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Ask HN: Why does my '15 MacBook Air have the same RAM (8gb) as a '22 McBook Pro?
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why does my '15 MacBook Air have the same RAM (8gb) as a '22 McBook Pro?
#2It's better! Don't fall for the "megabyte myth."
Re: Ask HN: Why does my '15 MacBook Air have the same RAM (8gb) as a '22 McBook Pro?
#3I don't see the '22 MacBook Pro available with less than 16 GiB.
Re: Ask HN: Why does my '15 MacBook Air have the same RAM (8gb) as a '22 McBook Pro?
#48GB is plenty for a browser with a few tabs, and a couple applications open. If you need more memory, buy more, right?
Re: Ask HN: Why does my '15 MacBook Air have the same RAM (8gb) as a '22 McBook Pro?
#5Why not?
8gb is the minimum and is still working fine.
Plenty of ram for plenty of use cases.
Not everything has the same CPU to memory balance.
Re: Ask HN: Why does my '15 MacBook Air have the same RAM (8gb) as a '22 McBook Pro?
#6I don't see the '22 MacBook Pro available with less than 16 GiB.
The base 13" model has 8GiB.
Re: Ask HN: Why does my '15 MacBook Air have the same RAM (8gb) as a '22 McBook Pro?
#7I don't see the '22 MacBook Pro available with less than 16 GiB.
The 13" MBP starts at 8GB.
Re: Ask HN: Why does my '15 MacBook Air have the same RAM (8gb) as a '22 McBook Pro?
#8Your average consumer is not really using more than 16GiB of RAM, which was also an artificial limit for a while in laptops due to having to choose between LPDDR3 (power efficient, 16GiB limit) or DDR4 (larger capacities allowed, uses more power).
Apple and other manufacturers thus had to keep 8GiB models around so they had something to boost to entice you to the more powerful models.
So a few professional laptops went with DDR4 as LPDDR4 support floundered for years, but most stuck to LPDDR3 as most consumers would notice an extra 30 minutes of battery life on the spec sheet more than RAM they wouldn't actually use.
It's only with Ice Lake (low quantities) and Alder Lake (more available) on the Intel side, M1 on the Apple side, and Ryzen 4000 on the AMD side that it's as cheap (cost and battery life) to have a system capable of more memory.
But plenty of consumers still haven't complained about their 8GiB systems, so they still sell them.
Re: Ask HN: Why does my '15 MacBook Air have the same RAM (8gb) as a '22 McBook Pro?
#9Because unless your applications need to store lots of things in memory, it doesn't matter for performance.
macOS is very good with memory management, so for a lot of use cases 8gb is simply sufficient. The system as a whole is a lot faster than the '15 Air.
That being said, the lowest config is often something that is just there to meet a price point for advertising purposes, not what Apple actually expects people to buy. They've been doing this for decades. 16gb was the "standard" in 2015 already for most machines.