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Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

macworld.com

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Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#11

Post by Osiris »

When I started my current job they gave me an M1 Mac with 8GB because it’s what they had on hand. I could barely run my IDE and a web browser. At least 1GB was for video memory, and it was swapping constantly. I couldn’t run docker containers because of how much input lag I would get. 8GB is barely usable and shouldn’t even be an option for a Pro machine.

I used it for a week before switching to a personal desktop with 64GB.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#14

Post by bushbaba »

eisa01 wrote: post #9

This will excerbate the problem with electronic waste by shortening the useful life Apple should be more serious about their environmental commitments

Eh, if you give more Ram developers will just take advantage of it. Realistically perf headroom just gets eaten up on shitty code and abstraction layers. Ever notice how word is always the same slow-ish speeds. Never really faster.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#16

Post by SllX »

charcircuit wrote: post #3

Having an 8GB version makes it more accessible. Apple could just stop selling it and the complaint about there being a $200 upgrade would no longer be valid.

Apple's memory and SSD prices are too damn high for what they're giving. Basically ~$200 per 8GB of RAM and ~$200 per half terabyte of SSD. This is well out of line what you pay for both in any other product or standalone, and there's nothing especially good about the RAM and NAND chips they use to justify anything close to those prices. If they were buying SSDs retail off of Amazon and marking them up 30 or 40 percent, that would be a bargain compared to what they charge for SSDs right now, and they're not paying anything close to retail prices themselves.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#18

Post by aurareturn »

eisa01 wrote: post #9

This will excerbate the problem with electronic waste by shortening the useful life Apple should be more serious about their environmental commitments

The average Mac is in use for far longer than your average upgradeable windows laptop from Walmart/Costco. One strong evidence for this is that macOS market share is actually 20% on desktop/laptops despite Macs selling only about ~8-10% of total PCs worldwide. [0]

So yes, on average, Macs are significantly better for the environment. Having less RAM does not mean people replace their Macs more often than Windows computers.

If people truly cared about the environment, they'd buy Macs over Windows computers.

With that said, could Apple extend the lifespan of Macs even more by making the base RAM higher? Yes. Not going to argue against that. But Macs are already much better than Windows computers in this regard.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

[0] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS51020623

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#19

Post by brucethemoose2 »

charcircuit wrote: post #3

Having an 8GB version makes it more accessible. Apple could just stop selling it and the complaint about there being a $200 upgrade would no longer be valid.

8GB of LPDDR5X does not cost Apple $200.

Its... Maybe $20?[1][2]

Its so cheap that it probably costs Apple more to manufacture the extra Macbook/CPU SKU, test it, support it and so on than to just sell 16GB as the baseline.

Its literally, purely just to upsell the 16GB version. There is effectively no savings for the consumer even if 8GB is "enough."

1: https://www.dramexchange.com/

2: https://www.mouser.com/c/semiconductors/memory-ics/dram/?typ...

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#20

Post by Osiris »

bushbaba wrote: post #14
eisa01 wrote: post #9

This will excerbate the problem with electronic waste by shortening the useful life Apple should be more serious about their environmental commitments

Eh, if you give more Ram developers will just take advantage of it. Realistically perf headroom just gets eaten up on shitty code and abstraction layers. Ever notice how word is always the same slow-ish speeds. Never really faster.

You’re arguing that we should all be using 10-20 year old computers and that computers should never get faster because it makes us write less efficient code?

That’s an asinine argument.

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