from Hacker News

In Defense of RAM

by loteck on 11/3/23, 3:59 PM with 78 comments

• by wongarsu on 11/3/23, 4:33 PM

  Apple offering 8GB RAM in a $1,600 laptop is especially egregious, but small RAM sizes are an endemic across most laptop brands. In a desktop getting 128GB is no problem, beyond that you reach the realm of "workstations" with a significant price hike. Yet even high-end laptops frequently only offer a range from 8GB to 32GB, with the occasional 64GB for a specific model at high markup.

  I get the trend to soldered-on memory. I don't like it from a longevity standpoint, but it does provide space and performance benefits. But why are all laptops so low on memory?

• by linmob on 11/3/23, 4:21 PM

  8 GB RAM is not even enough to do Pro-level web-browsing, so I do agree, this new 14" Macbook Pro is a joke - and let's not forget that swapping can't be good for the storage you can't replace.

  I don't think upgradable RAM is coming back to Apple Silicon Macs. Upgradable storage, maybe; and there might be a use for standard RAM as a faster Swap, e.g., in a Mac Pro, to have 256 GB of super fast unified RAM and additional TBs of DIMMs for workloads that need that.

  Nitpick: Something is off with the timeline of M2 Pro Macbook Pro ownership mentioned in the article ("Two years ago, I got a 14” MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro processor and 16 GB of RAM.") M2 Pro Macbook Pro were only introduced in January 2023.

• by wnorris on 11/3/23, 4:32 PM

  What gets me is how Apple markets the improvements in the M series processor. They iterate on these on a yearly basis, yet do not upgrade base model RAM for near a decade.RAM is quite often the limiting factor for current computer longevity. This is especially true of Apple computers as RAM is non-upgradable.

  Apple at a minimum should create a cadence of RAM upgrades to coincide with processor upgrades to at least some extent. Otherwise they are selling base model computers that are going to require most users to replace sooner. Conflicts with Apple's environmental efforts.

• by zamadatix on 11/3/23, 4:26 PM

  I can see the argument the Pro really should have 16 GB base. It's not about whether 8 GB can fit anyone's use case reasonably (of course it can) or whether it's not enough to fit other's use cases (of course it isn't) but whether more people are getting the 8 GB version in error or because it was actually a good fit. An 8 GB Air is more defensible though, even if I wouldn't get it myself.

  In regards to upgradeable RAM I'd rather not see it in the laptops. Too much power and efficiency left on the table for something with an overall audience who will rarely utilize the ability to swap it anyways. I do like the swapability in things targeted at more niche audiences though. I think Intel's approach with on chip memory in some of the new Xeons is interesting, you can use it as RAM or as a cache for your actual RAM should you need more than can be put on chip. Could fit well with the Studio/Pro line audience.

• by dragontamer on 11/3/23, 5:11 PM

  RAM-capacity matters.

  Apple products have chosen to have higher-speed RAM that has lower capacity. PC users have the more standard (higher-capacity, but slower) RAM modules.

  I'm sure everyone remembers the crazy MiniZinc benchmarks on Apple products, as well as other incredible RAM benchmarks. Yeah, when you directly solder RAM to the motherboard, and/or directly stack the RAM on top of the CPU, you can make more assumptions about communication... and that channel can likely have lower capacitances or other physical features.

  Even 10-centimeters is about 2-clock ticks (assuming 4GHz clock), aka 0.5 nanoseconds, worth of distance. So that physical distance is in fact a substantial distance away when we're talking about nanosecond-scale communications that regularly take place between a CPU and RAM.

  ---------------

  But its a tradeoff. By having the assumption that RAM is further away in typical PCs, we can stuff more RAM 10-centimeters away or 20-cm away on larger server motherboards (aka: sticks-and-sticks of different RAM).

  But Apple makes a much smaller assumption: 0-cm... directly soldered on top of these M1 chips. Guess what? After 8GB of RAM, they've run out of room and they literally can't expand anymore unless they increase the assumed centimeters worth of distance out.

  BTW: Thank your EE for equalizing all the trace-lengths to all your RAM chips. Don't believe me? Take a good look at a motherboard close to the RAM and/or CPU, I guarantee you'll see the "wavy" lines of PCB-traces as the EE in charge of the PCB-design is trying to trace-length match all the different wires to the RAM.

• by tedunangst on 11/3/23, 4:48 PM

  I'm very happy with an 8GB laptop (several actually) doing more than basic tasks, but the secret may be not doing basic tasks like running a music player that requires 1 GB of ram all to itself. Leaves more memory for the compiler.

  Author mentioned this in passing, but I think could have reflected more on how it is so much ram is used to do so little, lest they find their 64 GB machine obsolete as well.

  (I think $1800 is an absurd price for an 8GB laptop.)

• by brucethemoose2 on 11/3/23, 4:12 PM

  Yes, all this... Except for the advocation of upgradable RAM.

  Embedded RAM, like or not, is the future of CPUs unless you want memory performance/power efficiency to freeze near current levels. Doubly so for graphics heavy SoCs like the M series.

  But Apple motherboards should absolutely be swappable, Framework style. This would not be a huge technical compromise like swappable RAM, or a design compromise like a socketed M CPU.

  And maybe we can get CXL "overflow" memory slots in laptops where performance is slow, but still 100x better than swap on SSDs.

• by superkuh on 11/3/23, 4:23 PM

  Apple selling 8GB of RAM laptops is both wonderful for tech support people and horrible. Pretty much every non-technical person I know who bought an 8GB M* device has run into problems. But pretty much every technical person I know says they have no problems. I wonder what the difference is? Regardless, I get lots of calls for help with M* macs re: running out of ram when running Adobe Creative Suite + darkroom/lightroom, etc, or the normal mac problems of having no storage (ie, 256GB/512GB) and the octopus of external drives and dongles not working right because externals/dongles are incredibly fragile and problem prone.

  It's horrible because there's actually no "fix" I can offer these normal people who made the mistake of buying an unupgradable 8GB computer.

• by themadturk on 11/3/23, 5:25 PM

  I'd kinda like to know what "pro-level web browsing" is.

  I have an M1 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM. The choice between 8 and 16GB was strictly a monetary one. I wish I'd bought 16GB, but I don't regret buying 8GB. I mostly run native apps, close down ones I'm not using, a rarely have more than a dozen Safari windows open at once. The only Electron app I run is Obsidian. I'm using some swap, but have never had an out of memory alert in three years. I hope when it comes time to replace my Air, I'll be able to afford more memory. Until then I'm doing just fine.

• by thejohnconway on 11/3/23, 5:45 PM

  Macs have always been RAM starved at the base models. It always struck me as surprisingly cheap move from what was meant to be a premium company — they would happily sell you a Mac that would perform badly with contemporary software.

  But you could upgrade it yourself, of course, and that’s what all the old Macheads would advise you do.

  These days… urg! Their SSDs are ridiculously tiny too, which I think is even more egregious. My computing habits might not require more RAM in the future, but my storage requirements always go up.

• by cosmotic on 11/3/23, 4:41 PM

  The presented evidence isn't very convincing. If the author had less memory, the browser would be (or already is) swapping individual tabs to disk and many of his apps wouldn't be caching things in memory as aggressively while in the background.

  The real key here is the PCIe NVMe bandwidth. If macos could swap in and out all of two entire memory heavy applications in a fraction of a second, the RAM size isn't as important as it used to be.

• by whatindaheck on 11/3/23, 6:22 PM

  Overall I agree 8GB is a joke in a “pro” laptop that costs as much as it does. But the author is a little off base imo.

  1. How macOS uses RAM changed a few years back. Memory Pressure is just important of a metric as usage because data is intelligent cached to fill memory. The author’s screenshot shows there’s no memory pressure on their machine while arguing there’s not enough memory. My RAM is usually pretty “full” but a lot of it is pre-loaded data.

  2. It seems like the author uses quite a few Electron apps. Maybe I’m shifting the blame here but Electron is a known resource hog. I’ve seen Signal use more resources than a full Linux VM. Native apps are usually faster, less resource intensive, and oftentimes follow the HIG / have better UX. For the user there’s no downside.

  3. There’s different “pros” out there. So often us developers think we need these big dank machines just to work inside Vim all day. I’m extremely guilty of that. And having headroom is nice. But even an entry MacBook Air could do the job. It’s not as fun but it’d be fine.

• by guidoism on 11/3/23, 4:57 PM

  The author has Chrome and Electron apps. Not sure this is normal usage. Grandma doesn’t use anything but what comes with the Mac.

  It’s fascinating how we all try to extrapolate assuming our usage is the norm. I do the same. But we all have different expectations.

• by cozzyd on 11/3/23, 5:01 PM

  Yeah but if the non-removable storage doesn't reach its rated lifetime in a year or two from constant swapping, then not as many people would need to buy new laptops.

• by pshc on 11/3/23, 4:55 PM

  I use Safari on my Macbook Air 16GB. Fast, saves RAM, energy efficient, just works.

• by jewel on 11/3/23, 4:25 PM

  Memory compression (via zswap) has made a big difference for me, on Linux, when on a constrained device. It makes a lot of sense for desktop workloads where most time is spent waiting for user input. For me it was a lot faster than swapping to disk, although with NVME drives that may no longer be the case.

  I thought I had read when the M1 came out that they had memory compression turned on by default but I'm not an Apple user.