from Hacker News

8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

by webmobdev on 11/8/23, 10:11 PM with 62 comments

• by tambourine_man on 11/8/23, 11:24 PM

  This smells like the MHz comparison of the G4 vs Pentium, when they claimed that their 500Mhz was equivalent to a 1GHz Pentium.

  There's a tiny nugget of truth surrounded by mostly bullshit.

  Only this time they put themselves in this position. They should own it, either admit that they couldn't keep their margins otherwise or take the US$ 50 or so profit hit and avoid the bad press on an otherwise great machine.

• by nullindividual on 11/8/23, 10:17 PM

  That's certain one of the statements of all time.

  All major OSes compress memory at this point. I'd be curious to see how OoM acts on macOS -- I've seen it on Windows [NT4] and Linux over the years. I've not seen an OS handle it as well as NT does/did.

• by ricardobeat on 11/8/23, 10:49 PM

  This is not news, has been the case since Intel macs, though the rise of Electron apps has reduced the MacOS advantage.

  I do have an 8GB M1 mini I use for development and the only way to make it run out of memory is to run Docker, otherwise it's perfectly fine.

• by itg on 11/8/23, 10:39 PM

  Well most pc laptops allow you to upgrade the ram. Upgraded mine to 64gb for about $125. How much is that analogous to, Apple?

• by justinator on 11/8/23, 11:22 PM

  I have a 16G M1 and that popup about the system running out of memory comes up frequently. I would do terrible, terrible things to be able to upgrade the RAM. My 2014 Macbook Pro had 16G!

• by sva_ on 11/8/23, 11:31 PM

  > Starting at $1,599, [...] 8GB of unified memory. [...] Users can opt for 16GB or 24GB at checkout, but these configuration options cost an extra $200 and $400 at purchase, [...]

  That's insane. I could upgrade my $1200 laptop, which came with 32GB, to 96GB DDR5 ram for about $300.

• by nwmcsween on 11/8/23, 10:39 PM

  Apple 100% knows Windows and Linux does memory compression, this is just a way of deflecting the actual issue of tiny amounts of ram.

• by tracerbulletx on 11/8/23, 11:25 PM

  There is something to this though I don't have benchmarks, I use an 8gb M1 air and it has never been an issue. I also have a 64gb desktop with a 4090 with 24GB of VRAM, and a MBPro M2Max with 32 and an old intel macbook with 16, and I do a lot of random stuff like video editing and running random docker containers, and what have you, and the MBAir is solid and never has any problem with it.

• by IronWolve on 11/8/23, 10:31 PM

  I just upgraded my windows workstation to 128gigs so i could load larger language models for only $300. 8 gigs seems rather absurd of apple.

  Apple charges 200 bux for 16 gigs or 400 bux for 24 gigs.

• by Yizahi on 11/9/23, 12:29 AM

  Pathetic clowns. 1600$ laptop with 8Gb memory (actually less, because it is shared with GPU) in 2023 is a fucked up thing. Any laptop more than 1000-1200$ with such memory is trash. The ones labelled "pro" especially.

• by GaryNumanVevo on 11/9/23, 8:40 AM

  Every Apple announcement makes me glad that my employer pays for my MBP

• by replete on 11/8/23, 11:09 PM

  Horse shit.

  What Apple wants to happen is for you to eat into your soldered SSD's endurance (TBW) through virtual memory swapping out RAM to your storage volume so that you Buy More Stuff.

  I investigated my unexpectedly high disk writes and made a few changes, disabled some MacOS services, disabled write-caching for video in Firefox etc and this reduced my write volume by tens of gigabytes per day. By this point I think I'd written 50TB of the drives TBW in a year which was significant/

  This is particularly relevant if you use a mac with a soldered SSD, because when you approach endurance ratings the drive will probably fail spectacularly and your computer will unrepairable by reasonable means.

• by madjam002 on 11/8/23, 10:32 PM

  Hah, reminds me of when they tried to justify having a max of 16GB of memory

• by nottorp on 11/8/23, 11:27 PM

  Marketing assholery.

  Apple is good at memory compression but that's not physical ram. They compress like crazy but you can still run out of it. I have. On a 16 Gb M2. It had 7 Gb of compressed ram at that moment.