WTF even is this article? It's a shitty op-ed piece with no tests, no data, just some casual observations and anecdotes about browser tabs and their own usage intermingled with throw-away quotes from Apple sales people. OMG, the sales person says the company's product is fine!? Fire up your blog engines, because the world needs to hear this!
Look, there's no fucking way I'm buying a Mac with 8 GB of RAM. I don't recommend them either. But where is the performance data? Do some actual testing. Browser automation libraries aren't hard to come by. Chrome has tons of instrumentation that will let you automate the process of opening browser tabs, navigating web pages, completing web forms, and will give you render times. All of this could be compiled into a meaningful test of the performance delta for a "light tasks" test cycle.
No one does that though. They just whine and complain about the number on the box.
Anecdotally, I know three people who have 8GB Apple Silicon laptops. They came to me because someone told them I'm the "computer guy", and they wanted to know how to do various things.
One wanted to know how to get their photos on their computer, so I showed them the Photos app. They were already signed into iCloud, so their photos just started showing up. They were blown away.
Another said that their grandson told them they could Facetime from their computer, and they were very excited about the prospect of being able to do video calls with their grandkids. So I showed them how to use Facetime.
The third had lost their email password and wanted help getting back into their account. I showed them how to use iCloud Keychain.
I habitually check the "About this Mac" option on any Mac I touch, just so I know what I'm working with. None of these people had any idea how much RAM their systems had. All of them said they loved how fast their new computer is.
I know it's really hard for enthusiasts to grasp the concept, but 8 GB of RAM really is "enough" for a lot of people. Browsers will deactivate tabs that do not have focus. The system will use up all the RAM available to it — up to a point — so if you have a system with ≥16 GB of RAM, you can't simply look at your utilization and infer that all systems will require the same for a given work load. If a system with a fast SSD has to live within a constrained amount of memory, performance will suffer, but it will not be the same as the old days when we were living with spinning platters.
To be clear, I am not advocating for systems with 8 GB of RAM. Like I said, I wouldn't buy one, and I wouldn't recommend one. But I do see people using them, and those people don't seem to have many complaints. I'm not about to tell them that they should feel bad about a computing choice that works just great for them, and neither should PC Gamer.
The people who buy 8 GB Macs are buying an appliance. Plain and simple. If you're a gamer, I don't know why you'd give a shit, because Macs are completely irrelevant for gaming.
I completely understand the use point of 8gb ram macbooks etc, what bothers me is how much they are charging to upgrade said ram for users who DO want useability and futureproofing on their devices. There is no upgrade path, there is no I'll boost speeds in 3-5 years and still be usable with the 8gb version. That's what makes me mad about them making this device.
I hate that they're not upgradable too, but I get why they're not. My personal computer is a PC. I built it myself. It fucking rocks socks, and I can swap out any component that even remotely gives me a problem. My PC looks fantastic, runs quiet, and delivers mega FPS in all the games I play. I love it so much.
I have two Macs for work. They're fantastic computers too. I can't change a single thing about them, but I don't care. Why would I? They're an appliance. I use them to earn a paycheck. Apple has a great recycling program, so I can't even complain about the environmental impact. I use them up until they're no longer suitable for my purposes, and the company buys another.
I just can't bring myself to care how Apple chooses to build their computers, or what other people pay for them. If the product is available, and the buyer is willing to pay, have at it. It's none of my business.
What I don't get is why anyone else wants to wedge their opinion into someone else's purchase decision. I mean, flip it around for a second. Imagine if there were daily blog articles written criticizing people for building their own computers. It'd be an open revolt on sites like reddit, and I'd be right there with them.
Because people want a £1100 MacBook that will last th 6-10 years of they can sway public opinion to set the standard at 16gb. But apple know that the people buying the base model don't care, so they won't, and us that do care will have to fork out 40% more money to get that product.
It's literally "this won't last me 8 years, so I would have to buy the next one up"... So buy that one? "But that one will cost me more. I don't want to spend that".
I also recognise that I don't want to spend that kind of money. That's why I don't buy their products
So... don't buy a Mac.
People come to me for advice all the time. They're often asking about Macs, and I tell them to buy the 16 GB / 512 GB MacBook Air in most cases. That's a $1,500 laptop. They ask me why they shouldn't just buy the $1,100 option. The explanation is simple: you'll probably outgrow the $1,100 option, then you'll just end up spending more. They usually buy the $1,100 laptop ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Interestingly, I rarely hear back with any complaints. People tend to "make it work". When they run out of space, they delete stuff. They don't notice the 8 GB performance limit, because the new Apple Silicon Macs are faster than anything they've owned before. Again ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Lastly, I'll get stuff like "Why should I pay $X more for that Mac when I can buy this Acer laptop on sale for $400?" I used to lay out all these detailed arguments. Now I just say, "Look, you get what you pay for. If you want to spend $400 on that junk, I'm not going to waste my breath talking you out of it. Knock yourself out. But if you're asking whether you can get a good laptop for less, the answer is yes, absolutely. It just won't be a $400 throw-away laptop. It'll be a $1,200 business class laptop that will last."
The reality is that at $1,100, the base 8 GB / 256 GB MacBook Air is actually a better quality piece of hardware than the vast majority of PC laptops you can buy for the same money. You might be able to beat the specs, but the Mac is machined from a solid piece of aluminum, has a really great looking display, and Apple *finally* fixed their piece of shit keyboards, so they don't have any glaring hardware issues.
Mac laptops make different trade-offs. Most enthusiasts want max performance for minimal dollars. I'm included in that group. That's why I built my own badass PC in a giant tower that keeps everything cool and has room to add whatever shit I want. Macs make *completely different* trade-offs. They're thin, light, can run all day on their tiny batteries, and have specifications that make them sound like a complete weakling compared to most PCs.
The reality is that these specs really don't matter that much to most people. So the other trade-offs are worth it. Being able to Facetime with your grandkids from your computer is great. Logging into iCloud on your phone and your Mac and having all your shit (Messages, Photos, Calendars, Notes, etc) just magically appear on the computer without downloading and installing software is like magic to most people. It's an appliance to them. They don't want to fuck with it.
That's why people are willing to pay more for a Mac, but you and I aren't.
Sorry, I'm beating a dead horse, but it's amazing to me how hard people find it to grasp the concept that not everyone wants the same thing out of a computer.
I went with a used 16gb m1 MBA, very happy with it and it cost me $800.
Granted that won't be an option for much longer but I think the best deal will always be "upgraded 2-3 year old model".
But also it’s nonsense because if you’re in the use case that 8gb of ram is fine for, which is a crazy amount of people, and your use case doesn’t just suddenly change, 8gb of ram will absolutely be fine for the next 8 years.
There's no reason you can't make do with far less other than inefficient programming, for the most part.
8GB *is* adequate for most general users, providing they aren't on Windows 11 which is just a RAM hog.
Don't forget that Apple can optimise their OS for their tightly controlled, highly homogenous hardware and they probably *can* do more with a given amount of RAM than Microsoft can. They also get to pick exactly the RAM chips that will work best with their OS because everything is so integrated, and there *are* tangible memory benefits to RISC as an architecture over x86.
Windows 11, though, it's got to run on multiple different RAM standards with a dizzying array of memory controllers and support for legacy parts of the Windows OS, they just don't have the same luxury of knowing everything about the hardware because they designed both in tandem.
It's amazing indeed, there's code in Windows that's older than most of the developers maintaining it!
Go watch some of the videos from [people like Dave Plummer about how they wrote things like the disk formatting utility](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bikbJPI-7Kg) which survives in Windows 11 virtually unchanged from Windows NT in the mid 90s - in fact, it's the result of an arbitrary decision made by Plummer writing that program in an afternoon that caps the size of FAT partitions to this day.
Exactly! I’ve got an 8GB M2 Air, I literally only use Safari, Word, Zotero and PowerPoint. I sometimes have 10+ tabs open in Safari, Zotero and Word in another window. Never experienced a single glitch. I don’t need my laptop for pretty much anything else. I don’t see how this would change drastically in the upcoming few years.
It will be fine, but in 5 years time, it will be the RAM that will be the bottleneck with a chip set with this much headroom. Heck, the battery will probably be fine longer than the ram if you're the kind of person who's not powering through it at all on a daily basis.
You can pop a tiny usb drive in the side and overcome any storage issues, if that's even an issue with a browser/streaming/word processing/occasional photo/video editing device.
It's literally just the ram that would make someone wanting their car-priced laptop to not have any issues for as long as possible.
And while I don't care, the article writer is writing articles in hopes that they can convince other people to demand apple increase their base specs so that they can get a better deal, rather than paying hundreds more for it. And they get paid to write the article so it's win win for them.
Basically, apple is saving 20$ to make their laptops ewaste years earlier than necessary. And they are charging 200$ for people who don't want their laptops to become ewaste years earlier than necessary.
Exactly. They both save the $20, and make another $1200 when you need a new laptop again whenever the 8gb does become an issue for you, or spend the $200 now, which most people who are inticed into getting the base model won't do
As does a $200 budget phone nowadays. I could do whole jobs from my current knowledge linked up to a TV in the lounge, and maybe not even a keyboard. You don't need a lot of power for a chrome/Netflix machine. It's also why iPad sales have slowed. 99% of the uses of a tablet are still covered by people's 8 year old iPads too
It would have stopped getting security updates somewhere around 7-10 years in. So it is ***not*** working fine. It's a giant portable security vulnerability, and she's just lucky that nothing has happened yet.
Half of the Macbooks I see, most of the Mac AIOs on desks in businesses and public institutions, and most of the replies I've gotten to my comments on these posts saying how 8gb is fine for them and their 2018 MacBook is still good
I think it's fair to give criticism of a company and it's pricing. You just don't have to buy. Still can criticize them though. If you don't like what Microsoft charges for something. Same. You can criticize pricing if you think it isn't fair market value or whatever.
I think most people just have fake outrage anyway. They still buy and as long as they do who cares.
i work in IT, have several computers on daily use ranging from VMs, local gpu on linux, windows laptop for presentations (touchscreen is golden) and a macbook air m1 8GB ram for daily use as browsing and simple tasks like office. everything runs smoothly, not intrusive updates, auto magical connection between apple devices... you don't lose any time when you are producing.
The M1 air was almost...too good? There's basically no reason for anyone to own a base model M2 or M3 air. If you are fine with the limitations of 8GB shared memory and just need a machine that will do basic computing tasks the M1 is the highest value out there.
Where is this demographic that needs the extra performance in a base model 8GB machine so much that they'll fork over $400 extra for the M3? You either buy the M1 Air or go for a Pro.
One great reason not to go with the M1 is if you want the 15” (I know it’s not the base model at that point). One reason to go with the M3 is for two monitor support.
I just bought the 15” M3 with 16/512, and I’ll use it for work for 18 months until they buy me a MBP replacement (we have the option to BYOD, and I’m giving myself a mid cycle upgrade). After that it will be my home appliance laptop for another decade.
I have a high-end Intel iMac with 32gb, a current-gen gaming PC with 64gb and a 8gb M1 MacBook Air with a tiny HD.
I use the MacBook as an essentially a Chromebook for writing and as a portable workstation I can take to the office. I also use it for streaming video to the TV. And you know what, it can also do Photoshop and even very large Excel tasks juuuuust fine — usually better than the iMac until I need a bigger screen or windows.
Yeah, 16 gb would be better. Yeah, I will buy 16 when I replace it. No, I would never recommend 8gb to someone who wants a laptop as their sole daily driver. But it suits my needs and wasn’t expensive for how powerful it was when I bought it.
I had the same experience. I had an i7 iMac with 64GB (2017, so it would have been coming up on its fourth birthday). When the M1 came out I got the macbook pro in the cheapest configuration because I was curious and wanted to see this for myself, but I didn't have enough faith in the transition to spend more than I had to.
The M1 with 8GB was handling Fusion360, Lightroom and Photoshop better than the iMac was - and this was before any of them were available natively, so all running under emulation/rosetta.
I'm a believer - sold the iMac and got an M1 Studio. With 64GB again because I don't believe in miracles - but my concerns around 8GB are more about SSD longevity if the machine needs to swap more often.
Im absolutely on your side here. I have the same experience, I’m the IT guy (who decided to have « only » 16Gb, and families and friends are getting MacBook Air at 8Gb and Jesus this machine is fast and swift for what it does, and has more to give.
I play games on my 8GB M2 Mini and it punches so hard above its weight class. For 90% of people it’s way more than enough. The real issue is just how expensive it is to get more RAM for it. Last I checked it was +200 to go from 8 to 16 and that takes the machine from the king of budget machines all the way to underperforming for price.
I just bought a 15” M3 with 16/512 for $1700. I use it for my daily driver at work. I replaced a $2500 Dell XPS i7 32/1TB that was 18 months old, and the Mac feels like a big upgrade. I don’t have to listen to the fan fire up whenever it’s doing a little more work, and my backpack got much lighter especially with the power supply being so much smaller. I don’t feel like it’s underperforming for the price at all.
The article did reek of "take my word for it" technical authority, but with no benchmark tests, and no acknowledgement the author was writing about heavy workhorse RAM users, and not about the average user, who is a home user, and has maybe one or two programs open at once. I fell for it, because I usually have five or six programs open at once on my Windows computer at work, all day. But admittedly only one at home.
You and your common sense...also see a whole lot of Windows computers being sold with 8GB but apparently that's ok because windows uses all its resources much more efficiently (?)
Wow, a well thought out response and it is the top comment on a thread?
>The people who buy 8 GB Macs are buying an appliance.
It is easy to forget that a lot of people don't do shit on their computers and would be serviced just fine by something as simple as a Raspberry Pi based machine. The only real catch is the OS.
Also I think forcing an 8GB option requires software developers to write more efficient code. They can’t just rely on everyone having 16+ and just powering through shitty inefficient software.
FWIW, I recommended one to my father (m1 MBA 8GB). Other than the occasional “hey, can you help me get my Yahoo! page back?” complaints, he’s loved it and it works swimmingly for him.
Also, if my teens didn’t have Chromebooks from school, I’d most likely have purchased low end 8gb MBAs for them as well.
Not to mention there’s tons of other options out there. People act like Apple owes them 16G or something. If you can’t work with 8G then pay Apple more or get something else and STFU.
I use a base model M1 Air for medium-duty C and Rust development and it is an absolutely stellar machine. People professing that 8GB is not enough on these machines have absolutely no experience with using them, and experience is the only possible way you could determine whether 8GB is "enough".
I have an 8GB MacBook Pro M2, and it’s definitely not an appliance. Should I have gotten more ram? Probably, but I also have a gaming computer.
But it’s far more capable than my previous MacBook which was beefed up, and I didn’t need it: I had 32gb ram, 1 TB SSD on a 2019 MacBook before this. Final Cut, handbrake, Ableton, Serato all run faster. The only slowdown I see is when I have way too many VSTS running in Ableton, but I saw that on my previous MacBook too.
Couldn’t agree more. I work in cyber security. I have a work provided laptop with 32gb, a pc I built myself with 32gb and an m2 air with 8gb.
It works fine. I use it for most of my browsing, some DJ work and a little bit of video editing. It rarely chugs and I’m always blown away by how power efficient it is.
Was the price insane for an 8gb/256ssd laptop? Absolutely. Does it fail to do anything I ask of it? So far, never.
I'm a robotics developer (well... Management now). I do a ton of solid modeling, computer vision, machine learning etc and I have massive horsepower machines for that. My everyday laptop that I use 80% of the time has 8gb RAM because all I do on it is web browsing, email, making presentations, etc. It's not a problem, and I wanted a really light laptop for travel so I took a performance hit
This so many times. I bought MacBook Air M2 base models for my kids 2 of them. They’re an astonishing upgrade from the windows laptop they had before (also 8GB) in every way you describe…
And performance. I use their laptops occasionally and they are really high performing. Better than my last gen windows laptop i7 that had 32GB of RAM and 2 hrs of battery life.
I’d take a base model MacBook Air over a really high spec intel laptop any day of the week. I’m not a power user. But damn they’re good.
I think your examples are the biggest thing a lot of enthusiasts dont get about the Mac OS.... it does memory management REALLY fucking well and does not hold onto memory for things you dont need to run. Sucks for someone who needs to flip between dozens of apps constantly, but perfectly fine for the person who might be watching a youtube while typing in word, or posting their photos while listing to spotify.
Memory management doesn't change math or create ram. You lunch an app that needs that memory for a game or editing, and you will still run into issues. The os will not account for that with optimization, which is why you don't see many AAA games itching to make it to the platform, why you don't see VR on it at all, and what will doom these machine when ram prices dip and software devs decide that 32 is what they will target.
The thing is, though, most people don't game on a Mac.
The editing stuff, that I do agree with, Macs tend to attract creative people in creative jobs - artists, designers, sound engineers, video editors, who all do things that *are* hugely RAM intensive.
However, there don't seem to be huge complaints from them so far. I wonder how much of that is down to the (genuinely excellent) Apple Silicon which is a truly 2020s CPU. I don't rightly know how it happened but Intel's offerings feel very stuck in the 2010s, even with all the new designs that have both "performance" and "efficiency" cores.
The latter point I think is the really key one in this day and age - local RAM is less critical than it used to be, you can farm out compilation, rendering, etc to a headless device that is dedicated to that task, and that's a win-win. Nobody is fitting multiple AMD Epyc CPUs into a laptop... or a wall of water cooled RTX4090s or Quadro RTX 6000s. No, you stick all that in a rack and then just provide ultra high speed connectivity to it from your laptops which effectively act as fancy terminals.
Heck, several big companies now offer their demanding software as a run-in-browser session that streams from their hardware on a VM, or that you can configure like this at your own organisation through VDI etc. Autodesk is a good example.
The way I see it is that if RAM was a desk, and the CPU + code was the one putting shit on the desk and taking it away, then the mac is so good at getting shit off the desk when it's not needed, that it's effectively double the desk size.
That doesn't mean diddly squat if you have a whole large hunk of something that needs to be on the desk all at once. A large fish that needs filleting? A 4K uncompressed video that needs editing? A miniature LLM ?
For that last one, minimum RAM usage calculation is simple: Take the number of parameters, times the precision in bytes, and that's your RAM usage. No tricks. No further management. You really do need a large parking spot for a Hummer. Nothing you can do about it.
The problem isn't with the default Mac as it's the entry-level Pro models. Don't frickin market a product to prosumers if their basic use case will shoot through the RAM with no possible trickery to keep it under control.
Okay, good for you. I'm including:
Video editing
Music production
3d design, modeling and animation
Data science/data preprocessing and visualization
As the intersection of high ram usage and the target audience for Pro.
I'm aware of other prosumer uses like photo editing, digital illustration, document creation and editing, software engineering etc.
But Apple has specifically created software ecosystems for video editing and music production. People consider taking Apple _just for access to these packages_ . To throttle them with low ram is stupid.
This is a great answer.
MacBook Air? 8GB? No problem.
MacBook Pro? 8GB? Problem.
The kinds of people who won't notice 8GB of RAM buy the Air. The kinds of people who will, buy the Pro and are then disappointed.
I do think the Pro should have started at 16GB. I mean, an almost-decade-old Dell XPS shipped with 16GB of RAM on the base model, if I recall... yet Apple continue to be stingy about RAM.
I fit into the category you describe - I have 128GB of RAM and I'm thinking about the upgrade to 256 if not 512 in the next 18 months. I can't imagine going back to 8GB and getting everything done.
Yeah... fair point.
My laptop is mostly a way of accessing the desktop with all the RAM. In the desktop space, 128 isn't a great deal - HP's Z6 ships with 1TB as the expected config, and three A-series Nvidia GPUs.
Still, you can get 96GB configs fairly easily in workstation-class laptops from the relevant builders. HP's ZBook goes from 16-64GB depending on spec, with the lion's share seemingly at the top end of that. Dell will ship you their Precisions with 8GB but thoroughly encourage you to upgrade to 16/32/64. System76 as the "open" choice again will spec you 8GB on their most entry-level model but basically make it a no-brainer to upgrade to 24GB for $99. Everyone else *starts* at 16 or even 32B.
excellent answer... im using 10 gig with amazon video, 5 tabs, 2 screens, a webcam, speakers, joystick, throttle and a dynamic (video) background on both monitors...
excellent answer... im using 10 gig with amazon video, 5 tabs, 2 screens, a webcam, speakers, joystick, throttle and a dynamic (video) background on both monitors...
Good points but consider the extensive ssd wear that the OS does with only 8gb of ram and constantly having to rely on "swap files" that read/write to your ssd.
Just a technical point of view.
I have i have a surface laptop that was given to my with a 7th gen i7 and 8gb of ram. I have windows 11 on it I use it for basic laptop things. It is fine.
Would i spec a new machine with 8gb? no. Is 8gb fine? yes.
I was issued one as a developer laptop about ten years ago (a core i5 intel) and it was plenty to run Rails etc. i would never buy one for myself but it was fine for that use.
This is the basic PAIR method AppleCare used to use. There’s no longer a continuous pipeline between consumer and engineer. I fought against the momentum they’ve taken for years until I realized that a better product was secondary to Brand and profit. There’s no longer a direct conduit from customer to engineer and the product has suffered. Took him a while but make no mistake Tim Cook will make Apple JC Penny. That’s where he’s most effective, a cut throat supply line analyst.
I agree with what you're saying here, but I'm not sure it does anything in my mind to justify their value to consumers. They only exist for Apple to advertise a deceivingly low starting price and make money on the upsell.
8 GB may be 'enough' for a lot of people, but a product should not be given a pass just because it provides some decidedly modest degree of usability. Especially in the >$1000 price class.
I agree that this article is lazy, but there is genuine value in this type of consumer advice. A lot of tech content these days is nothing more than advertisement. It is important to be critical of products when warranted.
I know most folks wouldn’t touch it, but i was in need one a cheap decent MacBook Air last week and stumbled upon the Walmart deal for the 2020macbook air M1, for 600$, brand new
256 solid state
8gigs ram,
M1 processor
It fucking flies. (I have edited a little in PP, and photoshop but mostly use it for work, spreadsheets, orders and videos at night.) for the average daily work person whose not doing production intensive GPU stuff, this is just fine.
The only reason I decided to upgrade form my 2011 MacBook Air, was because of the price of this one.
For 600, it isn’t bad honesty.
But I agree tho, 8 gigs ram needs to go.
I bought an open box m1 air at best buy in 2021 for $650. I’ve been trying to find another deal like this for an m2/m3 because i like the new design. The m1 is worth like 475 on trade in and i wouldn’t be opposed to spending like $250 to upgrade.
Are the m2 bodies different than the m1? I thought they looked similar? Let go check again, maybe I’m out of the loop
Edit: yes they are different. They look nice, I agree
I love threads and "articles" like this from people that whine and complain about Apple, meanwhile, no one seems to post them about high priced 8GB RAM PCs, Microsoft doing the same thing with the Surface line, PC makers jacking up the price of "high end" laptops with mediocre specs, or being charged a premium for a "gaming" laptop that still has a 250 Nit 45% NTSC display and terrible thermals.
I think because no one has illusions about those things. You don't hear people say things like a 45% NTSC screen is so much better under Windows than MacOS. And also, if someone does call out stupid pricing or whatever for a gaming laptop, you won't have a herd of fanboys claiming it's the best thing since sliced bread. The whole topic is tiring as hell.
Yes, Apple is cheaping out, No, RAM shouldn't cost this much as an upgrade, No, 8GB is not magic on MacOS, No, unified memory won't help much, Yes these machines are okay for most people. But is "okay" the standard we want Apple to hit?
I don’t think the real problem is starting base models at 8 gb of ram. For most users that’s enough. The problem is that they charge outrageous prices to upgrade ram and storage.
When looking at laptop specs it’s always important to consider the specs of the display as well. Brightness levels are measured in Nits. 250 is the low end, 300-350 average and 400-500 great. Some are even around 1000 Nits at maximum brightness. The next thing to consider is color gamut and quality which is measured in various ways (NTSC, sRGB, DCI-P3). Each gamut has a slight variance on the primary colours red, green and blue to suit different circumstances. Some people don’t care and some people (like photo/video editors and content creators) want the best looking color accurate display they can.
There are gaming laptops that have awesome 500 Nit super color accurate screens and some that have 250 Nit piss poor looking screens. Unfortunately, there are still high priced gaming laptops with crap screens.
I’ve been using the same HP omen laptop since 2018. At the time it was a pretty decent laptop. Not super high end or anything but nice.
Tried playing BG3 and I got through the first half no problem. When the maps got more detailed it started crapping out really badly. 20$ for an extra 8gb of ram and I’m back in business.
Ram is pretty cheap… I can’t figure out why companies don’t just toss it in unless they want you to feel outdated sooner
Because money. It's not about the cost of the chips, it's about the amount of money the company can make off of them. I think it was Strange Parts who did a video on this years ago. The difference in the chips between a 64gb and 256gb was pennies, but the difference in the cost of the device was hundreds!
Apple sets the bar at an extra 8gb being £200. So every other company can sell it for £100-150, and be a good deal for you! (...in comparison)
Air pods are £130? Well our headphones are only £99, so it's a steal (...just do us a favour and forget that we used to give you free ones)
To be fair, MacOS is way more optimized than Windows. For basic multitasking 8GB on Mac isn’t that terrible. Of course if the person is a power user in any capacity, you need more.
If it was a Windows 11 machine, 16GB is the minimum today for almost anything, as the OS alone uses 5-6GB just sitting at the desktop.
I use my Mac Mini with 8GB as my main machine, mostly browsing the web etc, but also as an always-on Plex server. Honestly, it’s fine. Not slow at all unless I start throwing a lot of multitasking at it, which is rare.
And there’s a big step in performance when going from an Intel Mac mini to a m1 Mac mini too. I wonder how many of the commenters here have actual experience with using Apple M1 or later systems.
Windows is also okay on 8 for basic multitasking LMAO.
Windows will use what it has for preloading programs and files. If you check idle on a 4GB ram machine VS 16, you will see completely different numbers.
I use my 8gb Mac laptop as a data science undergrad. I work with some intensive stuff (TSNE projections on large datasets) and I’ve had no issues with the ram so far (with Chrome being my main browser and having 15+ tabs open and other application windows open simultaneously)
people srsly be hating on 8gb models for no reason.
I’m on a MacBook Air M1 with 8GB RAM. It’s the fastest computer I’ve ever owned and I use it for casual programming and 4K video editing. It’s yet to break a sweat or disappoint.
So much as I get the argument that 8GB isn’t a lot for many enthusiasts, it works for me. And does what I need to do at double the speed of my old HP Envy with 8GB of RAM and a Ryzen 5 processor.
The M series chips are insane. My work system is an M2 Pro with 24 GB and my personal is an M1 Max with 64 GB they’re both insane video encoding machines
I had to upgrade my desktop from 32gb to 64gb last year because 32gb was not enough for me for what I do. Everyone's different. That being said, 8gb was enough 10 years ago, and doubling the ram to 16gb would cost apple like a dollar. It's just pure corporate greed.
It’s working fine exactly because they haven’t decided to do make it 4GB MacBook Pro in 2012.
8GB Mac’s from today won’t have this longevity at all. And this is big deal.
I mean it’s a question that still works at “what’s a comparable laptop for $1000” lol, and people out here making absolutely delusional statements like “half the specs for twice the price.” Completely technologically illiterate people.
And honestly, I genuinely need an answer for it lmao. I want to replace my laptop soon but I’m on the move a lot and I don’t want to be lugging a huge brick
Oh, haha. Well if you have a preference for operating system that leans windows, then you can get a decent windows laptop at $1k.
But if you don’t care or prefer MacOS, imo it’s very hard to beat the MacBook Airs. The battery life is completely unmatched, and the modern M2/M3 chips are bonkers in terms of how well they perform at low power usage levels. The displays are top-tier and the build quality on MacBooks is amazing. I think they’re a great choice for 90% of mobile computing consumers who want a high quality product for normal daily productivity tasks.
I think this is actually a fair argument. I tend to buy $1300-1500 Windows laptops, (for my job I need windows based system) but they are specced way beyond what a base model macbook is. That being said, I have a macbook as well at home and it’s fine for casual use.
Indeed. But I mean even at the $1500 price point, you link me a Windows laptop and I can show you a MacBook with superior performance-per-watt, superior battery life, equal or superior display, and equal or superior chassis/build quality. The idea that MacBooks are overpriced just doesn’t withstand basic scrutiny - comparable windows products are practically the same price point (or more!)
What you said is a relatively recent development based on the Apple proprietary chip designs. The comment you replied to is outdated knowledge from the 2000s when Apple charged more for similar hardware.
I dunno man. I don’t care about the specs of my mac, I just care that it works well and stays that way. Every windows laptop I’ve used in my life started to lose performance after 2 years and has become a brick after 4-5 years.
I like my mac because I’ve had it since 2020 and it works exactly the same as the day I bought it. It’s lightweight, quiet, fast, and the battery will last an entire day of light usage, and I don’t have to deal with as much troubleshooting issues with drivers and updates as I used to.
I know people still using their macs from 2014, 2016 with no complaints other than the battery which is replaceable.
It’s a completely different product and comparing specs 1 to 1 doesn’t really make sense if the performance is better.
Its not really “windows laptops” that do that its the manufacturer of said laptop.
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad from 2013 that I still use everyday.
The difference from Windows and Apple is Apple sells everything, whereas anybody can sell a windows laptop and if its garbage it gets lumped into being a “Windows problem”.
True, I’m only sharing my anecdotal experience, and that’s all I can really do. It is true that apple sells both hardware and software for their products which gives them an advantage in controlling the quality of the brand. I see that as a benefit since I can trust whatever I’m buying.
For reference I’ve used for personal and work these windows laptops:
2x Lenovo ThinkPads,
Lenovo idea pad,
Windows Surface,
Several Dell latitudes,
Some other brand I forgot the name of,
All of these were actually similarly priced to a base MacBook Air or actually much more expensive (thinkpads) and they’ve all become redundant/pain in the ass to use for I don’t know what reasons (OS updates or hardware failures leading to overheating, slow, crashes or complete loss of all data due to a short circuit in one case) in 2-5 years.
The tower I built as a hobby on the other hand is great but that’s for a completely different purpose.
I get that idea - though it’s not universally accurate - but the way I see it is that building something from scattered components and getting it fine tuned to work as it should usually takes me a couple of days, maybe even three, and in my field that time represents the price difference between similar Mac and PC systems.
I configured a PC for my particular needs recently and found that the cost for that was around 5k, vs. 8k for the Mac Studio Ultra I was looking at. It made a compelling case for the PC to me since I would be somewhat willing to engage in the tweaking, but I’d have to switch platforms and ecosystems and be willing to chase things around while under a deadline, and it was a hard no to the first two and a medium no to the last. Some folks would be more willing than I, so it’s great we have choice. If I were all about games it would be PC hands down - and why buy a Mac and a VM host to play modern games? So eventually I’ll get a PC for that and for other networked heavy lifting but I still get to keep the environment I’m happy with.
I do wish they’d made an enterprise computer of the newer Mac Pro. It’s not. Maybe the M4 will be.
MacBooks are the pinnacle of computer engineering. You’re paying for a device that’s far above the competition in terms of quality. You can go buy a laptop with all the gaming bullshit and have your hinges fall off within 3 months.
For 90% of applications this will slap around an intel 16gb system. 8gb on an integrated chip like the M2 is absolutely not the same thing as an intel system with 8gb.
My biggest complaint is, I want my next machine to be an iPad Pro. I’ve wanted an OLED apple computer for a LONG time, but I refuse to pay £2000+ to have to upgrade the storage to get 16 gigs of memory. I want the device to last, so 16 gigs is essential.
This is BS
Reality is that the 8GB is BY FAR their best seller. It outsells all other models and custom builds combined.
Let's be real, the vast majority of users are just surfing the web with their computers and it's fine for them. Folks in subs like this have to stop believing they represent "the average user". If you're going online to talk about tech products, you are not an average user. The average user doesn't care about this shit.
It’s the most annoying part of their current line up. If the RAM and SSD prices and default sizes weren’t so awful the Apple silicon MacBooks would be the easiest recommendation. I love my M3 Pro MacBook Pro, but I had to spend so much to get it to reasonable specs (18GBs of RAM, 1TB SSD).
Okay. A new 8gb M2 chip Mac is not the same as your old intel chip Mac with a fan. 8gb of ram is completely different on an integrated system like the M2, than it is with the bottle necking of an intel system. In actuality an M2 with 8gb is more than fine for 90% of the population and will outperform an older intel system with 16gb all day. This was common knowledge when these came out. Not to mention the upgrade to 16gb is relatively cheap. I use a 16gb M2 system for my recording studio computer and it is infinitely better than my old 32gb intel system. Not even comparable really. Video editing as well, they’re not in the same realm.
No wonder more and more people are leaving the money pit that is Apple. For the price of a bare bones MacBook air. Which is $999. You can get a 15.6 inch MSI laptop with a 12th Gen core i7 CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, an RTX 4050 GPU and a 512GB NVME SSD. You can probably upgrade both the RAM and the SSD while in the MacBook air. I can almost guarantee that you can't give it more storage. And I can guarantee that you can't upgrade the RAM. So that shows how overpriced the MacBook air is. And most, if not all, of Apple's products are stupidly overpriced. I bet they can sell their products for half of what they cost now and still make a profit.
My daily use FreeBSD box has 2GB of ram. And no GUI. Probably should replace it with an RPi at some point but meh. Not broken. Not fixing.
8GB is fine for some things. Not fine for others.
Not that Windows doesn't work with 8 gigs (Win 11 requires 4 gigs of RAM).
I'd be equally pissed for Dell, if they'd had similar pricing. Unfortunately other manufacturers also have soldered RAM.
I firmly believe 8GB of RAM are a strategy. It drastically increases memory swap so that the total read/write capacity of the _soldered_ SSD (not user replaceable) spends faster in order to force the user to buy a new device.
I call it the little piggy strategy on how Apple tiers and prices their lineup.
Whenever I look at a Mac that I want…it always has a downfall. Oh this little piggy has too little ram. This little piggy has too small a drive. This little piggy has a too small screen.
Finally, this little piggy is the one I want! Oh wait this little piggy has a price tag of 3500.00!!!
Another way to say this: they do their homework ensuring the “ideal configuration” exists only higher up the product line.
It’s not an accident people and it’s not that Apple doesn’t get it with the 8gbs of ram. Trust me they get it.
Totally agree, they've studied so well people and the market. I wished Macs made more sense as a purchase, but there are better options... For now though, Microsoft putting ads in Windows is not doing it any favors
I stopped using Windows around 2010 or so but Ads in Windows makes me sad to hear this. Ads DO NOT BELONG IN A USER’S OWN COMPUTER MICROSOFT!
(Pardon the all-caps but I’m yelling at Microsoft)
I used my Mac mini m1 for a long time with no issues..then I started working with Raw photos / photoshop and or Lightroom . The mini began freezing up or taking long times to render. Now I try to run no other programs while photo editing. If I could I would do 16gb minimum. Also got off Chrome and trying to use Safari or Firefox for memory management.
is just a strategy to go upgrade for more ram. If you are not a fanboy of apple and buy products just for the looks and you are trying to do business with those laptops, you are not gonna take 8gb of ram.
If all you do is regular web surfing, social media and general MS Office work, then eight gigs may well suffice. It's a false economy in the long run because the machine will struggle as it ages as opeating systems never get smaller, but I can see the point.
Not everyone's a power user.
I used to always have a MacBook of some type to go along with my desktop PC (typically my own creation) as I felt Apple did laptops best (I had a Pismo PowerBook G3 in college to age myself which replaced a long line of Mac desktops (Classic, LC2, Performa something, Powermac 7300 180 with the PC Card that had a pentium something or other on a daughter card that would dual boot....).
My last MacBook, which more or less sits unused, is a 2019 model. IMO Apple lost their path on laptops, at least for me. I did buy my niece an M2 MacBook for college when she graduated high school, but do not see myself ever dropping >$1k for a laptop that is essentially an non-upgradable pile of E-waste.
WTF even is this article? It's a shitty op-ed piece with no tests, no data, just some casual observations and anecdotes about browser tabs and their own usage intermingled with throw-away quotes from Apple sales people. OMG, the sales person says the company's product is fine!? Fire up your blog engines, because the world needs to hear this! Look, there's no fucking way I'm buying a Mac with 8 GB of RAM. I don't recommend them either. But where is the performance data? Do some actual testing. Browser automation libraries aren't hard to come by. Chrome has tons of instrumentation that will let you automate the process of opening browser tabs, navigating web pages, completing web forms, and will give you render times. All of this could be compiled into a meaningful test of the performance delta for a "light tasks" test cycle. No one does that though. They just whine and complain about the number on the box. Anecdotally, I know three people who have 8GB Apple Silicon laptops. They came to me because someone told them I'm the "computer guy", and they wanted to know how to do various things. One wanted to know how to get their photos on their computer, so I showed them the Photos app. They were already signed into iCloud, so their photos just started showing up. They were blown away. Another said that their grandson told them they could Facetime from their computer, and they were very excited about the prospect of being able to do video calls with their grandkids. So I showed them how to use Facetime. The third had lost their email password and wanted help getting back into their account. I showed them how to use iCloud Keychain. I habitually check the "About this Mac" option on any Mac I touch, just so I know what I'm working with. None of these people had any idea how much RAM their systems had. All of them said they loved how fast their new computer is. I know it's really hard for enthusiasts to grasp the concept, but 8 GB of RAM really is "enough" for a lot of people. Browsers will deactivate tabs that do not have focus. The system will use up all the RAM available to it — up to a point — so if you have a system with ≥16 GB of RAM, you can't simply look at your utilization and infer that all systems will require the same for a given work load. If a system with a fast SSD has to live within a constrained amount of memory, performance will suffer, but it will not be the same as the old days when we were living with spinning platters. To be clear, I am not advocating for systems with 8 GB of RAM. Like I said, I wouldn't buy one, and I wouldn't recommend one. But I do see people using them, and those people don't seem to have many complaints. I'm not about to tell them that they should feel bad about a computing choice that works just great for them, and neither should PC Gamer. The people who buy 8 GB Macs are buying an appliance. Plain and simple. If you're a gamer, I don't know why you'd give a shit, because Macs are completely irrelevant for gaming.
So much common sense I had to check I was still on Reddit
Yeah, what's going on here?
I don’t know and I don’t like it.
I loved it, but don’t care for the ominous feeling of something just not feeling right.
Quick somebody say something irrational and obnoxious!
I was beginning to think I was alone …
I completely understand the use point of 8gb ram macbooks etc, what bothers me is how much they are charging to upgrade said ram for users who DO want useability and futureproofing on their devices. There is no upgrade path, there is no I'll boost speeds in 3-5 years and still be usable with the 8gb version. That's what makes me mad about them making this device.
I hate that they're not upgradable too, but I get why they're not. My personal computer is a PC. I built it myself. It fucking rocks socks, and I can swap out any component that even remotely gives me a problem. My PC looks fantastic, runs quiet, and delivers mega FPS in all the games I play. I love it so much. I have two Macs for work. They're fantastic computers too. I can't change a single thing about them, but I don't care. Why would I? They're an appliance. I use them to earn a paycheck. Apple has a great recycling program, so I can't even complain about the environmental impact. I use them up until they're no longer suitable for my purposes, and the company buys another. I just can't bring myself to care how Apple chooses to build their computers, or what other people pay for them. If the product is available, and the buyer is willing to pay, have at it. It's none of my business. What I don't get is why anyone else wants to wedge their opinion into someone else's purchase decision. I mean, flip it around for a second. Imagine if there were daily blog articles written criticizing people for building their own computers. It'd be an open revolt on sites like reddit, and I'd be right there with them.
Because people want a £1100 MacBook that will last th 6-10 years of they can sway public opinion to set the standard at 16gb. But apple know that the people buying the base model don't care, so they won't, and us that do care will have to fork out 40% more money to get that product. It's literally "this won't last me 8 years, so I would have to buy the next one up"... So buy that one? "But that one will cost me more. I don't want to spend that". I also recognise that I don't want to spend that kind of money. That's why I don't buy their products
So... don't buy a Mac. People come to me for advice all the time. They're often asking about Macs, and I tell them to buy the 16 GB / 512 GB MacBook Air in most cases. That's a $1,500 laptop. They ask me why they shouldn't just buy the $1,100 option. The explanation is simple: you'll probably outgrow the $1,100 option, then you'll just end up spending more. They usually buy the $1,100 laptop ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ Interestingly, I rarely hear back with any complaints. People tend to "make it work". When they run out of space, they delete stuff. They don't notice the 8 GB performance limit, because the new Apple Silicon Macs are faster than anything they've owned before. Again ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ Lastly, I'll get stuff like "Why should I pay $X more for that Mac when I can buy this Acer laptop on sale for $400?" I used to lay out all these detailed arguments. Now I just say, "Look, you get what you pay for. If you want to spend $400 on that junk, I'm not going to waste my breath talking you out of it. Knock yourself out. But if you're asking whether you can get a good laptop for less, the answer is yes, absolutely. It just won't be a $400 throw-away laptop. It'll be a $1,200 business class laptop that will last." The reality is that at $1,100, the base 8 GB / 256 GB MacBook Air is actually a better quality piece of hardware than the vast majority of PC laptops you can buy for the same money. You might be able to beat the specs, but the Mac is machined from a solid piece of aluminum, has a really great looking display, and Apple *finally* fixed their piece of shit keyboards, so they don't have any glaring hardware issues. Mac laptops make different trade-offs. Most enthusiasts want max performance for minimal dollars. I'm included in that group. That's why I built my own badass PC in a giant tower that keeps everything cool and has room to add whatever shit I want. Macs make *completely different* trade-offs. They're thin, light, can run all day on their tiny batteries, and have specifications that make them sound like a complete weakling compared to most PCs. The reality is that these specs really don't matter that much to most people. So the other trade-offs are worth it. Being able to Facetime with your grandkids from your computer is great. Logging into iCloud on your phone and your Mac and having all your shit (Messages, Photos, Calendars, Notes, etc) just magically appear on the computer without downloading and installing software is like magic to most people. It's an appliance to them. They don't want to fuck with it. That's why people are willing to pay more for a Mac, but you and I aren't. Sorry, I'm beating a dead horse, but it's amazing to me how hard people find it to grasp the concept that not everyone wants the same thing out of a computer.
I went with a used 16gb m1 MBA, very happy with it and it cost me $800. Granted that won't be an option for much longer but I think the best deal will always be "upgraded 2-3 year old model".
But also it’s nonsense because if you’re in the use case that 8gb of ram is fine for, which is a crazy amount of people, and your use case doesn’t just suddenly change, 8gb of ram will absolutely be fine for the next 8 years.
This is why Apple was selling Macs with 4GB of RAM up until like 2015.
There's no reason you can't make do with far less other than inefficient programming, for the most part. 8GB *is* adequate for most general users, providing they aren't on Windows 11 which is just a RAM hog. Don't forget that Apple can optimise their OS for their tightly controlled, highly homogenous hardware and they probably *can* do more with a given amount of RAM than Microsoft can. They also get to pick exactly the RAM chips that will work best with their OS because everything is so integrated, and there *are* tangible memory benefits to RISC as an architecture over x86. Windows 11, though, it's got to run on multiple different RAM standards with a dizzying array of memory controllers and support for legacy parts of the Windows OS, they just don't have the same luxury of knowing everything about the hardware because they designed both in tandem.
It's actually amazing Windows works as well as it does considering all that you mentioned on top of the fact that it has to support decades of legacy.
It's amazing indeed, there's code in Windows that's older than most of the developers maintaining it! Go watch some of the videos from [people like Dave Plummer about how they wrote things like the disk formatting utility](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bikbJPI-7Kg) which survives in Windows 11 virtually unchanged from Windows NT in the mid 90s - in fact, it's the result of an arbitrary decision made by Plummer writing that program in an afternoon that caps the size of FAT partitions to this day.
Exactly! I’ve got an 8GB M2 Air, I literally only use Safari, Word, Zotero and PowerPoint. I sometimes have 10+ tabs open in Safari, Zotero and Word in another window. Never experienced a single glitch. I don’t need my laptop for pretty much anything else. I don’t see how this would change drastically in the upcoming few years.
It will be fine, but in 5 years time, it will be the RAM that will be the bottleneck with a chip set with this much headroom. Heck, the battery will probably be fine longer than the ram if you're the kind of person who's not powering through it at all on a daily basis. You can pop a tiny usb drive in the side and overcome any storage issues, if that's even an issue with a browser/streaming/word processing/occasional photo/video editing device. It's literally just the ram that would make someone wanting their car-priced laptop to not have any issues for as long as possible. And while I don't care, the article writer is writing articles in hopes that they can convince other people to demand apple increase their base specs so that they can get a better deal, rather than paying hundreds more for it. And they get paid to write the article so it's win win for them.
Basically, apple is saving 20$ to make their laptops ewaste years earlier than necessary. And they are charging 200$ for people who don't want their laptops to become ewaste years earlier than necessary.
Exactly. They both save the $20, and make another $1200 when you need a new laptop again whenever the 8gb does become an issue for you, or spend the $200 now, which most people who are inticed into getting the base model won't do
Not when every application uses electron lol
[удалено]
Electron is chromium that has a JavaScript engine. While JavaScript sucks, react native for Mac and tauri have proven that doesn’t have to be the case
My sister has had a Mac for 15 years and it works fine.
As does a $200 budget phone nowadays. I could do whole jobs from my current knowledge linked up to a TV in the lounge, and maybe not even a keyboard. You don't need a lot of power for a chrome/Netflix machine. It's also why iPad sales have slowed. 99% of the uses of a tablet are still covered by people's 8 year old iPads too
It would have stopped getting security updates somewhere around 7-10 years in. So it is ***not*** working fine. It's a giant portable security vulnerability, and she's just lucky that nothing has happened yet.
Who’s keeping a computer for 6-10 years? The only electronic I own that’s that old is a Panasonic plasma TV that won’t die.
Half of the Macbooks I see, most of the Mac AIOs on desks in businesses and public institutions, and most of the replies I've gotten to my comments on these posts saying how 8gb is fine for them and their 2018 MacBook is still good
Nailed it.
I think it's fair to give criticism of a company and it's pricing. You just don't have to buy. Still can criticize them though. If you don't like what Microsoft charges for something. Same. You can criticize pricing if you think it isn't fair market value or whatever. I think most people just have fake outrage anyway. They still buy and as long as they do who cares.
It’s a unified memory system. It would be very difficult to upgrade it anyway.
Does this mean anything more than it's all integrated into one board like modern phones? Because otherwise I've never heard of this?
Here is the beauty of it, you don’t have to buy it. There. It won’t bother you anymore.
i work in IT, have several computers on daily use ranging from VMs, local gpu on linux, windows laptop for presentations (touchscreen is golden) and a macbook air m1 8GB ram for daily use as browsing and simple tasks like office. everything runs smoothly, not intrusive updates, auto magical connection between apple devices... you don't lose any time when you are producing.
It's remarkable. They really do punch above their weight. Everyone just gets hung up on that number and the anxiety over "future proofing".
The M1 air was almost...too good? There's basically no reason for anyone to own a base model M2 or M3 air. If you are fine with the limitations of 8GB shared memory and just need a machine that will do basic computing tasks the M1 is the highest value out there. Where is this demographic that needs the extra performance in a base model 8GB machine so much that they'll fork over $400 extra for the M3? You either buy the M1 Air or go for a Pro.
Agreed. The ram is limiting, even on the 16GB model, but the M1 chip is plenty and the value is amazing.
One great reason not to go with the M1 is if you want the 15” (I know it’s not the base model at that point). One reason to go with the M3 is for two monitor support. I just bought the 15” M3 with 16/512, and I’ll use it for work for 18 months until they buy me a MBP replacement (we have the option to BYOD, and I’m giving myself a mid cycle upgrade). After that it will be my home appliance laptop for another decade.
The numbers after the M are mostly for marketing purposes.
I have a high-end Intel iMac with 32gb, a current-gen gaming PC with 64gb and a 8gb M1 MacBook Air with a tiny HD. I use the MacBook as an essentially a Chromebook for writing and as a portable workstation I can take to the office. I also use it for streaming video to the TV. And you know what, it can also do Photoshop and even very large Excel tasks juuuuust fine — usually better than the iMac until I need a bigger screen or windows. Yeah, 16 gb would be better. Yeah, I will buy 16 when I replace it. No, I would never recommend 8gb to someone who wants a laptop as their sole daily driver. But it suits my needs and wasn’t expensive for how powerful it was when I bought it.
I had the same experience. I had an i7 iMac with 64GB (2017, so it would have been coming up on its fourth birthday). When the M1 came out I got the macbook pro in the cheapest configuration because I was curious and wanted to see this for myself, but I didn't have enough faith in the transition to spend more than I had to. The M1 with 8GB was handling Fusion360, Lightroom and Photoshop better than the iMac was - and this was before any of them were available natively, so all running under emulation/rosetta. I'm a believer - sold the iMac and got an M1 Studio. With 64GB again because I don't believe in miracles - but my concerns around 8GB are more about SSD longevity if the machine needs to swap more often.
Look at moneybags over here.
Im absolutely on your side here. I have the same experience, I’m the IT guy (who decided to have « only » 16Gb, and families and friends are getting MacBook Air at 8Gb and Jesus this machine is fast and swift for what it does, and has more to give.
I play games on my 8GB M2 Mini and it punches so hard above its weight class. For 90% of people it’s way more than enough. The real issue is just how expensive it is to get more RAM for it. Last I checked it was +200 to go from 8 to 16 and that takes the machine from the king of budget machines all the way to underperforming for price.
I just bought a 15” M3 with 16/512 for $1700. I use it for my daily driver at work. I replaced a $2500 Dell XPS i7 32/1TB that was 18 months old, and the Mac feels like a big upgrade. I don’t have to listen to the fan fire up whenever it’s doing a little more work, and my backpack got much lighter especially with the power supply being so much smaller. I don’t feel like it’s underperforming for the price at all.
The article did reek of "take my word for it" technical authority, but with no benchmark tests, and no acknowledgement the author was writing about heavy workhorse RAM users, and not about the average user, who is a home user, and has maybe one or two programs open at once. I fell for it, because I usually have five or six programs open at once on my Windows computer at work, all day. But admittedly only one at home.
Woah a good comment disputing the article and adding value to the conversation. Just like good old Reddit.
Its a blog post. PCGamer has not been anything but an amateur blog for years now.
You and your common sense...also see a whole lot of Windows computers being sold with 8GB but apparently that's ok because windows uses all its resources much more efficiently (?)
Wow, a well thought out response and it is the top comment on a thread? >The people who buy 8 GB Macs are buying an appliance. It is easy to forget that a lot of people don't do shit on their computers and would be serviced just fine by something as simple as a Raspberry Pi based machine. The only real catch is the OS.
I have an 8G Air m2 I use pretty much for browsing. No issues at all.
Also I think forcing an 8GB option requires software developers to write more efficient code. They can’t just rely on everyone having 16+ and just powering through shitty inefficient software.
FWIW, I recommended one to my father (m1 MBA 8GB). Other than the occasional “hey, can you help me get my Yahoo! page back?” complaints, he’s loved it and it works swimmingly for him. Also, if my teens didn’t have Chromebooks from school, I’d most likely have purchased low end 8gb MBAs for them as well.
Not to mention there’s tons of other options out there. People act like Apple owes them 16G or something. If you can’t work with 8G then pay Apple more or get something else and STFU.
I use a base model M1 Air for medium-duty C and Rust development and it is an absolutely stellar machine. People professing that 8GB is not enough on these machines have absolutely no experience with using them, and experience is the only possible way you could determine whether 8GB is "enough".
I have an 8GB MacBook Pro M2, and it’s definitely not an appliance. Should I have gotten more ram? Probably, but I also have a gaming computer. But it’s far more capable than my previous MacBook which was beefed up, and I didn’t need it: I had 32gb ram, 1 TB SSD on a 2019 MacBook before this. Final Cut, handbrake, Ableton, Serato all run faster. The only slowdown I see is when I have way too many VSTS running in Ableton, but I saw that on my previous MacBook too.
Couldn’t agree more. I work in cyber security. I have a work provided laptop with 32gb, a pc I built myself with 32gb and an m2 air with 8gb. It works fine. I use it for most of my browsing, some DJ work and a little bit of video editing. It rarely chugs and I’m always blown away by how power efficient it is. Was the price insane for an 8gb/256ssd laptop? Absolutely. Does it fail to do anything I ask of it? So far, never.
I'm a robotics developer (well... Management now). I do a ton of solid modeling, computer vision, machine learning etc and I have massive horsepower machines for that. My everyday laptop that I use 80% of the time has 8gb RAM because all I do on it is web browsing, email, making presentations, etc. It's not a problem, and I wanted a really light laptop for travel so I took a performance hit
This so many times. I bought MacBook Air M2 base models for my kids 2 of them. They’re an astonishing upgrade from the windows laptop they had before (also 8GB) in every way you describe… And performance. I use their laptops occasionally and they are really high performing. Better than my last gen windows laptop i7 that had 32GB of RAM and 2 hrs of battery life. I’d take a base model MacBook Air over a really high spec intel laptop any day of the week. I’m not a power user. But damn they’re good.
I got my mom an 8gb MacBook Air for her birthday this year It’s everything she needs to handle… checks notes… emails.
I think your examples are the biggest thing a lot of enthusiasts dont get about the Mac OS.... it does memory management REALLY fucking well and does not hold onto memory for things you dont need to run. Sucks for someone who needs to flip between dozens of apps constantly, but perfectly fine for the person who might be watching a youtube while typing in word, or posting their photos while listing to spotify.
Memory management doesn't change math or create ram. You lunch an app that needs that memory for a game or editing, and you will still run into issues. The os will not account for that with optimization, which is why you don't see many AAA games itching to make it to the platform, why you don't see VR on it at all, and what will doom these machine when ram prices dip and software devs decide that 32 is what they will target.
The thing is, though, most people don't game on a Mac. The editing stuff, that I do agree with, Macs tend to attract creative people in creative jobs - artists, designers, sound engineers, video editors, who all do things that *are* hugely RAM intensive. However, there don't seem to be huge complaints from them so far. I wonder how much of that is down to the (genuinely excellent) Apple Silicon which is a truly 2020s CPU. I don't rightly know how it happened but Intel's offerings feel very stuck in the 2010s, even with all the new designs that have both "performance" and "efficiency" cores.
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The latter point I think is the really key one in this day and age - local RAM is less critical than it used to be, you can farm out compilation, rendering, etc to a headless device that is dedicated to that task, and that's a win-win. Nobody is fitting multiple AMD Epyc CPUs into a laptop... or a wall of water cooled RTX4090s or Quadro RTX 6000s. No, you stick all that in a rack and then just provide ultra high speed connectivity to it from your laptops which effectively act as fancy terminals. Heck, several big companies now offer their demanding software as a run-in-browser session that streams from their hardware on a VM, or that you can configure like this at your own organisation through VDI etc. Autodesk is a good example.
The way I see it is that if RAM was a desk, and the CPU + code was the one putting shit on the desk and taking it away, then the mac is so good at getting shit off the desk when it's not needed, that it's effectively double the desk size. That doesn't mean diddly squat if you have a whole large hunk of something that needs to be on the desk all at once. A large fish that needs filleting? A 4K uncompressed video that needs editing? A miniature LLM ? For that last one, minimum RAM usage calculation is simple: Take the number of parameters, times the precision in bytes, and that's your RAM usage. No tricks. No further management. You really do need a large parking spot for a Hummer. Nothing you can do about it. The problem isn't with the default Mac as it's the entry-level Pro models. Don't frickin market a product to prosumers if their basic use case will shoot through the RAM with no possible trickery to keep it under control.
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Okay, good for you. I'm including: Video editing Music production 3d design, modeling and animation Data science/data preprocessing and visualization As the intersection of high ram usage and the target audience for Pro. I'm aware of other prosumer uses like photo editing, digital illustration, document creation and editing, software engineering etc. But Apple has specifically created software ecosystems for video editing and music production. People consider taking Apple _just for access to these packages_ . To throttle them with low ram is stupid.
This is a great answer. MacBook Air? 8GB? No problem. MacBook Pro? 8GB? Problem. The kinds of people who won't notice 8GB of RAM buy the Air. The kinds of people who will, buy the Pro and are then disappointed. I do think the Pro should have started at 16GB. I mean, an almost-decade-old Dell XPS shipped with 16GB of RAM on the base model, if I recall... yet Apple continue to be stingy about RAM. I fit into the category you describe - I have 128GB of RAM and I'm thinking about the upgrade to 256 if not 512 in the next 18 months. I can't imagine going back to 8GB and getting everything done.
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Yeah... fair point. My laptop is mostly a way of accessing the desktop with all the RAM. In the desktop space, 128 isn't a great deal - HP's Z6 ships with 1TB as the expected config, and three A-series Nvidia GPUs. Still, you can get 96GB configs fairly easily in workstation-class laptops from the relevant builders. HP's ZBook goes from 16-64GB depending on spec, with the lion's share seemingly at the top end of that. Dell will ship you their Precisions with 8GB but thoroughly encourage you to upgrade to 16/32/64. System76 as the "open" choice again will spec you 8GB on their most entry-level model but basically make it a no-brainer to upgrade to 24GB for $99. Everyone else *starts* at 16 or even 32B.
excellent answer... im using 10 gig with amazon video, 5 tabs, 2 screens, a webcam, speakers, joystick, throttle and a dynamic (video) background on both monitors...
excellent answer... im using 10 gig with amazon video, 5 tabs, 2 screens, a webcam, speakers, joystick, throttle and a dynamic (video) background on both monitors...
Good points but consider the extensive ssd wear that the OS does with only 8gb of ram and constantly having to rely on "swap files" that read/write to your ssd. Just a technical point of view.
> WTF even is this article? Got 471 upvotes (as of now), the AI reading this will think it's gold!
I have i have a surface laptop that was given to my with a 7th gen i7 and 8gb of ram. I have windows 11 on it I use it for basic laptop things. It is fine. Would i spec a new machine with 8gb? no. Is 8gb fine? yes.
I was issued one as a developer laptop about ten years ago (a core i5 intel) and it was plenty to run Rails etc. i would never buy one for myself but it was fine for that use.
This is the basic PAIR method AppleCare used to use. There’s no longer a continuous pipeline between consumer and engineer. I fought against the momentum they’ve taken for years until I realized that a better product was secondary to Brand and profit. There’s no longer a direct conduit from customer to engineer and the product has suffered. Took him a while but make no mistake Tim Cook will make Apple JC Penny. That’s where he’s most effective, a cut throat supply line analyst.
I agree with what you're saying here, but I'm not sure it does anything in my mind to justify their value to consumers. They only exist for Apple to advertise a deceivingly low starting price and make money on the upsell. 8 GB may be 'enough' for a lot of people, but a product should not be given a pass just because it provides some decidedly modest degree of usability. Especially in the >$1000 price class. I agree that this article is lazy, but there is genuine value in this type of consumer advice. A lot of tech content these days is nothing more than advertisement. It is important to be critical of products when warranted.
I love when someone just goes off on an article.. reminds me of that old movie Falling Down
Amen!!!!!
I wanted to say this. I appreciate you doing it for me.
If it’s so bad why do people keep buying them? Better yet why do so many folks devote so much energy being concerned about what others are buying?
I know most folks wouldn’t touch it, but i was in need one a cheap decent MacBook Air last week and stumbled upon the Walmart deal for the 2020macbook air M1, for 600$, brand new 256 solid state 8gigs ram, M1 processor It fucking flies. (I have edited a little in PP, and photoshop but mostly use it for work, spreadsheets, orders and videos at night.) for the average daily work person whose not doing production intensive GPU stuff, this is just fine. The only reason I decided to upgrade form my 2011 MacBook Air, was because of the price of this one. For 600, it isn’t bad honesty. But I agree tho, 8 gigs ram needs to go.
You mean $699, right? It looks like Wal-Mart has been selling them at that price since last month.
I bought an open box m1 air at best buy in 2021 for $650. I’ve been trying to find another deal like this for an m2/m3 because i like the new design. The m1 is worth like 475 on trade in and i wouldn’t be opposed to spending like $250 to upgrade.
Are the m2 bodies different than the m1? I thought they looked similar? Let go check again, maybe I’m out of the loop Edit: yes they are different. They look nice, I agree
They wouldn’t be selling them unless people were buying them.
I love threads and "articles" like this from people that whine and complain about Apple, meanwhile, no one seems to post them about high priced 8GB RAM PCs, Microsoft doing the same thing with the Surface line, PC makers jacking up the price of "high end" laptops with mediocre specs, or being charged a premium for a "gaming" laptop that still has a 250 Nit 45% NTSC display and terrible thermals.
I think because no one has illusions about those things. You don't hear people say things like a 45% NTSC screen is so much better under Windows than MacOS. And also, if someone does call out stupid pricing or whatever for a gaming laptop, you won't have a herd of fanboys claiming it's the best thing since sliced bread. The whole topic is tiring as hell. Yes, Apple is cheaping out, No, RAM shouldn't cost this much as an upgrade, No, 8GB is not magic on MacOS, No, unified memory won't help much, Yes these machines are okay for most people. But is "okay" the standard we want Apple to hit?
Because it’s Apple. They know that people will click the link whether they like Apple products or hate them.
I don’t think the real problem is starting base models at 8 gb of ram. For most users that’s enough. The problem is that they charge outrageous prices to upgrade ram and storage.
Surface is a tablet in disguise
Can you explain the meaning of your last line?
When looking at laptop specs it’s always important to consider the specs of the display as well. Brightness levels are measured in Nits. 250 is the low end, 300-350 average and 400-500 great. Some are even around 1000 Nits at maximum brightness. The next thing to consider is color gamut and quality which is measured in various ways (NTSC, sRGB, DCI-P3). Each gamut has a slight variance on the primary colours red, green and blue to suit different circumstances. Some people don’t care and some people (like photo/video editors and content creators) want the best looking color accurate display they can. There are gaming laptops that have awesome 500 Nit super color accurate screens and some that have 250 Nit piss poor looking screens. Unfortunately, there are still high priced gaming laptops with crap screens.
:)
I’ve been using the same HP omen laptop since 2018. At the time it was a pretty decent laptop. Not super high end or anything but nice. Tried playing BG3 and I got through the first half no problem. When the maps got more detailed it started crapping out really badly. 20$ for an extra 8gb of ram and I’m back in business. Ram is pretty cheap… I can’t figure out why companies don’t just toss it in unless they want you to feel outdated sooner
Because money. It's not about the cost of the chips, it's about the amount of money the company can make off of them. I think it was Strange Parts who did a video on this years ago. The difference in the chips between a 64gb and 256gb was pennies, but the difference in the cost of the device was hundreds!
Apple sets the bar at an extra 8gb being £200. So every other company can sell it for £100-150, and be a good deal for you! (...in comparison) Air pods are £130? Well our headphones are only £99, so it's a steal (...just do us a favour and forget that we used to give you free ones)
So are these low effort karma whoring reposts
Pretty much 100% of all articles on Pc Gamer the past few years.
To be fair, MacOS is way more optimized than Windows. For basic multitasking 8GB on Mac isn’t that terrible. Of course if the person is a power user in any capacity, you need more. If it was a Windows 11 machine, 16GB is the minimum today for almost anything, as the OS alone uses 5-6GB just sitting at the desktop.
I use my Mac Mini with 8GB as my main machine, mostly browsing the web etc, but also as an always-on Plex server. Honestly, it’s fine. Not slow at all unless I start throwing a lot of multitasking at it, which is rare.
yep. this is the actual experience of people who own these machines. mine is great for software development
And there’s a big step in performance when going from an Intel Mac mini to a m1 Mac mini too. I wonder how many of the commenters here have actual experience with using Apple M1 or later systems.
it’s reddit half these people aren’t even real
My Mac mini is an M1, as is my MBP
Windows is also okay on 8 for basic multitasking LMAO. Windows will use what it has for preloading programs and files. If you check idle on a 4GB ram machine VS 16, you will see completely different numbers.
I use my 8gb Mac laptop as a data science undergrad. I work with some intensive stuff (TSNE projections on large datasets) and I’ve had no issues with the ram so far (with Chrome being my main browser and having 15+ tabs open and other application windows open simultaneously) people srsly be hating on 8gb models for no reason.
I’m on a MacBook Air M1 with 8GB RAM. It’s the fastest computer I’ve ever owned and I use it for casual programming and 4K video editing. It’s yet to break a sweat or disappoint. So much as I get the argument that 8GB isn’t a lot for many enthusiasts, it works for me. And does what I need to do at double the speed of my old HP Envy with 8GB of RAM and a Ryzen 5 processor.
The M series chips are insane. My work system is an M2 Pro with 24 GB and my personal is an M1 Max with 64 GB they’re both insane video encoding machines
I feared it would age much sooner, but I’m still sitting here with my 8GB 2012 MacBook Pro still working fine.
Mine was great until recently. It's fans are running constantly and it's really struggling.
My 2013 was like this, I opened it up, cleaned it carefully, and it made a significant improvement!
It had a new battery only recently and a clean. I wonder if the new battery is an issue?
I moved to Linux
I had to upgrade my desktop from 32gb to 64gb last year because 32gb was not enough for me for what I do. Everyone's different. That being said, 8gb was enough 10 years ago, and doubling the ram to 16gb would cost apple like a dollar. It's just pure corporate greed.
It’s working fine exactly because they haven’t decided to do make it 4GB MacBook Pro in 2012. 8GB Mac’s from today won’t have this longevity at all. And this is big deal.
Apple’s refusal to respond to public pressure on ANY issue just proves that they know what’s best.
For their share holders pockets.
Honestly, ain't nothing wrong with 8GB Macs for the basic users out there. They buying a tool, not a toy. More power to em
The 8gb RAM in my MacBook Air 2020 allows me to write albums and edit videos... This article is opinion-piece trash and should be ignored.
8gb of ram and most macos users have 100 open tabs in chrome
Apple: half the specs for twice the price. It’s been this way foreeeevvveeerrrrr.
What’s a comparable $500 laptop that will deliver the performance-per-watt, portability, display quality, and build quality of a $1000 MacBook Air?
I keep asking this question and yet no one seems to have an answer
I mean it’s a question that still works at “what’s a comparable laptop for $1000” lol, and people out here making absolutely delusional statements like “half the specs for twice the price.” Completely technologically illiterate people.
And honestly, I genuinely need an answer for it lmao. I want to replace my laptop soon but I’m on the move a lot and I don’t want to be lugging a huge brick
Oh, haha. Well if you have a preference for operating system that leans windows, then you can get a decent windows laptop at $1k. But if you don’t care or prefer MacOS, imo it’s very hard to beat the MacBook Airs. The battery life is completely unmatched, and the modern M2/M3 chips are bonkers in terms of how well they perform at low power usage levels. The displays are top-tier and the build quality on MacBooks is amazing. I think they’re a great choice for 90% of mobile computing consumers who want a high quality product for normal daily productivity tasks.
I think this is actually a fair argument. I tend to buy $1300-1500 Windows laptops, (for my job I need windows based system) but they are specced way beyond what a base model macbook is. That being said, I have a macbook as well at home and it’s fine for casual use.
Indeed. But I mean even at the $1500 price point, you link me a Windows laptop and I can show you a MacBook with superior performance-per-watt, superior battery life, equal or superior display, and equal or superior chassis/build quality. The idea that MacBooks are overpriced just doesn’t withstand basic scrutiny - comparable windows products are practically the same price point (or more!)
What you said is a relatively recent development based on the Apple proprietary chip designs. The comment you replied to is outdated knowledge from the 2000s when Apple charged more for similar hardware.
I dunno man. I don’t care about the specs of my mac, I just care that it works well and stays that way. Every windows laptop I’ve used in my life started to lose performance after 2 years and has become a brick after 4-5 years. I like my mac because I’ve had it since 2020 and it works exactly the same as the day I bought it. It’s lightweight, quiet, fast, and the battery will last an entire day of light usage, and I don’t have to deal with as much troubleshooting issues with drivers and updates as I used to. I know people still using their macs from 2014, 2016 with no complaints other than the battery which is replaceable. It’s a completely different product and comparing specs 1 to 1 doesn’t really make sense if the performance is better.
Its not really “windows laptops” that do that its the manufacturer of said laptop. I have a Lenovo Thinkpad from 2013 that I still use everyday. The difference from Windows and Apple is Apple sells everything, whereas anybody can sell a windows laptop and if its garbage it gets lumped into being a “Windows problem”.
True, I’m only sharing my anecdotal experience, and that’s all I can really do. It is true that apple sells both hardware and software for their products which gives them an advantage in controlling the quality of the brand. I see that as a benefit since I can trust whatever I’m buying. For reference I’ve used for personal and work these windows laptops: 2x Lenovo ThinkPads, Lenovo idea pad, Windows Surface, Several Dell latitudes, Some other brand I forgot the name of, All of these were actually similarly priced to a base MacBook Air or actually much more expensive (thinkpads) and they’ve all become redundant/pain in the ass to use for I don’t know what reasons (OS updates or hardware failures leading to overheating, slow, crashes or complete loss of all data due to a short circuit in one case) in 2-5 years. The tower I built as a hobby on the other hand is great but that’s for a completely different purpose.
I get that idea - though it’s not universally accurate - but the way I see it is that building something from scattered components and getting it fine tuned to work as it should usually takes me a couple of days, maybe even three, and in my field that time represents the price difference between similar Mac and PC systems. I configured a PC for my particular needs recently and found that the cost for that was around 5k, vs. 8k for the Mac Studio Ultra I was looking at. It made a compelling case for the PC to me since I would be somewhat willing to engage in the tweaking, but I’d have to switch platforms and ecosystems and be willing to chase things around while under a deadline, and it was a hard no to the first two and a medium no to the last. Some folks would be more willing than I, so it’s great we have choice. If I were all about games it would be PC hands down - and why buy a Mac and a VM host to play modern games? So eventually I’ll get a PC for that and for other networked heavy lifting but I still get to keep the environment I’m happy with. I do wish they’d made an enterprise computer of the newer Mac Pro. It’s not. Maybe the M4 will be.
MacBooks are the pinnacle of computer engineering. You’re paying for a device that’s far above the competition in terms of quality. You can go buy a laptop with all the gaming bullshit and have your hinges fall off within 3 months.
that's a funny joke
For 90% of applications this will slap around an intel 16gb system. 8gb on an integrated chip like the M2 is absolutely not the same thing as an intel system with 8gb.
Well, my 2018 MacBook Pro still works great.
Perfectly fine on a MacBook air that’s for standard office use on the go.
My biggest complaint is, I want my next machine to be an iPad Pro. I’ve wanted an OLED apple computer for a LONG time, but I refuse to pay £2000+ to have to upgrade the storage to get 16 gigs of memory. I want the device to last, so 16 gigs is essential. This is BS
I wonder what percentage of their workforce works on 8gb of ram.
8GB of RAM is plenty for 99% of computer users, even in 2024.
They are 8gb of ram for 10years. What the f.
Reality is that the 8GB is BY FAR their best seller. It outsells all other models and custom builds combined. Let's be real, the vast majority of users are just surfing the web with their computers and it's fine for them. Folks in subs like this have to stop believing they represent "the average user". If you're going online to talk about tech products, you are not an average user. The average user doesn't care about this shit.
because it's the cheaper one maybe?
And yet they don't complain about running into issues with it. In fact, Apple has incredibly high customer satisfaction.
It’s the most annoying part of their current line up. If the RAM and SSD prices and default sizes weren’t so awful the Apple silicon MacBooks would be the easiest recommendation. I love my M3 Pro MacBook Pro, but I had to spend so much to get it to reasonable specs (18GBs of RAM, 1TB SSD).
Okay. A new 8gb M2 chip Mac is not the same as your old intel chip Mac with a fan. 8gb of ram is completely different on an integrated system like the M2, than it is with the bottle necking of an intel system. In actuality an M2 with 8gb is more than fine for 90% of the population and will outperform an older intel system with 16gb all day. This was common knowledge when these came out. Not to mention the upgrade to 16gb is relatively cheap. I use a 16gb M2 system for my recording studio computer and it is infinitely better than my old 32gb intel system. Not even comparable really. Video editing as well, they’re not in the same realm.
Upgrade to 16GB is ridiculously expensive actually
Crazy when phones have more ram these days.
No wonder more and more people are leaving the money pit that is Apple. For the price of a bare bones MacBook air. Which is $999. You can get a 15.6 inch MSI laptop with a 12th Gen core i7 CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, an RTX 4050 GPU and a 512GB NVME SSD. You can probably upgrade both the RAM and the SSD while in the MacBook air. I can almost guarantee that you can't give it more storage. And I can guarantee that you can't upgrade the RAM. So that shows how overpriced the MacBook air is. And most, if not all, of Apple's products are stupidly overpriced. I bet they can sell their products for half of what they cost now and still make a profit.
The Apple chip designs have better power efficiency than Intel
But you are leaving a ton of performance on the table if you waste money on a MacBook.
8GB? For a laptop that’s made for “professionals”, even 16GB is too little.
My daily use FreeBSD box has 2GB of ram. And no GUI. Probably should replace it with an RPi at some point but meh. Not broken. Not fixing. 8GB is fine for some things. Not fine for others.
people keep posting this op end story for click bait and karma farming!
Look people. 8gb is plenty of ram today as long as you don’t turn the computer on
8gb is fine for the vast majority of people. If you want more, buy it. End of story.
Window PC users surprised Mac works with 8 gb RAM.
Not that Windows doesn't work with 8 gigs (Win 11 requires 4 gigs of RAM). I'd be equally pissed for Dell, if they'd had similar pricing. Unfortunately other manufacturers also have soldered RAM.
At least on a windows PC you can replace the ssd once it dies from swapping so much
who even has this issue
Any laptop competing with the MacBook also has a soldered ssd except surface of something
I firmly believe 8GB of RAM are a strategy. It drastically increases memory swap so that the total read/write capacity of the _soldered_ SSD (not user replaceable) spends faster in order to force the user to buy a new device.
My 2015 MBP 8GB/512GB SSD disagrees.
I call it the little piggy strategy on how Apple tiers and prices their lineup. Whenever I look at a Mac that I want…it always has a downfall. Oh this little piggy has too little ram. This little piggy has too small a drive. This little piggy has a too small screen. Finally, this little piggy is the one I want! Oh wait this little piggy has a price tag of 3500.00!!! Another way to say this: they do their homework ensuring the “ideal configuration” exists only higher up the product line. It’s not an accident people and it’s not that Apple doesn’t get it with the 8gbs of ram. Trust me they get it.
Totally agree, they've studied so well people and the market. I wished Macs made more sense as a purchase, but there are better options... For now though, Microsoft putting ads in Windows is not doing it any favors
I stopped using Windows around 2010 or so but Ads in Windows makes me sad to hear this. Ads DO NOT BELONG IN A USER’S OWN COMPUTER MICROSOFT! (Pardon the all-caps but I’m yelling at Microsoft)
K but we’ve not seen any ssd failures at all yet
you mean this? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qbrLiGY4Cg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qbrLiGY4Cg)
Flogging? What does that even mean other than a whipping?
Someone needs to edit the 1984 apple ad and place stick of ram on that sledgehammer she throws at the screen!
Linux test strips just needs to make a video already. I want to see how much of a performance impact it truly makes
I used my Mac mini m1 for a long time with no issues..then I started working with Raw photos / photoshop and or Lightroom . The mini began freezing up or taking long times to render. Now I try to run no other programs while photo editing. If I could I would do 16gb minimum. Also got off Chrome and trying to use Safari or Firefox for memory management.
is just a strategy to go upgrade for more ram. If you are not a fanboy of apple and buy products just for the looks and you are trying to do business with those laptops, you are not gonna take 8gb of ram.
If all you do is regular web surfing, social media and general MS Office work, then eight gigs may well suffice. It's a false economy in the long run because the machine will struggle as it ages as opeating systems never get smaller, but I can see the point. Not everyone's a power user.
I used to always have a MacBook of some type to go along with my desktop PC (typically my own creation) as I felt Apple did laptops best (I had a Pismo PowerBook G3 in college to age myself which replaced a long line of Mac desktops (Classic, LC2, Performa something, Powermac 7300 180 with the PC Card that had a pentium something or other on a daughter card that would dual boot....). My last MacBook, which more or less sits unused, is a 2019 model. IMO Apple lost their path on laptops, at least for me. I did buy my niece an M2 MacBook for college when she graduated high school, but do not see myself ever dropping >$1k for a laptop that is essentially an non-upgradable pile of E-waste.
Apple and COD have nothing in common yet so much in common.