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Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models

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Re: Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models

#71
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That increases performance but it doesn't save any RAM.

I’m not exactly an expert on this, but I do know from experience that Objective-C programming (and anything coming out of an ARC compiler, like Swift) is a constant game of grabbing memory, using it, and releasing it. My impression is that if you can release memory faster, that means greater availability in the pool. Guesses aside, I spent a lot of time in Xcode on an 8gb M1 while waiting for the M1 Pro to come out t…

The behavior you describe would be a function of the memory allocator in use (system allocator, custom allocator) and independent of the hardware. It's at a much, much higher level than the hardware or even the page compression.

Re: Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models

#73

As an Apple fan, what Apple charges for RAM is insulting. Pre 2012 it was standard practice to buy your MacBook Pro with the minimum RAM, and you could upgrade the RAM yourself buying from Crucial and the like for WAY CHEAPER than what Apple sold the RAM for. To stop that Apple started soldering the RAM to the logic board. I’d have no problem buying RAM from Apple if they charged a fair market price. Sadly Apple seem…

> Sadly Apple seem hell bent on ripping us off. Did you mean "Fortunately, Apple are laser-focused on maximizing shareholder value"?

The sad part is that people assume those two ate roughly inversely related. But I feel like there’s a lot of negative externalities and long term system effects that would disprove it.

Re: Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that's needed. 1TB is great and all, but unless you're downloading games or handling a lot of media, you're unlikely to use it all. I don't think most people need that much, and will get by just fine with 512GB or even less (my current work laptop for software dev has a 256GB SSD, and while I could use more if I wanted to, I don't need to think about disk usage, even with a small Windows 11 VM on the same dis…

My MacBook Air M1 has 16GB RAM and the base 256GB RAM. I decided I wanted to try some native Apple Silicon games like “Resident Evil: The Village” and “Death Stranding”. So I took a 1 TB WD_BLACK external SSD, installed macOS Sonoma and made sure to boot from that hard drive when I wanted to play games. It works perfectly. Sadly there is no way to add RAM externally ha ha. I boot from the 256GB storage that is solder…

Is all device functionality otherwise supported booting off an external drive?

Re: Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models

#76

I hate to say it but their minimum configs feel like a pricing scam. Like the price of a hotel room before taxes & fees. Even store employees will tell you that you really have to go one level up.

And each level up in RAM typically includes a bump to CPU and/or GPU core counts as well, so it is even more difficult to discern the true pricing. Annoying, but also understandable that they don't want to produce every possible combination of specs.

Don't get me started on needing to buy a 1TB+ iPad Pro to get double the RAM, though.

Re: Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models

#77

As an Apple fan, what Apple charges for RAM is insulting. Pre 2012 it was standard practice to buy your MacBook Pro with the minimum RAM, and you could upgrade the RAM yourself buying from Crucial and the like for WAY CHEAPER than what Apple sold the RAM for. To stop that Apple started soldering the RAM to the logic board. I’d have no problem buying RAM from Apple if they charged a fair market price. Sadly Apple seem…

> Sadly Apple seem hell bent on ripping us off. Did you mean "Fortunately, Apple are laser-focused on maximizing shareholder value"?

Why not both

Re: Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models

#78
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some people with 300k on their original Chevy Silverado transmission. But there are MANY people that have them blow up every 100k miles. So, would you say the 4l60e is a good transmission because yours went 300k? Im in the Central valley and have helped at least 5 friends replace or rebuild theirs. If you visit a transmission shop, this is the transmission that keeps them in business because it's one of the…

Well the repair cost if you have this problem on a computer would approach the used value of the computer, so its likely to become ewaste. It wasn't a problem before the 2016 machines, and its still a problem on the current machines. Meanwhile my pre-2016 apple laptops are still in use by family members without issue

I agree with you. I was responding to the guy that said his is fine..... As if that proves anything. So I gave the 300k mile example of the most troubled transmission in the industry.

Re: Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models

#79

As an Apple fan, what Apple charges for RAM is insulting. Pre 2012 it was standard practice to buy your MacBook Pro with the minimum RAM, and you could upgrade the RAM yourself buying from Crucial and the like for WAY CHEAPER than what Apple sold the RAM for. To stop that Apple started soldering the RAM to the logic board. I’d have no problem buying RAM from Apple if they charged a fair market price. Sadly Apple seem…

There were plenty of other reasons they started soldering the RAM, and their desire to lock in customers to bogus upgrade prices simply meant that “but customers will lose the ability to upgrade their RAM from third parties for cheaper!” argument to not solder the RAM fell on deaf ears.

Re: Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models

#80

I’d love to see an Air with an M4 chip and 64GB RAM.

The non-integer scaling on the Airs puts me off. I want perfect text rendering at a great resolution as that's well over 50% of the reason to get a MacBook. So it's the Pro for me

Apple just needs to add sub pixel anti aliasing back. It’s utterly disgusting to use macOS on some third party displays.
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