I’m a web developer but I also do tons of work with large files being transferred across the network, I do some CPU intensive tasks from time to time, run Docker containers, etc. all on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM.
Well it’s 2024 now and the thing still screams. So what I don’t understand is: why are there suddenly so many enraged tech news websites bashing on the 8GB base RAM?
I get it that some people need more than just 8GB, but for the cliche web browsing, email and social media user it’s not adding up to me why anyone is so enraged about this.
Because RAM is cheap and really helpful. If you have a Desktop, you can buy 16GB DDR4 RAM for ~30€ and 32GB for ~60€. That’s retail with VAT - Apple itself will get much better prices and so there is no reason why their expensive devices are shipped with 8GB RAM.
That is a great argument — I can fathom anger toward this.
8GB is just too low and was too low in 2020. It gets shared with GPU and once you swap you decrease lifespan of a soldered SSD. It’s okay for light use but let’s not kid ourselves that even if it was passable in 2020 it would be enough for much longer.
It got bashed for low RAM by everyone except mainstream tech „reviewers”. Tech media are glorified advertisements these days so the only thing that happened between then and now is that they switched from selling you that new shiny M1 MacBook to selling you that new shiny OpenAI model.
I’m not going to bash M1 MacBook Air. It’s awesome, the CPU was ahead of time and I knew it would last me years. That’s why I got 16GB one.
8GB was already too low for what is positioned as a premium machine. RAM is a pretty cheap part of the whole computer, so it’s completely unnecessarily small. I’m also a software engineer and the 16GB in my work MBP M1 is not even enough at times.
The big thing that’s caused Apple to stop completely fleecing the people buying the low end option: AI. If you or Apple want to run local models on a machine with only 8GB of RAM, you probably won’t have much left over for anything else.
I should say that the MacBook Air in question is a personal device. My work MacBook Pro with something like 32GB of RAM can’t keep up sometimes with all the trash apps we have to use at work: Slack, Teams, VS Code. I very much wish we’d go back to native UI and stop using these insane memory hog apps.
When buying a computer, most people want it to last several years, with most PCs you can upgrade the RAM during the lifetime of the device. If you buy a modern Mac, you can’t.
As time goes on new software will need more and more ram, but on a Mac you are stuck with what you got.
Sure, Apple uses a different way of managing RAM than windows, but that can only do so much. Sooner or later you will get to a point where it just isn’t enough anymore. With eight gigs you will get there sooner than with 16.
Regarding your usecase, one thing you need to consider is that CPU intensive tasks does not equal RAM intensive tasks.
Copying a file is neither CPU nor RAM intesive, so it is a rather pointless test.
Docker instances depend highly on what they actually do for work weather or not they will use a lot of RAM, so it is a very inacurate test.
Web development is not as resoruce intensive as say video editing or running simulations.
For you 8GB RAM is fine, for an engineer, video editor, or even a finance analyst, 8GB is putiful.
Then we need to talk about value, I can get an Asus ExpertBook B1 B1402CVA for less than an M2 MacBook Air.
The ExpertBook is slightly heavier with slightly larger screen (but with lower resolution), it has 16GB RAM and 512GB storage space, both of which can be upgraded as the user’s needs change.
The ExpertBook costs slightly less than the MacBook, so tell me, why should I pay more to get less?
Now, I realize it isn’t that simple, both computers are suitable for different tasks, they run completely different OSes, and have different types of CPUs.
I think it has to do with Apple Intelligence that requires 16GB.
This makes a lot of sense. I remember there was tons of speculation about AR/VR around 2020 and Apple was preparing their machines to support that if necessary.
If that was the case, then yeah 8GB is crazy low.
Context is important.
If you’re running a single app that has low requirements 8gb is quite usable. For my mom using. browser and email it’s fine. For my kids doing school work it’s fine.
For me working in 4K video and photoshop it’s not.
But that’s why you can add more. The whiners are just noise.
💯
My 10 year old Dell laptop is still pretty useful and I plan on using it for a few more years. You might not still be happy with your 8gb of ram in 2030. If the M1 laptops were upgradable people would have less of an issue.
As everyone is saying, 8gb is not much and ram is cheap. What I find unforgivable is the pricing on upgrading the ram. $200 for 16gb is just completely unacceptable, I would actually call it discusting. Also the ram is not user replaceable unless you are into micro-soldering, so they’ve basically got you by the balls. 8gb will much sooner be limiting than the cpu performance on these laptops in the future. Overall, very sleazy, anti-consumer tactic.
I guess we got used to massive ram increase/requirements in the past few years due to x86/64 architecture and such, that 8GB now seems completely obsolete. ARM works differently and more efficiently which would explain the lower specs for same or better results.
That’s how I see it at least.
I am sorry, but you are confidently incorrect.
It is absolutely true that x86_64 and ARM are two different CPU architectures, this does not mean that RAM usage differs hugely between them, that has more to do with the OS.
If you want to load a 20MB raw image into ram to edit it, it will take 20MB of ram regardless of CPU arcitecture.
The reason we are used to using so much ram is that as hardware capabillities have increased, so have software requirenments.
The processor architecture does not influence RAM usage. (At least not if both architectures are 64-bit)
