And now all the fan boys and girls will go out and buy another MacBook. That's planned obsolescence for ya
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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And why they solder the RAM, or even worse make it part of the SoC.
BUT BUT you'll get 5% fasTEr SpeED!!! And MOrE seCuRiTy!!!
Well. The claim they made still holds true, despit how I dislike this design choice. It is faster, and more secure (though attacks on NAND chips are hard and require high skill levels that most attacker won't posses).
And add one more: it saves power when using LPDDR5 rather DDR5. To a laptop that battery life matters a lot, I agree that's important. However, I have no idea how much standby or active time it gain by using LPDDR5.
There are real world performance benefits to ram being as close as possible to the CPU, so it's not entirely without merit. But that's what CAMM modules are for.
But do those benefits outweigh doubling or tripling the amount of RAM by simply inserting another stick that you can buy for dozens of dollars?
That's extremely dependent on the use case, but in my opinion, generally no. However CAMM has been released as an official JEDEC interface and does a good job at being a middle ground between repairability and speed.
It's an officially recognized spec, so Apple will ignore it as long as they can. Until they can find a way to make money from it or spin marketing as if it's some miraculous new invention of theirs, for something that should just be how it's done.
Parts pairing will do. That's what Apple known for, knee capping consumer rights.
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Someone who is buying a MacBook with the minimum specs probably isn’t the same person that’s going to run out and buy another one to get one specific feature in Xcode. Not trying to defend Apple here, but if you were a developer who would care about this, you probably would have paid for the upgrade when you bought it in the first place (or couldn’t afford it then or now).
Well no, not this specific scenario, because of course devs will generally buy machines with more RAM.
But there are definitely people who will buy an 8GB Apple laptop, run into performance issues, then think "oh I must need to buy a new MacBook".
If Apple didn't purposely manufacture ewaste-tier 8GB laptops, that would be minimised.
I wouldn't be so sure. I feel like many people would not buy another MacBook if it were to feel a lot slower after just a few years.
This feels like short term gains vs. long term reputation.
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From who? My mother who only use facebook, youtube and googling don't need 8gb
Sounds like all she needs is a dirt cheap chromebook then
That all depends on how much work they want to put into troubleshooting it for her. I got my mom a Mac Mini when her PC needed to be replaced. It’s way less responsibility on my part. I mostly just answer the occasional how-to.
Mac is easier than Windows, sure, but not easier than a chromebook. Nothing is simpler than a Chromebook. You can do much more with a Mac, but a chromebook is much easier.
That's what she has
Then her situation isn't applicable to this topic
This comment chain made me chuckle. It's such an "internet comment section" ..trope? I don't know the right word.
It’s a straw man argument that doesn’t address the main point the comment or was making.
I had a laptop with 8GB. Doing one of those things was fine, but when you open up another program it takes forever to switch to the browser
I don't know what Xcode is so yeah, I haven't been found wanting with my 8GB M2. Videos, downloading, web browsing, writing, chat applications, some photo editing, games (what I can actually play on a Mac, anyway), all good here.
16GB+ is obviously going to be necessary though, and not exactly that expensive to put into their base models so it should be put in soon.
Wake me up when phones have enough ram to run good voice to text engines on the phone itself
12 aint enough?
We already have that since iOS 15 if you have a phone that released after the iPhone X. It's time to become woke, sheeple.
So 8gb?
3GB, actually. That was on iPhone XR, which is basically the only budge iPhone Apple has made.
They should do 4Gb. I hear M3 mac's make it seem like 8Gb.
I think you mean gigabytes, not gigabits.
8 Gb = 1 GB
Darn you broadband
That’s true. Data transmission is usually measured in bits, not bytes. Gigabit Ethernet can only transmit a maximum of ~128 MB/s.
You mean they can even make 0.5GB appear as 8GB?! That's 16x! That apple silicon is just something else!
If you allocate it right, you can add 200GB of swap space and then that 4GB of RAM will feel like 408GB!
8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment. Heck my M1 Macbook Air is even good with basic Photoshop/Illustrator work and light AV editing. I certainly prefer my PC laptop with 32GB and a dedicated GPU but its power adapter weighs more than a Macbook Air.
8GB would be fine for basic use if it was upgradable. With soldered RAM the laptop becomes e-waste when 8GB is no longer enough.
Yeah, the soldering is outrageous. I miss the time when Apple was a (more) customer friendly company. I could open my Mac mini 2009 and just add more RAM, which I did.
When I bought my first MacBook in ‘07 I asked the guy in the store about upgrading the RAM. He told me that what Apple charged was outrageous and pointed me to a website where I’d get what I needed for much less.
I feel that if Apple could have soldered the RAM back then, they would have.
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8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment.
The thing is, basic office/school/work tasks can be done on any laptop that costs twice less than an 8GB MacBook.
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For the record, on Windows 10, I'm using 9GB (rounded up from 8.something) to run Firefox and look at this website, can't forget Discord inviting itself to my party in the background, and the OS. I had to close tabs to get down here. Streams really eat the RAM up.
Throw a game in there, with FF open for advice and Discord running for all the usual gaming reasons, and yeah, way over.
Notice I haven't even touched any productivity stuff that demands more.
8? Eat a penis, Apple. Fuckin clown hardware.
Also for the record, I have experienced an 8GB Mac Mini run Firefox with at least 20 tabs, Jetbrains Rider with code open and editable, Jetbrains DataGrip with queries, somehow Microsoft Teams, MS Outlook and didn’t seem to have a problem. Was also able to share the screen on a Teams call and switch between the applications without lag.
Windows OS couldn’t handle your application load? Eat a penis, Microsoft. Fucking clown memory management.
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imagine showing this post to someone in 1995
shit has gotten too bloated these days. i mean even in my head 8GB still sounds like 'a lot' of RAM and 16GB feels extravagant
I have a VPS that uses 1GB of RAM, it has 6-7 apps running in docker containers which isn't the most ram efficient method of running apps.
A light OS really helps, plus the most used app that uses a lot of RAM actually reduce their consumption if needed, but use more when memory is free, the web browser. On one computer I have chrome running with some hundreds of MB used, instead of the usual GBs because RAM is running out.
So it appears that memory is full,but you can actually have a bit more memory available that is "hidden"
Same here. When idle, the apps basically consume nothing. If they are just a webserver that calls to some PHP script, it basically takes no RAM at all when idle, and some RAM when actually used.
Websites and phone apps are such an unoptimized pieces if garbage that they are the sole reason for high RAM requirements. Also lots of background bloatware.
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I still can't fully accept that 1GB is not normal, 2GB is not very good, and 4GB is not all you ever gonna need.
If only it got bloated for some good reasons.
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I chalk it up to lazy rushed development. Good code is art.
That's not true at all. The code doesn't take much space. The content does. Your high quality high res photos, 4K HDR videos, lossless 96kHz audio, etc.
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This isn’t a big deal.
If you’re developing in Xcode, you did not buy an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years.
If you are just using your Mac for Facebook and email, I don’t think you know what RAM is.
If you know what RAM is, and you bought an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years, then you are likely self-aware of your limited demands and/or made an informed compromise.
I’m not gonna stand up and declare that 8gb is absolutely fine, because in very short order it won’t be. But yeah, currently for an average use case, it is.
My work Mac mini has 8gb. It’s a 2014 so can’t be upgraded, but for the tasks I ask of it it’s ok. Sure, it gets sluggish if I’m using the Win11 VM I sometimes need, but generally I don’t really have any issues doing regular office tasks.
That said, I sometimes gets a bee in my bonnet about it, so open Activity Monitor to see what’s it’s doing, and am shocked by how much RAM some websites consume in open tabs in Safari.
8gb is generally ok on low end gear, but devs are working very hard to ensure that it’s not.
If you know what RAM is, and you bought an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years, then you are likely self-aware of your limited demands and/or made an informed compromise.
Or you simply refuse to pay $200+ to get a proper machine. Like seriously, 8Gb Mac's should have disappeared long ago, but nope, Apple stick to them with their planned obsolescence tactics on their hardware, and stubbornly refusing to admit that in 2023 releasing a MacBook with soldered 8Gb of RAM is wholy inadequate.
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