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

macrumors.com

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

#21

Post by porcc »

replete wrote: post #17

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 th…

Do you have a resource for us to do this for ourselves? Seems like a pretty good thing to do

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

#22

Post by tambourine_man »

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.

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

#23

Post by tracerbulletx »

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.

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

#24

Post by cmrx64 »

JohnFen wrote: post #16
stouset wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compressed memory is a performance increase. CPUs are fast .

Depends on what sort of performance you're optimizing for, does it not?

There might be an energy hit… but there are a LOT of compute cycles available between cache fills: https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/

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

#26

Post by golem14 »

tryfinally wrote: post #13
IronWolve wrote: post #3

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.

I just put 64 gigs of (fast) memory and a (very fast) 4 TB SSD in my laptop for a total of $600. In the MacBook Pro configurator the equivalent upgrades look like 36GB->64GB RAM: $400 1TB->4TB SSD: $1000

Except you can't upgrade Macs anymore, you need to buy a completely new one.

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

#27

Post by sva_ »

> 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.

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

#28

Post by golem14 »

porcc wrote: post #21
replete wrote: post #17

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 th…

Do you have a resource for us to do this for ourselves? Seems like a pretty good thing to do

+1. When there were still spinning HDDs, some of this fuckery was obvious, like spotlight indexing all the time like crazy. This might still happen, or happen again, but we sheeple would'nt know because SDDs are much quieter than HDDs.

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

#29

Post by dmvdoug »

justinator wrote: post #20

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!

I have an 8GB M1 and I have never seen that popup.

Our use cases likely vary.

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

#30

Post by justsomehnguy »

dmvdoug wrote: post #29
justinator wrote: post #20

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!

I have an 8GB M1 and I have never seen that popup. Our use cases likely vary.

> I have an 8GB M1 and I have never seen that popup.

Does that mean 8GB M1 == 16GB x86?

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