Eight gigabytes has been the standard RAM load out on new MacBook Pros for the better part of a decade, and in 2023, Apple execs still believe it’s enough for customers.
With the launch of Apple’s M3 MacBook Pros last month, a base 14-inch $1,599 model with an M3 chip still only gets you 8GB of unified DRAM that’s shared between the CPU, GPU, and neural network accelerator.
[…]In a show of Apple’s typical modesty this week, the tech giant’s veep of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers has argued, in an interview with machine-learning engineer Lin YilYi, that the Arm-compatible, Apple-designed M-series silicon and software stack is so memory efficient that 8GB on a Mac may equal 16GB on a PC – so we therefore ought to be happy with it.
Eight gigabyte of RAM in and of itself isn’t an issue, on a budget machine. Apple is selling incredibly expensive machines labelled as “pro” with a mere 8 GB, and charges €200 for another 8, which is highway robbery, plain and simple. I wonder how many people at Apple – at any level – use Macs with 8 GB of RAM.
I have a feeling that number is quite low.
That’s what they don’t tell you about life inside Apple. They all use PCs to keep costs low.
It’s true, 8GB on M-series processors is enough for almost everyone. For those browsing Facebook, checking email, and doing light productivity in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or the iWork suite, 8Gb is fine. You can even do photo editing and light video work all without breaking a sweat.
But if you bill the machine “MacBook Pro,” I’m sorry, 8GB is an insult. It’s just Apple running the Tim Cook “low cost/high profit” playbook. It’s just not a “pro” level configuration, and it dilutes the otherwise venerated brand value. The MBP should start at 16GB/512 in 2023, anything less is not only not-Pro, it’s also a bad look for Apple overall that the most valuable company in the world has to rip off their customers on the low end, and then crush them on the needed upgrade.
You mean 32GB/2TB in 2023… 8GB/512GB are like borderline chromebook numbers these days.
That’s true despite the M-series processor. In fact, 8GB can be generous if that’s all you’re doing.
Apple’s Bob Borchers can make his `8GB on mac = 16GB on pc` claim all he wants and I’d bet in 2023 most users, including Mac users, know better. He can demand users “ought to be happy with it” but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting. My experience has brought me to that opinion that Apple products are overvalued & exaggerated. Are they crap? Not until they are, just like anything else.
Try enabling a zram swap space on linux, you’ll see RAM compression ratios of about 1:3.
My backup machine has only 4GB of RAM, an with zram swap became quite usable, even for some C++ development.
Now, reportedly, MacBooks have RAM compression baked into the hardware, so the 8GB is physical, but real space might be twice that.
I’m not an apple evangelist, just a proponent of “get information and measure, then critizise”
My cellphone has 12GB of RAM. 8GB is a joke.
Part of my beef with them is they are labeling it “on M-series processors”.
I own a 2019 Lenovo ARM (Snapdragon 850) laptop, which was a somewhat-budget laptop (not chromebook, though). It comes with 8GB RAM, and is quite usable for browsing, even for light development. I cannot really compare with 8GB on x86 hardware nowadays, but it does not feel like memory is the main strainer.
So, if anything, this should be marketed as an ARM advantage, or a RISC advantage, not as an “M-series” advantage. It’s not Apple’s genius that made a stellar CPU from a mediocre architecture — it is that ARM just is a great performer for some constraints.
And, of course… it’s not the configuration baseline I’d expect from a $1500 laptop in 2023.
Crazy, insane, and likely goofy idea. Don’t buy Apple products!
There are tons of great products out there that will do pretty much anything an Apple product does, only far less expensive and intrusive. So long as the money keeps rolling in despite how they treat customers they have no reason to change what they’re doing.
I still don’t know of anything that is as hassle less as a mac, though. Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft, all have there terrible driver/hardware issues that have pissed me off recently. I’m sure you and everyone else has had different experiences, most of them positive, but all of my complaints with actual apple hardware are things like price and models like these that are kind of absurd.
Here’s hoping that the newer Qualcomm machines achieve parity with Apple silicon and have more upgradeability/lower cost alternatives.
BS. I have used ThinkPads for 25 years. Never a problem.
I’ve had two thinkpads die at 1 year old. First I thought was a fluke. After the second, I moved on. YMMV.
I’m a big fan of Linux on Thinkpads, but that’s not the OS they generally come with out of the box. My last Thinkpad, which had Windows 10 OOTB, had the following problems:
* Broken fractional scaling: at 125% zoom, fonts were badly rendered and there were frequent CPU spikes; neither were problems at 100% or 150%. “Legacy” applications were also improperly scaled.
* Software update conflicts: Lenovo Vantage and Windows Update would see different software packages as “newer,” and update against each other — installing package X, then X1, and then back to X — sometimes for days.
* Multiple battery level indicators running simultaneously in the taskbar.
* Inability to map touchpad input on/off to a hotkey combination (or toggle it on and of by any means short of going three layers deep into the Control Panel)
* Glitchy UI animations (e.g. the peek/timeline/virtual desktop animation).
* Changing touchpad gestures required reboot; gestures would be reset when new touchpad driver was installed.
* Inability to run an external display at a different scale than the laptop display (i.e. could not run laptop display at 125% zoom while running external display at 100%).
That’s out of the box, as in “the experience Lenovo intended when they shipped the product.”
That’s better than you’d get with a Dell or what have you, but significantly and categorically worse than you’d see on a Mac of the same vintage; In particular, Apple has had painless, “just works” display scaling for over a decade.
It’s also worth noting that a Thinkpad is roughly the same price as a comparable Macbook Pro.* Both being premium machines, albeit with different use cases, it is reasonable to expect either to be relatively problem-free.
* Thinkpads with WUXGA/kinda-like-Retina displays start at about $1700, and hit about $2000 when decently specced. Depending on which specs you privilege, the price will float about 10% in favor of one or the other, and of course there are some areas where comparison is impossible (there’s no such thing as an easily-repairable Macbook or a Thinkpad with 18 hours of battery life).
Dell also has issues with that. Keep losing my touchpad functionality. I think sadly the best windows machines all suffer form the same faults basically. Something in my environment is just harsher towards lenovo. Maybe its my power? Maybe the way I type? IDK. Dells fail less often for me, but still suffer from various maladies including some listed above for lenovo.
I mean, Apple silicon (and ARM generally) is in fact a lot more memory efficient than x86. The RAM being soldered in however… And the SSD as well! I know they have some kind of custom bus for that which is faster than M.2, but I’d take an old school SATA SSD if it meant being able to upgrade the storage.
rainbowsocks,
A while back I measured the code density of hundreds of ARM vs x86 binaries from debian repos, ARM did have a slight code density advantage, which has a number of benefits, but it was a few percent. So combining a slight advantage for ARM code density with the fact that most of the ram will be consumed by data, not code, comparing 8GB to 16GB is…far fetched. Certainly the onus is on apple to back up it’s statements, but given how often they provide misleading comparisons with non-reproducible benchmarks and vague unspecified test procedures, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I completely agree. This has been a serious downgrade throughout apple’s product lineup, especially for so-called pro workstations. Soldered ram is disappointing but IMHO it is less critical than soldered SSD. Unreplacable SSDs are where I personally draw the line. Consumers should be able to upgrade and repair these on their own just like they could with older apple hardware. At least on unrestricted hardware, is is a very cheap and effective way to get many more years out of products. Just like apple’s many other anti-repair antics, this is all an intentional form of planned obsolescence.
It’s always important to see what 3rd party benchmarks actually show. While their proprietary bus might theoretically be faster, it doesn’t automatically mean that storage will be faster. I don’t know where the M3 will stand, but some of their M2 laptops actually ended up using slower SSDs than M1.
https://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-ssd-read-write-speeds-testing-benchmark
The benchmarks make it very clear apple have SSD bottlenecks happening well before bus speeds become the limiting factor, this is true of PCI bus speeds as well. This isn’t a bad thing, it provides headroom for future upgrades, that is if storage weren’t soldered in.
Note apple’s response…
They sort of swept the low SSD performance under the rug with a vague generalization about M2 based systems being even faster for real world activities…as though raw SSD performance doesn’t matter in real world performance.
Woof, thanks for the corrections Alfman. Makes me even gladder I never jumped on the Mac bandwagon.
Alfman,
To be fair, Mac “Pro” (the tall tower desktop) has upgradable SSD:
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MR393AM/A/apple-2tb-ssd-upgrade-kit-for-mac-pro
But I have no idea whether 3rd party ones would work, or it is Apple branded only.
sukru,
As you probably guessed already, the storage for macpro is proprietary, which wouldn’t be an obstacle for clone markets, however it’s also locked through DRM. So I don’t think any 3rd party compatible SSDs exists. This is why apple can charge so much higher than market prices. If you bought such an expensive macpro to begin with, $1-3k for an SSD probably isn’t a big deal for you.
They can’t replace system disks, but if it’s just auxiliary storage that you need, I’ve read that you can add commodity 3rd party storage via 3rd party PCI cards that are macpro compatible. External storage works too, but to have such large macpro computer and still be dependent on external storage seems excessive.
Alfman,
Yes, it seems to be the case 🙂
Seems like we are back at the good old days. Remember that Apple claimed in the noughties that a 500 MHz PowerPC chip was just as fast if not faster than the then freshly released GHz monsters from Intel and AMD?
So 8GB is 16GB. Sure why not. The RDF is still intact.
Not the same thing at all. It is perfectly possible for a CPU with slower clock speed to outrun a faster model; e.g. compare Athlon 64 to Pentium 4. Or of course, compare FX8150 to I7 2700K…
But there’s no substitute for more memory, and in 2023, 8GB is a joke, especially if it can’t be upgraded. If you want to see the difference, open a big Blender project and some texture editing software in both machines at the same time.
It’s a typically Apple strategy. Upsides for Apple, pass the downsides onto their customers.
They put RAM inside the CPU package to gain a big performance advantage and look better than the competition on marketing pages.
The RAM cannot be upgraded after purchase but that’s fine because they can price gouge their customers up front.
Apple shall go with NUMA architecture to have both both HBM and standard DIMM biodegradability. That would probably lower their power efficiency.
Imagine shopping for Apple products outside the USA. The pricing is worse.
Their market share is considerably worse too. Americans tolerate it but the rest of the world isn’t so quick to accept being blatantly shafted by Apple and ask for more.
Like many of you, I was incredulous about 8GB of RAM, and I am using a M1 Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM. It’s great, but I first ordered an 8GB machine. Do I notice a difference? No. The 8GB Mac Mini kicked ass. Probably the best bang for your buck. Costco lists the 8 GB/265GB Mac Minis at $300. There has never been a better deal in the history of computing.
The internal storage is more important to me at this point, though. It really is a different architecture. I am having to rewire my brain, because more is better. But I ended up getting an external USB-C drive from Costo for cheap. iCloud works great too for offloading a bunch of stuff. Still, 256GB is the bigger issue than 8GB of RAM.
What do you do with it? I’d be concerned as I’ve heard reports people are having issues with too many browser tabs open, which Shouldn’t be a problem for anyone. On Windows, 32 GB seems to be a minimum for me to work comfortably, due to several large Java apps I unfortunately use, which preserve memory then use it…
NathanJHill,
Obviously some people don’t need that much because the nature of the work doesn’t demand it. 8GB RAM shared across CPU and GPU tasks is ok for people who don’t need more than that. Same with 8GB chromebooks and 8GB windows devices and heck we may as well throw in 8GB phones in there. But RAM of all things is an area where you can’t apply the “it’s good for me, therefor it’s good overall” logic. What works for you may be painfully inadequate for others.
I’ve never bought computers from a private membership club, but we use their website.to get a rough idea of memory specs when buying computers today.
8GB ram starts at $580 (BTW the $300 mac mini is unavailable).
16GB starts at $1250
32GB starts at $1,950
64GB starts at $3800
https://www.costco.com/desktops-servers.html?sortBy=item_location_pricing_salePrice+asc
Now I don’t consider this list useful for much given the handwaiving and omission of other important specs. However what it does make clear is that in 2023 8GB is at the extreme low end. In fact every other computer that costco sells includes more than 8GB total ram and apple stands alone in defining the lower limit.
Oh boy, this is the Trumpiest statement I’ve heard in a while 🙂
We can agree there. Storage is an important spec too and 256GB is extremely low. This wouldn’t be as big a deal if it weren’t permanently soldered in. Not having to buy a new computer to upgrade its storage, what a concept!
While it is on the low side, 8GB is fine for many use cases, especially when those use cases aren’t so demanding, which many office applications aren’t. Many people don’t do demanding work, and 8GB should be adequate for them. However it doesn’t take much to use 8GB when you start doing heavy workloads. When you add in the fact that apple only has shared memory iGPUs with no option for dedicated GPUs, 8GB starts to look a lot worse because the GPU needs memory too. Even low end discrete GPUs today have their own 8GB dedicated vram in addition to system memory. So sharing 8GB between GPU and CPU…that’s not very good IMHO.
8GB is quite usable. But… who’d pay US$1500 for a “usable” machine? That’s he price for a “premium, high performance” machine, able to do heavy compiling, media editing or other tasks — for which 8GB is somewhat lowish.
8Gb of ram is 8gb of ram in PC, os×, mobile, kiosk, GPU, and even console. Nothing can change that, unless you install 16gb, then its going to be like 16gb. That kinf of garbage is no different than retina display, dynamic island, camera array, butterfly keyboard, bezeless and meaningless things they come up with. They always spin their planned obsolescence and omissions as sacrifices.
8GB of RAM is 8GB of ram everywhere. if a process allocates xyz byes, it’s going to do so anywhere. On my x86_64 linux, I have 32GB of RAM. I’m always using over 45GB of memory though because I have a 128GB swap partition on an nvme drive. sure’s it’s killing it but there is no visible drop in performance.
I don’t have a problem with a product for professionals having 8GB of RAM – thin clients are a thing. I don’t have a problem with a product for professionals costing $1.6k, especially if it came with a business warranty, support and maintenance contract (although I very much doubt it did in this case). But I object to labeling a locked-down, irreparable, fragile consumer device a “pro” product in the first place.
What is with this obsession with using “pro” products anyway? A professional carpenter will have many expensive, specialized, high capacity tools, requiring a lot of floor space, vacuum systems, high power electrics etc – most people, even advanced woodworking hobbyists, are better served with more universal and smaller footprint products.