called multitasking, you might have heard of it. when you want to open more than one app and use them all at the same time, GUESS WHAT BRIGHT LIGHTS? Takes more memory.
Sure. I have just never encountered any problems. I used to, to be honest, as mentioned back with the iPhone 4 where Safari tabs were reloading because of the lack of RAM. But Android had its own problems back then, for example with the update policy of most manufacturers leaving my wife‘s Android phone obsolete after only one year.
What exactly do you do? Hook up your smartphone as a desktop replacement with a bulky USB dongle, firing up some CAD software on two 6K displays while rendering an 8K HDR video in the background? People never disappoint creating completely made-up scenarios just to discredit.
Never talked about tablets, so it’s reading – again!
Okay bright lights, sure thing, you stick with your tiny amount of ram and see how that works out in the future. Meanwhile the rest of the world will move on.
It’s funny, though, that ram is a commodity and you’re fine with apple’s ridiculous upsales, to the point where you’ll claim there’s no need. Frankly I’m surprised you’re not rocking an OG iphone with that attitude. You do you, keep simping for apple, stay in the 2010s. Aloha, from the future!
Gonna block you now so I don’t have to reply to another stupid comment.
The whole world will move on, sure. But I think you‘ll stay wound up a little longer as this brain sprain of yours seems to have worn you out quite a bit. I hope, AI may solve this problem for you in the future. I heard loads of RAM help with that.
Some of us want to buy tools instead of toys. 4GB was great for the xbox 360 slim. Will it run anything a sane person would get a mac for? Probably not, most mac DAW I’ve used personally are hungry and 4gb is less than the machine I had my last crash filled experience on.
What most people use a Mac for could be just as well handled by a Chromebook and an Apple decal.
At least in the consumer market. Not knocking graphic artists or any other industry that prefers Apple (though I’m still really not sure why, at this point it seems to go back to things that don’t apply anymore)
I work with my Mac every day. It‘s not a toy. I chose the platform in the early 2000s because I liked the OS, the far superior app experience across many 3rd party apps and because I like to work with things I like aesthetically. I chose a 32 GB MacBook Pro with M1 Pro and paid for the upgrade. Because I could and because I wanted to (100% tax deduction helped as well). No need for pity or anything.
Honestly we’re kinda edging up to the point where I think 32gb of ram should be the minimum, especially for heavy use cases like games and production jobs.
Yeah, in my work I don’t even do a lot of 3D rendering, but 64 GB main RAM and at least 8 GB GPU RAM barely manage to cut it performance wise for the GIS and CAD systems we use.
Most heavy games do need 32GB ram. 16GB RAM will overflow to page file and we all run QLC SSDs, it’s gonna get corrupt over time being in constant writes.
Diablo 4 beta was totally 32GB i literally bought a ram kit from 16gb to 32gb after that experience. Cyberpunk 2077 needs over 16gb, and just that if you like to multitask, watch some YouTube or twitch with discord sharing screen and gaming with your friends during these games will need 32gb to avoid over using page file on 16gb. Maybe 24gb is enough with ddr5 kits if your lighter on multitask or don’t play the newer unoptimized games.
I play modded cyberpunk and I’ve never had an issue on 16gb. and I am also a multitasker with multiple windows and other things open and tabbing between them while gaming.
Yeah i didn’t have an issue but i noticed all my ram used and my total commit was like 31gb everyday which is a bit concerning for my write limited qlc SSD
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