Wait, that’s it? Seriously?
My sister just bought a MacBook Air for college, and I had to beg her to spend the extra money on 16gb of memory. It feels like a scam that it appears cheap with the starting at price, but nobody should actually go with those “starting at” specs.
Yeah it’s about future proofing. 8 GB might be okay for basic browsing and text editing now, but in the future that might not be the case. Also in my experience people who only want to do basic browsing and word editing, end up inevitably wanting to do more complex things and not understanding that their device is not capable of it.
Exactly. I told her that 8gb might be fine for a year or two, but if she wants this thousand plus dollar laptop to last four years she needs to invest the extra money now. Especially once she told me she might want to play Minecraft or Shadow of the Tomb Raider on it
Good, 8 is unusable for my workloads and 12 feels like they’re just fucking with us
Whoa, that’s like 32GB of Windows RAM. Seems excessive to me tbh
Ironically, it’s the other way around, since Apple has to share their RAM between GPU and CPU, where other computers typically have them separately.
So in normal usage with 8 GB, you’re automatically down to 7, since at least 1GB would be taken by the graphics card. More if you’re doing anything reasonably graphics-heavy with it.
Is it like SI RAM vs US Customary RAM?
Yes. Freedom RAM equals approx. 1.6 metric RAMs. Unless your computer is on water, in which case it’s 1.857
Is that calibrated against the Universal Prototype Kilobyte in Paris?
AI Models needs that RAM to work
I always thought 8gb was a fine amount for daily use if you never did anything too heavy, are apps really that ram intense now?
Yes. Just as 4GB was barely enough a decade ago.
I usually find myself either capping out the 8GB of RAM on my laptop, or getting close to it if I have Firefox, Discord and a word processor open. Especially if I have Youtube or Spotify going.
Most of that is discord, they can’t manage a single good thing right Use more GPU than the game I’m playing? Check. Have an inefficient method of streaming a game? Check. Be laggy as fuck when no longer on GPU acceleration when lemmy and guilded is fine? Check.
RAM is cheaper than my time.
I kinda consider 32GB as a minimum for anyone working on my team.I can get over 8 GB just running Discord, Steam, Shapes2
I am pretty sure most of that is just discord.
Imagine how much more room we’d have if everything wasn’t dragging a big trailer full of Chrome behind it.
Yep. I work in IT support, almost entirely Windows but similar concepts apply.
I see people pushing 6G+ with the OS and remote desktop applications open sometimes. My current shop does almost everything by VDI/remote desktop… So that’s literally the only thing they need to load, it’s just not good.
On the remote desktop side, we recently shifted from a balanced remote desktop server, over to a “memory optimised” VM, basically has more RAM but the same or similar CPU, because we kept running out of RAM for users, even though there was plenty of CPU available… It caused problems.
Memory is continually getting more important.
When I do the math on the bandwidth requirements to run everything, the next limit I think we’re likely to hit is RAM access speed and bandwidth. We’re just dealing with so much RAM at this point that the available bandwidth from the CPU to the RAM is less than the total memory allocation for the virtual system. Eg: 256G for the VM, and the CPU runs at, say, 288GB/s…
Luckily DDR 4/5 brings improvements here, though a lot of that stuff has yet to filter into datacenters
Naturally the price for the cheapest model will also be going to up several orders of magnitude more than the cost of materials, labor, and healthy profit margin to account for that as well I’m sure.
In 1999, the iBook was US$1599 (equivalent to $2925 in 2023) (source).
The 2010 13" Air was $1299 (more in today’s $) (source).
The current 13" M3 Air is $1099 (source).
So yeah, they may well raise prices, but the cost of Apple’s entry-level hardware has decreased in absolute terms over the years, and has decreased substantially if inflation is taken into account. Not to say the margins aren’t higher (no idea about that), but it’s interesting.
for the same price other laptops sell for 64GB
what a bargain
It’s about time.
…is this actually 16Gb or 8Gb feeling like 16Gb, as per previous statements?
I think perhaps they realize the Apple magic has worn off and people have shockingly realized that 8 GB is in fact 8 GB.
I know it’s not a like for like comparison, but the Pixel 9 Pro that launched this month has 16gb of RAM.
I remember back in the early 2000s when I saw a PDA with a 232mhz cpu and 64mb ram, and I realized how far technology had come since I got my computer with a 233mhz cpu and 64mb ram…
Obviously different architechtures, but damn that felt strange…
Some phones have 24gb since 2 years ago already
Yup, while the current iPhone 15 Pro is the only model which has 8 GB of RAM, with the regular iPhone 15 having 6 GB. All iPhone 16 models (launching next month) will still only have 8 GB according to rumors, which happens to be the bare minimum required to run Apple Intelligence.
Giving the new models only 8 GB seems a bit shortsighted and will likely mean that more complex AI models in future iOS versions won’t run on these devices. It could also mean that these devices won’t be able to keep a lot of apps ready in the background if running an AI model in-between.
16 GB is proper future-proofing on Google’s part (unless they lock new software features behind newer models anyway down the road), and Apple will likely only gradually increase memory on their devices.
Pretty much what NVIDIA is doing with their GPUs. Refusing to provide adequate future proof amount of VRAM on their cards. That’s planned obsolescence in action.
I don’t use Apple computers but if we’re going into phones, iOS is extremely memory efficient. I’m on a six year old XS max with 4GB and it works like the day I got it, running circles around Android phones half its age.
It’s a good comparison actually because Apple keeps saying that their ram is faster because it’s soldered (Which is true but only if you squint). I don’t really think it makes a difference because if you run out of space you still run out of space, the fact that you can access the limited space more quickly doesn’t really help.
Well phone RAM also tends to be solded onto the board too so it’s a pretty good comparison.
It’s because AI needs a not a ram. I think Apple did not expect or plan for ai which shows in the fact that only the latest pro phone can have Apple intelligence. It’s because that phone has enough ram.
Now they will boost ram across the board because Apple intelligence will not run well without it.
Depending on pricing, I may actually buy a MacBook in 2025.
I’ve wanted one since the m1, but I’ve held out until 16gb was the starting amount of ram.
I don’t really care unless it has the same price point as the 8gb one.
But we all know it won’t be.
Golly, thanks Apple. It’s not like I can go buy a 256GB DIMM right now. 16GB what a joke.
Considering that RAM is shared with the GPU, it’s still not enough.
It’s OK - for an extra $400 they’ll sell you one with an extra $50 worth of RAM.
It doesn’t even cost that for them.
$800 for $30 of ram
I remember an Apple fanboy arguing that this made things better!
It does make some things better, but there are a number of downsides too. The biggest downside is that it’s not practical to make the memory socketed because of the speed that’s required.
Linux requirements: CPU (optional)
i wonder if it’s actually possible to install linux on a machine without a CPU
These days, the CPU probably runs Linux on itself.
Storage drive control boards are basically small computers in their own right, now.
Paper Linux, computing done olde world style 📜 🤖
