8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests::Apple’s new MacBook Pro models are powered by cutting-edge M3 Apple silicon, but the base configuration 14-inch model starting at $1,599…
For $1,599 you’d at least expect 16GB+ RAM given how cheap RAM is…
I think Apple gets all their RAM from 2008, because they charge $50/GB for it.
How the fuck did Apple manage to be the largest company on the planet doing shit like this? Are Apple users really that fucking dumb?
Because they have an extremely consumer friendly UI/UX and a very stable OS.
And they’re much better at marketing than they are at making computers or phones. Apple is probably the most successful marketing company in the world.
Not sure “friendly” is quite the right word… you can argue it’s well designed or cultivated users but Apple is anything but a "friend"ly.
Their UI and UX is shit. You basically can’t use it for many basic tasks without installing a bunch of third party (proprietary and expensive) software.
Apple loves under ramming (to give a word a new meaning) and forcing everyone to pay for upgrades. The problem is there are always people that buy the base.
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I think the point is to squeeze out a couple extra hundred dollars from customers.
Apple has long done price anchoring with their products just like in this case.
Apple’s RAM isn’t as cheap as you might think, because it’s all built directly onto the CPU die. That’s part of what makes its computers so fast.
It’s iRAM!
Maybe we should all start calling it the “MacBook Semi-Pro”.
8gb ram has been common for over a decade now. It’s what I would expect in a sub-$400 laptop.
Or a raspberry pi.
$75, 8gb, and this isn’t even the latest model. https://www.microcenter.com/product/622539/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-8gb-ddr4
The LPDDR4X RAM in the Raspberry Pi isn’t QUITE the same as the on-die stuff in the M3 processor.
The MacBook amateur. They should be called out on a viral scale.
It’s hard to take the Mac seriously. This is even more dumbfounding because they have an excellent processor. Then they pair it with anemic RAM and make demonstrably false statements about the system’s performance. I don’t get it.
soldering in an unusably low amount of memory or storage into the base model is classic bait and switch. they get to advertise a much lower price than what you will end up paying
And if people buy the low-end one, they’ll feel like they need to upgrade sooner.
Ah it’s cool, you can just open the little door in the back and upgrade the RAM anytime you want.
Right??
Sir, this is apple.
Gotta buy their apple 5 point screwdriver
Open back
Remove adhesive & battery
Dismount motherboard and keyboard
Find out it’s soldered ram
Kill self
With a hot air rework station anything is upgradable, laptops, phones, babies… ok not babies, but like lots of other stuff.
Maybe, in the future, lamps will be permanently wired into house walls. Who even needs outlets? Just buy a new house if you don’t like the lamp anymore.
Isn’t that what ceiling recessed lights are?
Yeah, I get OP’s joke, but “permanent” doesn’t really apply to anything about houses. “Wired into wall” just means you need a screwdriver and a circuit breaker flip to change it, or maybe cutting into wall panels.
I mean it doesn’t matter if the house around the wiring falls apart first. Most modern construction is like one step above paper mache.
My four year old phone has more RAM than an expensive macbook? LMFAO 🤭🤭🤭
Apple had to know these reviews were coming. A new iteration on their custom SOC is obviously going to make every tech site go bananas benchmarking and their claim that 8GB = 16GB is going to make them punish the machine even harder.
It’s like they decided a few bad reviews would cost them less than cutting their markup on RAM to make a 16GB entry level Pro machine for less than $2k.
The worst part is that in many retail chains like Costco, you can only get the 8GB version. I suspect the review reading segment of the population is smaller than we’d expect for such an expensive purchase. Previously they’ve crippled M1 machines that have 256Gb storage, only including one controller instead of two as in the 512+ machines. It’s a shame for MacBook Air, but totally unacceptable for a computer marketed as “Pro”
Not a pro cpu, just a pro chassis.
What’s worse is that their “8GB = 16GB” claim has a tiny bit of truth in it: many apps that are GPU-accelerated usually load/generate stuff on host RAM and then transfer it to the GPU RAM to launch some shaders/kernels on it and they do this repeatedly. The idea with Apple (also AMD when you consider APUs) is that since the RAM is “unified” you just have one RAM and you probably don’t have that redundancy anymore if those apps are built with that in mind, so in a sense if previously you had a 1GB buffer that had to live on both CPU and GPU RAM, this time it will only live in as a single 1GB buffer on Apple’s “unified” RAM. That’s still very different from the “8GB = 16GB” deceptive marketing by Apple.
You don’t have to put unified in quotes, it’s the proper term for an SoC that shares the same memory between the CPU and GPU.
The major advantage of unified memory is that it doesn’t have the copy overhead. When using a discrete GPU you need to load data onto the host and then copy it over to the GPU. And then if data on the GPU needs to be processed separately by the CPU (saved to a file, sent over the network, etc) you incur more overhead again. And let’s ignore more specific technologies like Direct I/O and io_uring for this discussion.
On an SoC with unified memory you don’t have this overhead. The CPU can (in theory) access the same memory space as the GPU with zero overhead, and it makes the performance hit from shuttling the data back and forth non-existent.
But there’s a massive downside, and it’s that it drastically cuts down your available memory, because now the CPU and GPU have only a single 8GB pool to use for both. Whereas in a system without unified memory and a discreet GPU would have the 8GB for the CPU in addition to whatever the GPU has. They don’t step on each other’s toes.
For example, if I use a system with 8GB of host RAM and a GPU with 6GB of VRAM to run a model of some kind (let’s say stable diffusion), it will load the model into the VRAM and not clog up the host RAM. Yes, the host will initially use system RAM to load the file descriptors and then shuttle the data to the GPU, but once that’s done the model isn’t kept on the host.
On a Mac it would load it onto the only memory available and the CPU would not have the full 8GB available to it the way an x86 system would have.
The point I’m making is that because of the unified architecture the 8GB is effectively even less than 8GB in a discrete GPU system. It’s worse.
“Pro”
Ahem. Yeah right
It looks like the 24 GiB (?) real-Pro MacBook.
The cpu is the M3, the same one they’ll put in the air. NOT a “pro” cpu, just a “pro” chassis.
With all the ports a pro needs, right. Right? 😅
I tell you what, i do love my lenovo x1 carbon. I used to have a real macbook pro from back in the day. Loved it. Upgradable, ports everywhere. Fast. Beautiful.
I had to move to Linux and a machine like the lenovo as i was not going to put up with 1 port and a fuck you very much.
However, they also have soldered in parts now, so next machine will be something else.
My 350€ three-year old phone has an SoC with 12GB of RAM.
With that kind of memory swapping, the soldered ssd gonna be toasts within 1 or 2 yrs. Its already a known problem in previous macbooks, where people runs memory intensive programs and find thier mac book dead after even 6 months to 1 yr
Does it swap to the SSD or does it use a compressed area of RAM?
From what i read the previous cases it uses the ssd. Thus the ssd write cycle maxed out after 6 months leaving the mac dead. And then Apple sent a replacement, the guy use it as he usually did, and in 6months dead again.
And then wonder why Mac sales tanked 27% in their last financial report. Selling 8Gb laptops is an offence.
And seriously for their price, I would much prefer a laptop like Framework that I know I can easily swap components and make it workable even after a while.
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My current phone, and my last phone both had more ram. For significantly less money.
100 percent in agreement that apples ram pricing is lunacy
But my brother. Wtf do you need that much ram in a phone for lol. Mine has 6gb (12 pro lmao) and that causes me zero issues. Granted, I don’t game on my phone. But is phone gaming really eating that much ram these days?
I also have 12 GB. There are usage patterns where additional RAM wull be useful or even necessary on a phone. When you have more RAM, the phone can sleep tasks and leave background apps alone without having to discard their contents from RAM. This means fewer cold startups. Also, more contents can be cached, which means faster app startups. Both of these techniques also reduce CPU usage and improve battery life. You can also achieve more tabs in your browsers and more and bigger apps running at the same time. More RAM also means fewer situations where swapping is done or needed, so additional CPU and disk cycles are saved and battery usage is reduced. Some apps will actually require more RAM or spin more when memory is scarce. Examples can be advanced content creation apps in audio, video, or picture/photography. Also, some games, especially in high settings.
Are these additional GBs necessary? No. And most people would not notice them, as even 6 GB is overkill for quite a number of peoples’ usage patterns. Your phone does maybe 95% of what it does just about as well, even when you have a low-midrange CPU and GPU that is from a few years ago, and just 4 or 6gb of RAM.
This holds true for iOS and Android. They’ve both done a fair bit of housekeeping and software improvements to reel in excessive resource usage gen over gen. I think Android was doing some catch-up here for a while, but I don’t know how they go toe to toe on this anymore, and it’s difficult to empirically compare the two in this area.
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Money is the bottleneck.
I don’t have an Mac. How much RAM does it use just to turn it on? Windows 10 needs an astounding 4 GB just to see the desktop.
Windows RAM allocation depends on your ram size. If you have more ram, it will allocate more. Unused RAM is wasted RAM
Anecdotal evidence, but I’ve seen many old windows laptops with 8GB RAM use around 3-4GB on the desktop with no programs or background apps running.
Yes, 50% allocation is pretty normal and healthy.
Windows doesn’t use it all to load the desktop. It caches the rest so the files and software you use often loads faster. There’s also the reserved RAM for the hardware…
At least 4GB, my previous employer was a young guy that was an Apple simp. He bought a bunch of Mac minis as desktop computers and they only had 4GB of RAM. They were the most garbage piece of shit computer I have ever had the displeasure of being forced to use. It really wasn’t even usable, it would lock up just trying to open any web browser or even the file explorer (or whatever Apple calls it). It really amazes me how Apple continues to shit in their customers mouths, tell them it’s chocolate ice cream and they believe them
Every os uses certain % of ram to preload services and applications. So that when you launch them they open faster. And when they aren’t needed and you want to do ram intensive task, those unnecessary processes are killed.
I got gifted an old MacBook (I never thought of buying one myself) and started using it mainly because I liked the UI, but I’m generally speaking a windows user at work and Linux sysadmin at home.
When I checked up the MacBook systems, I see it has 4 GB of RAM and I thought “that’s pathetic!”
But surprisingly enough, the Mac OS handled everything I throw at him with decent performance and I’ve never felt the OS was overwhelmed.
I don’t know if this is a testament of how well integrated and optimised Mac OS is (after all, it’s still BSD) or how bad Windows is.
But still, for the price they’re charging for these machines, adding at least a couple of gigs of RAM would be expected!
I think Unix got a smidge better and windows got insanely bad.
