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.
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.
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.
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.
💯
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.
The processor architecture does not influence RAM usage. (At least not if both architectures are 64-bit)
