Welcome to 2010
I upgraded from 8GB to 16GB like 2 months ago.
Welcome to 2010 to you as well then!
Considering that RAM is shared with the GPU, it’s still not enough.
It’s OK - for an extra $400 they’ll sell you one with an extra $50 worth of RAM.
It doesn’t even cost that for them.
I think they meant what the end user would NORMALLY pay, which is the better comparison.
But Apple isn’t buying consumer ram, they’re spending $8 to put on a different chip instead. If other laptop manufacturers are charging $50, it’s because they think they can get away with it, like apple.
Think that’s not really what’s being compared, but ok
$800 for $30 of ram
“yeah but that’s like having 32GB on a lame PC”
I remember an Apple fanboy arguing that this made things better!
It does make some things better, but there are a number of downsides too. The biggest downside is that it’s not practical to make the memory socketed because of the speed that’s required.
It’s really sad that this needs to be an actual headline.
I know it’s not a like for like comparison, but the Pixel 9 Pro that launched this month has 16gb of RAM.
Yup, while the current iPhone 15 Pro is the only model which has 8 GB of RAM, with the regular iPhone 15 having 6 GB. All iPhone 16 models (launching next month) will still only have 8 GB according to rumors, which happens to be the bare minimum required to run Apple Intelligence.
Giving the new models only 8 GB seems a bit shortsighted and will likely mean that more complex AI models in future iOS versions won’t run on these devices. It could also mean that these devices won’t be able to keep a lot of apps ready in the background if running an AI model in-between.
16 GB is proper future-proofing on Google’s part (unless they lock new software features behind newer models anyway down the road), and Apple will likely only gradually increase memory on their devices.
Pretty much what NVIDIA is doing with their GPUs. Refusing to provide adequate future proof amount of VRAM on their cards. That’s planned obsolescence in action.
And like Apple, Nvidia has no shortage of fanboys that insist the pitiful amounts of (V)RAM is enough. The marketing sway those two companies have is incredible.
It’s a complete joke that Sapphire had an 8GB version of the R9 290X, what, 11 years ago or something? And yet Nvidia is still selling 8GB cards now, for exorbitant prices, and people lap it up.
The current GPU situation actually has me curious about AMDs upcoming Halo APU chips. They’re likely going to be pretty expensive relative to their potential GPU equivelent performance but if they work out similar to the combined price of a CPU and GPU then it might be worthwhile as they use onboard RAM as their VRAM. Probably a crazy idea but one I look forward to theory-building in spring when they release.
This happens if you sell your hardware as DRM key to use their software (i(Pad)OS, macOS etc. and Cuda)
If you were being cynical, you could say it was planned obsolescence and that when the new ai feature set rolls out that you have to get the new phone for them.
I think they got caught with their pants down when everybody started doing AI and they were like “hey, we have this cool VR headset”. Otherwise they would’ve at least prepared the regular iPhone 15 (6 GB) to be ready for Apple Intelligence. Every (Apple Silicon) device with 8 GB or more get Apple Intelligence, so M1 iPads from 2021 get it as well for example, even though the M1’s NPU is much weaker than some of the NPUs in unsupported devices with less RAM.
They are launching their AI (or at least everything under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella) with iOS 18.1 which won’t even release with the launch of the new iPhones, and it’ll be US only (or at least English only) with several of the features announced at WWDC still missing/coming later and it’s unclear how they proceed in the EU.
With how polished Apples AI on mobile was at launch compared to Gemini on Android at launch were it could not even do basics like timers I suspect Apple had it in the works for far longer and it would not have been a total surprise.
Also you are describing the situation at launch for new hardware, the software will evolve every year going forward and the requirements will likely increase every year. If I am buying a flagship phone right now I want it to last at least 3 years of updates, if not 5 years. The phone has to be able to cope with what is a very basic requirement that is enough RAM.
This isn’t some NPU thing, this is just basic common sense that more RAM is better for this, something the flagship iPhones could have benefited from for a while now.
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing or disagreeing with me here. Either way, hardware has a substantially longer turnaround time compared to software. The iPhone 15 would’ve been in development years before release (I’m assuming they’re developing multiple generations in parallel, which is very likely the case) and keep in mind that the internals are basically identical to the iPhone 14 Pro, featuring the same SoC.
AI and maybe AAA games like Resident Evil aside, 6 GB seems to work very well on iPhones. If I had a Pixel 6/7/8 Pro with 12 GB and an iPhone 12/13/14 Pro (or 15) with 6 GB, I likely wouldn’t notice the difference unless I specifically counted the number of recent applications I could reopen without them reloading. 6 GB keeps plenty of recent apps in memory on iOS.
But I’m not sure going with 8 GB in the new models knowing that AI is a thing and the minimum requirement for their first series of models is 8 GB is too reassuring. I’m sure these devices will get 5-8 years of software updates, but new AI features might be reduced or not present at all on these models then.
When talking about “AI” in this context I’m talking about everything new under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella, like LLMs and image generators. They’ve done what you’d call “AI” nowadays for many years on their devices, like photo analysis, computational photography, voice isolation, “Siri” recommendations etc.
I was under the impression that ios used sleight of hand with apps to reduce memory footprint for inactive apps rather than how android manages its recent apps list? Is it still requiring special permissions to run non apple apps in the background as active tasks? AI will need to run the background and will need a decent chunk of RAM to do so.
I completely agree that changing the processor or revising NPU or similar is too much to do late stage, I reject that for increasing RAM or storage, both can be changed closer than 12 months from release and I would also reject that apple had the AI changes planned for much less than 12 months out as well. It just feels like a big fuck you to anybody buying a flagship from apple this year as it wont last the length of time it should do for normal consumers who would expect all of the latest AI features to roll out during the supported window.
iOS used to be able to handle background tasks via very specific APIs, that started with iOS 4 and I believe this started to be reworked with iOS 7 and it behaves similar to Android in that background apps are suspended by default. According to an old video by Android Authority, iOS seems to be able to compress suspended apps down to a smaller memory footprint than Android. Both OS allow background services to run, but to my understanding iOS keeps way more control over that compared to Android (although vendor-specific battery saving features probably attempt to do something similar on Android). So in that way, it’s still more specific/selective on iOS compared to Android. Prompt (iOS SSH app) uses the location service in the background to prevent iOS eventually killing active connections for example. Still, iOS seems to handle app suspension more efficient than Android (and yes, Android actually suspends background apps as well).
I’m with you that they could’ve likely bumped all soon-to-be-released iPhone 16 models to 16 GB, but rumors only have them at 8 GB. Makes “sense”, as even the iPad Pro and MacBook Air still only come with 8 GB in their lowest configurations.
But I don’t buy that them releasing the iPhone 15 with only 6 GB of RAM was a malicious attempt at limiting AI features. Seeing how unfinished their AI stuff is even in their latest beta releases, they were/are playing catchup. It was bad foresight and there are often talks about how internal teams at Apple are very secretive about projects in development, I wouldn’t be surprised if the team developing the iPhone 15 knew pretty much nothing about the software plans with Apple Intelligence. It’s still a very valid point of criticism though obviously, seeing as you could still buy an iPhone 15 to this day (it’s still the “latest and greatest” non-Pro iPhone before the iPhone 16 releases in a few weeks) and you won’t get the by far biggest feature of a software update releasing just weeks/months after your purchase. This is a huge step backwards in terms of software support, as iPhones normally get pretty much all major new software features for at least 3 years, and still most features of even newer OS releases (recent devices have seen support for major updates for 6+ years, the iPhone XS will get its 7th major iOS release with iOS 18).
I’m not saying “cut that poor multi-trillion dollar company a break”, I’m just saying that not supporting the iPhone 15 for Apple Intelligence probably isn’t a result of malicious acting, but rather bad foresight and poor internal communication. Limiting the soon-to-be-released iPhone 16 models to 8 GB on the other hand seems very greedy, especially with them trying to run as many of their AI models on-device.
I bet, that the next non pro iPhone will be one of the most sold iPhones, all time. Or it is the SE one, if it supports apple’s “AI”. I think, they planned that this way, so they have an explanation compared to when they tried sell new hardware for stage manager.
I don’t use Apple computers but if we’re going into phones, iOS is extremely memory efficient. I’m on a six year old XS max with 4GB and it works like the day I got it, running circles around Android phones half its age.
Some phones have 24gb since 2 years ago already
Which phone(s) had 24Gb standard?
I didn’t think any of those are the base model. Anything with Pro or Ultra in the name should have more than 8Gb of RAM in my opinion. It also seems dominated by OnePlus as the others listed are not really players in the larger market. You could possibly argue that Xaomi is but I’ve never even seen one of these phones in the real world. In fact it looks like most of these are only available in China variant.
I am writing this using my Xiaomi poco x3 pro, although it have 8gb ram and 256gb memory, it also have headphone jack and micro SD slot
for the same price other laptops sell for 64GB
what a bargain
Oooo a whole 16 gigs! It can run Firefox with more than four tabs open!
…is this actually 16Gb or 8Gb feeling like 16Gb, as per previous statements?
…in 2030.
Golly, thanks Apple. It’s not like I can go buy a 256GB DIMM right now. 16GB what a joke.
Whoa, that’s like 32GB of Windows RAM. Seems excessive to me tbh
The annoying thing is I have had people claim that 8GB and 16GB is fine on Apple and works better than on PC laptops. To the point one redditor point blank refused to believe I owned an Apple laptop. I literally had to take a photograph of said laptop and show it to them before they would believe me about the RAM capacity.
You should have said “sure buddy” and ignored them.
The problem is they will then keep spreading misinformation.
And that’s your problem? Do you hold $AAPL
Apple helped spread that misinformation. So why would I hold some of their stock if I am trying to counter it?
No, I want companies to stop spreading this bullshit and for people to stop falling for it. I don’t hold any stocks at all. In fact that kind of bullshit I am fairly against.
I own a 8GB MacBook Pro for work, it’s definitely better than a PC with 8GB of RAM, but not better or even close to a PC with 16GB. Just the amount of stutters/freezes while the swap file goes is insane
Maybe this is true if you use Windows. If you use Linux on your PC versus macOS on a MacBook you will probably find the PC performs comparably if not better.
Oh totally, Linux is in the same ballpark as, if not better than, Macs when it comes to RAM usage. Windows is just a hog
Until you open a web browser or an Electron app. Them folks don’t really seem to give a shit about RAM usage.
We are talking about PC vs Mac. Both have the same problem when it comes to chromium based things.
My Linux machine has 64 GiB of RAM, which is like 128 GiB of Mac RAM. It’s still not enough
Serious question what are you using all that RAM for? I am having a hard time justifying upgrading one of my laptops to 32 GiB, nevermind 64 GiB.
For me in particular I’m a software developer who works on developer tools, so I have a lot of tests running in VMs so I can test on different operating systems. I just finished running a test suite that used up over 50 gigs of RAM for a dozen VMs.
Same, 48c/96t with 192gb ram.
make -j is fun, htop triggers epilepsy.
Few vms, but tons of Lxc containers, it’s like having 1 machine that runs 20 systems in parallel and really fast.
Have containers for dev, for browsing, for wine, the dream finally made manifest.
If games, modding uses a lot. It can go to the point of needing more than 32gb, but rarely so.
Usually, you’d want 64gb or more for things like video editing, 3d modeling, running simulations, LLMs, or virtual machines.
I use Virtual Machines and run local LLMs. LLMs need VRAM rather than CPU RAM. You shouldn’t be doing it on a laptop without a serious NPU or GPU, if at all. I don’t know if I will be using VMs heavily on this machine or not, but that would be a good reason to have more RAM. Even so 32 GiB should be enough for a few VMs running concurrently.
That’s fair. I’ve put it there as more of a possible use case rather than something you should be consistently doing.
Although iGPU can perform quite well when given a lot of RAM, afaik.
Photo Editing, Video Transcoding.
k8s
Ironically, it’s the other way around, since Apple has to share their RAM between GPU and CPU, where other computers typically have them separately.
So in normal usage with 8 GB, you’re automatically down to 7, since at least 1GB would be taken by the graphics card. More if you’re doing anything reasonably graphics-heavy with it.
Does it?
Previous benchmarks have shown the 8 GB models seriously fell behind in performance.
AI Models needs that RAM to work
Naturally the price for the cheapest model will also be going to up several orders of magnitude more than the cost of materials, labor, and healthy profit margin to account for that as well I’m sure.
Let me know how many multiple thousands of dollars it’s going to cost for a MAX variant of the chip that can run three external monitors like it’s 2008.
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I’ve had to support their products on a professional level for over a decade.
Their enterprise stuff…can only be described as a quintessential example of an ill-conceived, horrendously executed fiasco, so utterly devoid of utility and coherence that it defies all logic and reasonable expectation. It stands as a paragon of dysfunction, a conflagration of conceptual failures so intense and egregious that it resembles a blazing inferno of pure, unadulterated refuse. It is, in every conceivable sense, a searing, molten heap of garbage—hot, steaming, and reeking with the unmistakable stench of profound ineptitude and sheer impracticality.
That was…. poetry!
xServes were pretty cool though
Good, 8 is unusable for my workloads and 12 feels like they’re just fucking with us
“640k ought to be enough for anyone.”
