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anhydrous ,

My X220 and T520 each have 16GB. The designed max was actually “only” 8GB, but it turns out 16 GB actually works. I replaced the RAM modules myself without asking Lenovo for permission. Those models came out in 2011.

jaschen ,

My HP Omen 17" was designed for a maximum of 32GB ram. I’m currently running 64GB on it.

Duamerthrax ,

This was also true for Apple computers before they started soldering the ram in place. I remember going way over spec in my old G4 tower. Hell, I doubt the system would crash if you found larger ram chips and soldered them in.

Klause ,

I doubt the system would crash if you found larger ram chips and soldered them in.

You can’t even swap components with official ones from other upgraded models. Everything is tied down with verification codes and shit nowadays. So I doubt you could solder in new ram and get it to work.

Valmond ,

Yeah lol my thinkcentre with a 6gen intel had only 8GB (I paid under 100€ for it) so I went shopping to double that on a second hand site, but the price for 4, 8 or the 16GB ddr4 ram stick (sodimm, there seems to be a flood of used ones) I bought was about the same, like 30€ shipping included, so now I got 24GB.

Yerbouti ,

My students with the 8gb version struggle to do basic audio work with only a few plugins. This is BS from apple. Unless you use your computer only for web browsing, in which case you shouldn’t get a stupid mac in the first place.

uis ,

To be fair I have no idea why audio plugins need so much ram

KillingTimeItself ,

to be fair, apple is the one literally curating this experience so it “just works” only to then fuck it up somehow.

Jentu ,

Apple has a masterclass of tiering their products in just a way so that in every tier but the upper tiers, you’re giving up something really important. If you spend the least you possibly can on a MacBook, apple guarantees you’re going to have a very bad time for “doing the bare minimum to be seen with a laptop with an apple logo on it”. Their whole tier system is an exercise in “how can we get away with fucking up these things just enough so the customer feels like it is necessary to spend a little bit more” every step of the way. Then they make it unupgradable so you can’t sidestep their crafted feature tier system.

KillingTimeItself ,

nvidia also does this. It’s actually insane.

Love spending 200 USD on 16GB of ram in 2024 because of apple, very cool, or however much they charge, it’s still too much.

dustyData ,

Latency is a bitch. If you want anything to run on real time with zero latency, then it means everything, including those pretty large sample data, has to be stored as close to the processor as possible. Compressing/decompressing takes a shit tonne of time and effort, and to keep both delay down and fidelity up, you have to pay in absurd amounts of RAM to the DAW shrine.

nekusoul ,
@nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de avatar

Even the PC manufacturers selling “gaming” PCs using integrated graphics aren’t usually this brazen about it.

scorpious ,

To be fair, M-series Macs are pretty insanely efficient with memory. Unless you’ve actually used one extensively, I can understand the attitudes here…BUT:

I’ve done broadcast animation for many years, and back in ‘21 delivered an entire season of info/explainer-type pieces for a network show — using Motion, Cinema 4D, and After Effects (+ Ai and Ps) — all of it running on a base-level, first-gen M1 Mini (8/256). Workflow was fast and smooth; even left memory-pig apps running in the background most of the time…not one hiccup. Oh, and everything was delivered in 4k.

So 8gb actually is plenty for most folks…even professionals doing some heavy lifting. Sure I’d go for 16 next one, but damn I was/am still impressed. (Maybe it sucks for gaming, I don’t do that so have no clue).

aleph , (edited )
@aleph@lemm.ee avatar

It’s clear that the M3 MacBooks are noticably slower with 8GB or RAM than with 16GB for various tasks, though, including photo & video editing, and 3D rendering.

Sure, 8GB gets the job done but why are Apple selling “professional” grade laptops in this price range that clearly require additional memory to reach peak performance?

scorpious ,

Point taken! Clearly more is always better. Don’t have any experience with the M2 or 3.

I’m just adding a personal experience with having the minimum be plenty to get big jobs done.

tsonfeir ,
@tsonfeir@lemm.ee avatar

I get more because I know I’ll need more. I don’t get less and then complain I should have gotten more even though I knew I couldn’t upgrade later.

Really, Apple just shouldn’t have said what they did and they wouldn’t be in hot water.

freeman ,

It doesn’t matter how ‘insanely efficient’ they are. If your tasks need to use more than 8Gb of memory you are going to run out and start swapping to disk.

8gb worth of data is not heavy lifting for professional use.

scorpious ,

…And yet…?

My point is that while of course more is better, 8 sufficed for me…a professional, doing demanding…professional…work.

freeman ,

Sufficed is not an objective term but still is not a favorable term especially for machines that cost that much.

Your original point was that apple’s cpu are somehow more ‘efficient’ with ram. That’s misinformation to put it kindly.

kalleboo ,

It mostly just shows how crazy fast modern SSDs are that they can do swap duties with performance that is acceptable to many people. The SSD in my MacBook Pro can read/write at 5-6 GB/s. That means it can write out the whole 8 GB of memory of one of those smaller machines in under 2 seconds. As long as your current task fits in 8 GB and you’re fine waiting 2 seconds to switch between apps…

freeman ,

Yes if you don’t run out of ram you won’t face ram performance issues…

I wouldn’t be ok waiting 2 seconds to switch between apps on something the price of Mac laptop, even the cheapest m1.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

To be fair, at the price point of Macs, 16GB is easily achievable.

jenny_ball ,
@jenny_ball@lemmy.world avatar

i have more ram on my old gpu apple sucks

dustyData ,

A friend has a phone with more ram.

jenny_ball ,
@jenny_ball@lemmy.world avatar

all my phones have more ram since like 2015

mhague ,

Isn’t “it’s good enough for most users” a little too close to “it’s good enough to be bought, used for a bit, and then tossed”? Usually computers that were adequate for X stop being able to do X. There’s little to no margin and you can’t upgrade it?

paraphrand ,

Even if they are right, no one cares and it will always be a bad look.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I’m fine with this.

I mean, I have no interest in an 8GB machine, but it’s also fair to say that there definitely are people who are fine with it, and who would like to save the money. Say you’ve got four kids and you’re buying them all laptops – I dunno if that’s the thing parents do these days, or whether kids typically just get by on smartphones or what. And sometimes they get broken or whatnot, and you’re paying for the other expenses associated with those kids. That money adds up.

Apple runs a walled garden, unless things have changed in recent years while I wasn’t watching. They tried opening up to third-party hardware vendors back around 2000 with some third-party PowerPC vendors, found that too many users were buying that hardware instead of theirs, and killed off the clone vendors. That means that if you want to use MacOS, you have to buy Apple hardware. And so there’s good reason to have a broad range of offerings from Apple, even some that are higher-end or lower-end than the typical user might want, because Apple is the only option that MacOS users have. If I want to run Linux on a machine with 2GB of memory, I can do it, and if I want to run Linux on a machine with 256GB GB of memory, I can do it. MacOS users need to have an offering from Apple to do that.

Plus, I assume that these are running some form of solid-state storage, which makes hitting virtual memory a lot less painful than was the case in the past.

paraphrand ,

I agree. But we still have to listen to all the bitching.

ABCDE ,

We both have 8GB Airs in our house, an M1 and an M2. They run just fine.

lud ,

The thing is that Apple charges three kidneys per gigabyte over 8 GB.

dual_sport_dork , (edited )
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

If you’ve got four kids and you’re buying them all laptops, I don’t think buying them all Macs and “saving money” by getting cut-down machines with too little memory (or whatever other hobbling Apple may cook up now or later) is exactly the smart play. You would need to have a very compelling reason to absolutely have to run MacOS to the exclusion of everything else which if we’re honest, most people don’t.

A Lenovo IdeaPad Slim, just to pick an example out of a hat that contains many other options, costs half as much as the low spec 2024 Macbook Air the article is spotlighting while having double the RAM, double the SSD, and, you know, ports. For the cost of a 8GB Macbook Pro you could buy a Legion Slim with an i7 and an RTX4060 in it and have change left over, a machine which would blow that Mac out of the water.

There are a lot of things you can say about Macbooks, but being a good value for the money is consistently never one of them.

proton_lynx ,

Save money, buy an Apple computer. Choose one.

mightyfoolish ,

I get upgrades help the bottom line but considering that 8GB of RAM chokes the silicon they are allegedly so proud of… seems like a slap in the face to their own engineers (and the customer as well but that is not my point).

Raz ,

Like the upper management and C-suite give a fuck about any of their employees.

GlobalMind ,

I also can not figure out why so many companies are selling them with only a 500Gb drive. SSD or HDD.

vinyl ,

So they can charge more for an upgrade. Simple business tactics.

Classy ,

Don’t forget cloud services!

potentiallynotfelix ,
@potentiallynotfelix@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

Lmao I’d take my chonky ass dell laptop with expandable ram any day of the week

KillingTimeItself ,

my w520 would win in a fist fight against the latest macbook, hell any of them ever produced.

egeres ,
@egeres@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t believe I’m reading this in 2024

mechoman444 ,

I mean. It makes sense. The vast majority of people buying apple computers are loyalists or people that simply need an Internet/word processor.

And if you want to develop in apple then you have to spend a massive premium for their higher end hardware.

AdrianTheFrog ,
@AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world avatar

Their CPUs are actually really good now, when the apps are actually optimized for them. Especially in single core, they are very competitive with top Intel or AMD chips while being way more power efficient.

ex: in Geekbench 5.1 single core the M2 max gets 1967 points (85%) compared to 2311 points from the 7950X3D and 2369 from the 14900k. The M2 max (12 cores (8 p + 4 e), 12 threads) can draw a maximum of 36 watts while the 7950X3D (16 cores, 32 threads) can draw around 250 watts, and the 14900k (16 cores (8 p + 16 e), 32 threads) can draw around 350 watts.

Apple’s GPUs are definitely lacking though, in terms of performance.

mechoman444 ,

Ya. Their CPUs are really good. Got to give credit where credit is due.

Sam_Bass ,

Cant have users getting all uppity with excess memory after all

AlecSadler ,

I’ll admit I don’t use Macs, so maybe they are more efficient than the Linux and windows machines I work off…

…but I typically use machines with 64GB and recently upgraded my personal machine to 128GB. I still swap about 50GB to my SSD from time to time.

And I’m not doing heavy graphic design or movie editing stuff.

I cannot fathom for the life of me how 8GB would ever be feasible.

thedeadwalking4242 ,

How the fuck are you using that much ram of you aren’t doing “heavy duty” stuff???

AlecSadler ,

I just said I’m not doing graphic design or movie editing. I typically have 10 different browser profiles open to separate data / bookmarks, maybe 8 email accounts in tabs and Outlook (if not on Linux), 4-8 VS code windows, a mix of jetbrains rider or visual studio instances, a smattering mix of postman/SQL server/azure data studio/thunder client, among other things like PDFs and documents. And then multiple docker containers and other local running servers.

The swap usually comes in when I’m parsing a data file or something.

QuaternionsRock ,

I do not want to see what your desktop looks like lol

AlecSadler ,

Hahaha, it stressed me out so I hide all the icons and changed the background to just black.

el_bhm ,

Excuse me, can I get some more pepper for this troll dish?

jadedwench ,

I do a lot on my M1 air and I haven’t even considered I would have RAM issues with 16GB. Windows, I would be getting 64GB to not be miserable. I don’t run as much as you all the time, but having a container or two going, far too many browser tabs, PDFs, 3-4 intellij projects, discord, teams, and probably other things I am forgetting about is the norm. I even have AutoCAD open sometimes.

The biggest difference is Mx is arm based, which goes a long way into getting better performance and battery life. I really need to look up again how Apple manages memory, swap, and performance in general. I just checked Activity Monitor and even with most of the memory showing as used, I don’t even notice. If my laptop were to die tomorrow due to my clumsy fumbling, I am getting another Mac. My only wish is getting Vulkan support. That would be amazing. Not going to hold my breath on that though.

Now, 8GB is a crime and it is not something I would recommend for any laptop/desktop, no matter what it is running. Not saying it wouldn’t work ok on a Mac for someone who only uses it for web browsing, but it is utterly ridiculous that 8GB is even an option these days. This is a dumb hill for Apple to die on and 16 should be the absolute minimum.

I have a debloated W11 VM on my proxmox server that I have used only once and is only there for some unknown emergency. With a little fiddling, I got it to idle under 4GB. I don’t plan to run servers on my laptop and invested enough on a little server rack to give me things like file servers, VMs, more permanent containers, and somehow got talked into making a gaming VM that I use at LAN parties. The 3U case for the main server travels very well.

Personally, I would try and get some of your server stuff off your machine. You can even take a look at some docker swarm or similar k8 concepts to reduce your container load. RPis are another good choice for some lower load server operations. I have a little RPi swarm that is powered by PoE+, though I plan on trying k8 on them soon to get some experience. RPis are also small enough that you could throw one in your bag if you needed something portable and are fairly inexpensive. Just a thought and may not be possible with your server applications.

AlecSadler ,

Hmm, getting server stuff off sounds fun! I have a couple laptops sitting around so it might be fun to even just use those to offload some processes.

I’d love to get my own little server rack or something, not the best timing financially, but that’d be awesome.

I’ll have to look into the RPi thing. Thanks for the ideas!

ik5pvx ,

For me, it’s huddle (the conf call thing of slack), zoom, and a few Google sheets. Very easy to get to OOM killer

emptiestplace ,

With 64GiB or more of RAM?

ik5pvx ,

That VM has 16.

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

I get the sense that a lot of people here don’t use MacOS.

I have a few ARM and Intel Macs in 8 and 16gig configs, and I do a lot of heavy multimedia work. My 8 gig M1 only really gets into trouble when my partner and I both have an account with files open in bloated creative software. One pro user, and it’s usually fine. 2 active accounts with shitty creative software running, and you get a few beach balls.

AlecSadler ,

Interesting to know for sure! I guess I can’t speak to what they’re doing for optimizations first hand, but at the same time…my 128GB cost me like $300 on sale so, I dunno, a wash? Haha.

I’ve tried to become a Mac convert a few times, mostly peer pressure, but I just haven’t been able to do it successfully yet.

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, if I’m building a PC, I’ll throw in as much RAM as I can get.

That said, with 16gigs I’m usually not thinking about RAM at all. I’d probably only want to go higher than that if I was living in Adobe Lightroom 24/7.

olympicyes ,

There are a ton of benchmark videos on YouTube. I saw one recently for the new MacBook Air comparing the 8/16/24 GB models. They found that 8GB was significantly slower than 16GB for tasks like exporting video, but there was no difference between 16 and 24 gb.

summerof69 ,

I get the sense that a lot of people here don’t use MacOS.

I wish that was true.

emptiestplace ,

Do you understand kernel memory management fundamentals? I’m asking because what you wrote here strongly suggests otherwise - so, unless you’re able to show me I’m wrong, I’m going to stick with my conclusion that this is all incorrect and likely complete bullshit.

AlecSadler ,

You do you.

tsonfeir ,
@tsonfeir@lemm.ee avatar

You seem particular in a way that is breathtakingly unfun.

Specal ,

It’s worth mentioning that windows will use as much ram as possible just because it can and leave available with what it considers “reasonable”

uis ,

Then WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

AlecSadler ,

Code code code

uis ,

I don’t think even Eclipse can burn so much memory

lolcatnip ,

Dude, that’s how much RAM I used to have on a super high-end dev box at work with 56 cores. It was very helpful for compiling Chrome. WTF are you doing with a personal machine that needs that much RAM?

AlecSadler ,

I mean it’s my personal machine but I am a software engineer consultant/contractor so I use it for work, too.

lolcatnip ,

Ok fair enough. It’s just surprising to see someone say that. The standard-issue dev machine where I work is a laptop with 32 GB.

MacNCheezus ,
@MacNCheezus@lemmy.today avatar

I have a five year old MBP here with 16 gigs of RAM and it runs the latest version of macOS. I can run multiple web browsers with dozens of open tabs, VS Code, an LLM, and a video editing app on it, all simultaneously, without breaking a sweat.

IDK what Apple’s secret sauce is but their shit just works better than everyone else’s, that’s a fact.

NostraDavid ,
@NostraDavid@programming.dev avatar

I haven’t used 8GB since… 2008 or so? TBF, I’m a power user (as are most people on any Lemmy instance, I presume), but still…

And sure, Mac OS presumably uses less RAM than Windows, but all the applications don’t.

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