- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests::Apple’s new MacBook Pro models are powered by cutting-edge M3 Apple silicon, but the base configuration 14-inch model starting at $1,599…
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The sheer idea of selling a 8gb machine in 2023 is kinda wild
My company computer had 4 GBs of RAM… And an HDD with Windows 11, the worst fucking experience.
I open the two essential Excel tools that we use all day + teams and outlook and I’m at 10gb of memory usage…
Yeah I know, 4 GBs was a fucking nightmare back in the days when I did my colleague homework in 2014… It is even worse now.
Same with NVIDIA, who are stubbornly refusing to give their overpriced GPUs the VRAM they deserve.
I bought a Dell 6core AMD laptop on some sale and it was little 345 after tax and shipping. Then I immediately replaced the nvme with a 1tb one for another 70? I think. Laptop is really nice for the price.
The people to whom this discussion ought to matter (the prospective buyers of an 8GB RAM machine) are utterly oblivious to this discussion. They’ll continue to walk into an Apple Store and buy these machines. We are like body builders arguing about how obese people should stop eating shit.
Us power lifters over here looking around nervously while double fisting big macs lol.
You’re much better off double fisting big PCs.
or double fisting your mom
heh, wrecked.
This matters to the prospective buyers of 16gb machines too… Who want it for cheaper.
It’s hard to take the Mac seriously. This is even more dumbfounding because they have an excellent processor. Then they pair it with anemic RAM and make demonstrably false statements about the system’s performance. I don’t get it.
soldering in an unusably low amount of memory or storage into the base model is classic bait and switch. they get to advertise a much lower price than what you will end up paying
And if people buy the low-end one, they’ll feel like they need to upgrade sooner.
Surely they’ll just get a rep for poor performance?
If that was really a danger for them, the original iMac would have killed the company. At least it had a nice colourful case to look at while waiting for it to do things or restart after its latest crash.
They won’t. Because Apple is the best and very customer friendly. /s
Ah it’s cool, you can just open the little door in the back and upgrade the RAM anytime you want.
Right??
Sir, this is apple.
Gotta buy their apple 5 point screwdriver
Open back
Remove adhesive & battery
Dismount motherboard and keyboard
Find out it’s soldered ram
Kill self
With a hot air rework station anything is upgradable, laptops, phones, babies… ok not babies, but like lots of other stuff.
Maybe, in the future, lamps will be permanently wired into house walls. Who even needs outlets? Just buy a new house if you don’t like the lamp anymore.
Isn’t that what ceiling recessed lights are?
Yeah, I get OP’s joke, but “permanent” doesn’t really apply to anything about houses. “Wired into wall” just means you need a screwdriver and a circuit breaker flip to change it, or maybe cutting into wall panels.
I mean it doesn’t matter if the house around the wiring falls apart first. Most modern construction is like one step above paper mache.
It’s Apple so they probably do some kind of bullshit key pairing nonsense to prevent you being able to upgrade the RAM even with the soldering iron.
I really wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not actually possible
Oh it’s not even close to being user-upgradeable. As in, the RAM module is part of the silicon M3 chipset. You can’t upgrade it because it is literally part of the CPU die.
Of course, apple could address this by also offering expansion slots that users can install ram in, but that would mean being nice to consumers, which we all know apple is fundamentally opposed to.
My four year old phone has more RAM than an expensive macbook? LMFAO 🤭🤭🤭
Um actthually mac is so oPtimized so 1gb mac = 12.3gb windows 🤓
STFU it physically has less ram than a potato while costing the price of a nasa rocket
Also Apple™ RAM costs like 4 to 8 times as much. Being $200 for 8GB. So assuming fantasy land Apple™ iMagic™ means 8GB = 16GB it’s still a minimum of twice the cost per dollar
Apple ram actually is just more dense. They can fit more binary in each gigabyte.
Ok, so a tech neophyte here so please dont crucify me. Would that not be adding more transistors to the ram? And, would that not affect clock speed?
Echo Dot’s joking, more binary per gigabyte doesn’t actually make sense
You done got whooshed 😂
an explanation of the joke :D, he is saying more binary in a gigabyte, I get what u mean with the transistors but he aint talking about that, he talks about being able to fit more data (binary, the raw data, ones and zeroes) in the same space (one gigabyte, like 1024^9 or around 1billions spaces for the ones and zerors) bc ofc, it’s apple so they somehow can save morr info in the same amount of space, that’s whatvhe meant :)
Thanks for the clarification! I appreciate it. I guess I was equating the binary, ones and zeroes, to the transistor gates either been on or off. Again, thank you!
and if u spend another 200 it goes from 16 to 32, so apparrntly somehow 8gb can cost 200 or 100 bc apple
Who mentioned Windows??
Did you watch the video? The 8GB model is like 1/4 the speed of the 16GB model.
It’s a bottleneck, clear as day. I just thought it was funny that Apple is so stingy that they’d even consider putting an offensive 8GB of ram on this laptop.
Darken was poking fun at the Mac fan boy trope.
LOL. That went over my head. 😂
✈️
🙄Normally I hate emojis, but I have to admit that they are a powerful and very concise language.
Apple did https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/08/8gb-ram-m3-macbook-pro-like-16-gb-pc/
It’s not directly mentioned in this conversation, but the excuse as to why they put such a pathetic amount of RAM in the laptop is that “Macs use it more efficiently”
edit: The quote is “Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently.”
Apple being apple… marketing at it’s worst.
Sure, it’s “more efficient” than other operating systems if you want to look at how much space is being utilized, but other operating systems don’t seem to have the same catastrophic performance bottlenecks as this apple laptop apparently does.
The fact that going from 8gb to 16gb improves system performance by 4-5x is something you’d never see happen in a “less efficient” operating system, so what’s Apple’s excuse for using it?
so what’s Apple’s excuse for using it?
Money
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Yeah, no your post went right over my head. LOL
“Pro”
Ahem. Yeah right
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Macbooks are both fit and pro at the same time
Bravo 👏🏼
The cpu is the M3, the same one they’ll put in the air. NOT a “pro” cpu, just a “pro” chassis.
With all the ports a pro needs, right. Right? 😅
I tell you what, i do love my lenovo x1 carbon. I used to have a real macbook pro from back in the day. Loved it. Upgradable, ports everywhere. Fast. Beautiful.
I had to move to Linux and a machine like the lenovo as i was not going to put up with 1 port and a fuck you very much.
However, they also have soldered in parts now, so next machine will be something else.
It looks like the 24 GiB (?) real-Pro MacBook.
My 350€ three-year old phone has an SoC with 12GB of RAM.
With that kind of memory swapping, the soldered ssd gonna be toasts within 1 or 2 yrs. Its already a known problem in previous macbooks, where people runs memory intensive programs and find thier mac book dead after even 6 months to 1 yr
Does it swap to the SSD or does it use a compressed area of RAM?
From what i read the previous cases it uses the ssd. Thus the ssd write cycle maxed out after 6 months leaving the mac dead. And then Apple sent a replacement, the guy use it as he usually did, and in 6months dead again.
Pretty sure it just doesn’t do anything. I’m not going to get one and test it because I’m not insane but from the performance specs of people are putting out it looks like it just maxes out the ram and then does nothing.
I was saying this when the M2 was first announced. It’s impressive for what it is, but what it is, is actually kind of crap.
“it just maxes out the ram and then does nothing.” is absolute nonsense. The programs need memory to operate.
If your RAM is maxed out and the programs seem to operate just as fine, the OS is doing something behind the scenes, it’s just a matter of what that something is. And memory swapping / virtual memory is a well-known method of alleviating RAM overuse, at the cost of murdering your SSD/HDD lifespan.
Yup this.
- It’s purely academic to me, as I have no intention of buying any Apple products or any desktop not assembled myself.
- interesting how I asked an honest question and am being downvoted without further comment. Have the Steve Jobs fuckbois already infested the fediverse?
I think selling an 8GB laptop with a Pro moniker is a terrible move. But you’ll need to cite examples (more than one, because sometimes components just fail under the best of circumstances).
And then wonder why Mac sales tanked 27% in their last financial report. Selling 8Gb laptops is an offence.
And seriously for their price, I would much prefer a laptop like Framework that I know I can easily swap components and make it workable even after a while.
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Apple had to know these reviews were coming. A new iteration on their custom SOC is obviously going to make every tech site go bananas benchmarking and their claim that 8GB = 16GB is going to make them punish the machine even harder.
It’s like they decided a few bad reviews would cost them less than cutting their markup on RAM to make a 16GB entry level Pro machine for less than $2k.
Perhaps with an SSD, memory swapping is less intrusive, hence you won’t noticed any performance issues. This is referring to the vast majority of users. At least for a few years. They will have an intolerable machine later though, when the OS becomes more bloated, and they can’t figure out how to upgrade those soldered RAM modules.
SSDs are far slower than RAM. And adds extra wear on the SSD.
And in the case of these Macs, the SSD is also soldered. So you’re screwed when you wear it out with the excessive swapping.
You missed the point of my statement. SSDs are far faster than physical HDDs, therefore you can get away with providing less RAM. And the lifespan of a modern SSD is the same as a HDD. But yes, they are cheaping out by providing only 8GB, unless you pay hundreds more.
SSDs are faster than HDDs but they’re not as fast as RAM.
Like if you’re going to fanboy Apple at least make sense
This is referring to the vast majority of users. At least for a few years
The “vast majority of users” do not know what RAM is and they don’t know what expandable memory means. Nor will they ever open their own laptops. If the laptop is slow after a few years they will just get a new one.
They’ll still sell like hot cakes 😂
Apple is the proof Marketting >> Quality.
They sell the premium dream making the user think it’s the best.
Vote with your wallet. Well, those buying this kind of mac are basic users (non-pejorative), so it will continue to be there.
I love when back in the day people said that mastering the hardware and software would help to drive cost down, well their cost. :)
I don’t have an Mac. How much RAM does it use just to turn it on? Windows 10 needs an astounding 4 GB just to see the desktop.
Windows RAM allocation depends on your ram size. If you have more ram, it will allocate more. Unused RAM is wasted RAM
Anecdotal evidence, but I’ve seen many old windows laptops with 8GB RAM use around 3-4GB on the desktop with no programs or background apps running.
Yes, 50% allocation is pretty normal and healthy.
Windows doesn’t use it all to load the desktop. It caches the rest so the files and software you use often loads faster. There’s also the reserved RAM for the hardware…
At least 4GB, my previous employer was a young guy that was an Apple simp. He bought a bunch of Mac minis as desktop computers and they only had 4GB of RAM. They were the most garbage piece of shit computer I have ever had the displeasure of being forced to use. It really wasn’t even usable, it would lock up just trying to open any web browser or even the file explorer (or whatever Apple calls it). It really amazes me how Apple continues to shit in their customers mouths, tell them it’s chocolate ice cream and they believe them
I got gifted an old MacBook (I never thought of buying one myself) and started using it mainly because I liked the UI, but I’m generally speaking a windows user at work and Linux sysadmin at home.
When I checked up the MacBook systems, I see it has 4 GB of RAM and I thought “that’s pathetic!”
But surprisingly enough, the Mac OS handled everything I throw at him with decent performance and I’ve never felt the OS was overwhelmed.
I don’t know if this is a testament of how well integrated and optimised Mac OS is (after all, it’s still BSD) or how bad Windows is.
But still, for the price they’re charging for these machines, adding at least a couple of gigs of RAM would be expected!
I think Unix got a smidge better and windows got insanely bad.
Every os uses certain % of ram to preload services and applications. So that when you launch them they open faster. And when they aren’t needed and you want to do ram intensive task, those unnecessary processes are killed.
