While 8GB might be able to run macOS quite quickly for basic tasks, there's no way less than 16GB should ever be an option for people using the modern internet or applications. Given the popularity of bloatware such as Electron, Chrome etc.... even 16GB is a stretch. Heck even Apple's own Music app easily uses over 2GB of RAM at times.
At the end of the day for me beyond what one person uses their laptop for it comes down to this: RAM Is actually very cheap to manufacture and spec out compared to other components.
While letting companies get away shorting customers by installing small amounts of memory today they’re locking them in to an early upgrade/replacement in the near future.
We shouldn’t let profit companies get away with these kind of tactics as long as memory is not just not user upgradable - not even vendor upgradable after the fact.
That ship has long since sailed. Tell that to Microsoft, Slack, Google, Spotify, Apple (music). By enabling hardware vendors to sell people under-speced memory (for the current software landscape let alone future) it's only doing harm to the users. Making the default base size 16GB would arguably cost Apple next to nothing per machine, but locks individuals into suffering when they (have to) use bloated software. It's not the consumers problem - it's the corporations making money off it.
I watched a YouTube video testing the latest 8gb M3 yesterday.
It struggled running teams in a video call, stuttering as was eating memory.
I’d say there are a lot of users running multiple Electron and high memory apps without knowing they are running Electron / high memory apps because of the insistence of everyone building cross platform GUI apps using Electron.
Your favourite video calling app, notes app, password app, work productivity app will mostly be Electron resource hogs in 2024.
OS X was using about 4GB on the test video, that left 4GB for everything else which disappears quickly with just one or two other Electron apps running.
> struggled running teams in a video call...a lot of users running multiple Electron and high memory apps
Right. Those people shouldn't get the base model. If most of what you're doing is using FaceTime, Safari, Mail.app and watching videos--which is a surprising fraction of computer users--8GB is fine. If you're doing more you need more.
The article argues there is no reasonable market for 8GB Macs. I am disagreeing. It's not a massive market. But it's real, and they're not better served by having more memory.
I've been using Safari almost exclusively for years now! It runs so much leaner than any other browser and doesn't try to lock you into an ecosystem. It also syncs history with iOS devices and, surprisingly, has some great extensions, like Vinegar and Baking Soda (substitutes custom HTML5 video players with the native video player).
I occasionally try to use Orion, which is based off of Safari Tech Preview. I really like it but it's buggier than I'd like it to be right now. It also low-key pushes Kagi on you, and while I use Kagi heavily, I don't want my browser to have a search engine bias.
To support Orion with Orion+ (which I did, and don't regret having done it), you need to purchase it through Kagi. I'm guessing this was done to simplify payment systems, but it is a nuanced way of associating Orion with Kagi.
Orion works with Kagi out of the box in ways that are seemingly more native than other search engines. Specifically, the way it handles my account token is more seamless than how the Kagi extension handles it with Safari (which I understand is a requirement due to technical limitations).
While it's absolutely nothing like how Google and Chrome or Bing and Edge are inseparable, it is a slight push that had me slightly worried about deeper integration in the future. This wasn't a show-stopper at all, though!
Safari runs incredibly lean, at least 2x battery life. Lots of people use Safari. I know many non-web developers that use Safari because they don’t care which JIT compiler is under the hood.
Also you get email forwarding, iCloud relay, and it auto-fills your MFA-SMS codes so you don’t have look at your phone. It’s great.
i use safari on macos. i got a mac in college when i needed a laptop that could last all day. only macos with safari can handle that. all my bookmarks are synced to my phone. why would i use something else? so google can track everything i do and my battery can last half the time?
They don't want a Chromebook. They want a Mac. Maybe it's because they want macOS. Maybe it's build quality. Maybe it's vanity. The point is there appears to be a user set for whom 8GB is plenty, and the existence of Chrome or Electron doesn't disprove that hypothesis.
I would certainly prefer more RAM but I have a 8GB M1 MacBook Air and I do web development in VSCode fine. It's never been a problem for me personally.
I have 8GB of RAM, no swap. This is a Linux laptop and not a mac, but I don't think this makes a huge difference.
I never run in to issues, except with some games and even that is rare.
Up to last year I had 4GB of RAM. I ran in to issues with that sometimes, usually related to stuff I was doing with PostgreSQL.
"Uses over 2GB of RAM at times" can be very misleading if you have large amounts of RAM; because it doesn't mean it can't work with less RAM. Why wouldn't the system keep stuff in RAM? It doesn't really cost anything to do so – "unused RAM is wasted RAM".
All of that said, at this price point, and with the cost difference of 8G vs 16G in mind, I do kind of roll my eyes at their decision to sell these machines. My 8G machine is a €230 second-hand ThinkPad, not a €1,879 premium device (I checked: the 15" M3 w/ 512GB SSD comes with 8G of RAM at this price).
Linux does tend to use quite a bit less memory. Perhaps not if you run a full Ubuntu install with all its gnome extensions etc… but in general it’s a lot lighter as it has less integrated services / apps by default.
Well I do tend to have some dev-related things running in the background like PostgreSQL, Docker, and things like that, so that rather offsets that. I also run a macOS VM sometimes (to test stuff), and that works reasonable well-ish (much better than Windows) with most of the issues being CPU bound more than anything else.
Also Apple claims their "Unified Memory" is somehow more efficient. I don't really know what that means though.
The majority of Apple owners are not using them for anything more than office productivity, light multimedia consumption, and web browsing. They rarely use more than two of those applications at a time.
Given iPhones have 6GB of RAM, I think 8GB is fairly generous for the average Apple user.
> I think you're making massive assumptions on how people use computers these days.
I hear this a lot, but my own experience doesn’t stack up. It’s just anecdata or whatever the cool kids say, but: my mother, two sisters and brother all have their own laptops. None of them work in tech, and I’ve never put my finger on the scale to persuade them to get a laptop either — if anything I’ve tried to persuade them to get iPads in the past so I don’t have to play IT department when something goes wrong.
For reference, my mother is a nurse practitioner, sister 1 is a daycare director, sister 2 is self-employed working for her husband’s construction company, and my brother just has odd jobs working at gas stations and youth counseling.
All four of them have asked me for some kind of help or advice about their laptops in the last couple of months, so I know they actively use them. My sister with the daycare called me just a couple days ago to help her get her laptop connected to a projector so she could give a PowerPoint presentation to her employees.
Sure, and generally, those are performed either in the same app or one at a time. All of those are also doable in 6GB of memory (iPhones and iPads are great for it).
"For iMovie for macOS, you can edit and share 4K video on Mac computers from 2011 or later with at least 4GB of memory." [0]
I think a lot of people over-purchase with Apple devices because they're not sure what the hardware specs mean and end up generalizing to cost. "Well, I /use/ my computer (for photos, video, etc) and that seems like it'd require more, so I probably shouldn't buy lowest tier... What's the next one up that I can afford?"
In the end, they feel good about their choice for being "just right", even though all of the options would have been.
I live in the SF Bay Area and know tons of people; and almost everyone is in tech.
I know exactly 2 people that program on their personal laptop, and one that does photo editing.
For everyone else it's a glorified Chrome or Safari browser. They almost all have whatever affordable Macbook they got the last time they needed a new laptop.
The only people I've ever heard complain about their laptops were non-Macbook users.
Yeah, everyone I know uses their MacBooks for work, coding, music, music and video editing, photo editing, some games, some doing AI/ML (though this is currently the minority), lots of crappy Electron apps like MS Teams, Slack, Spotify, 1Password, Chrome etc…
I can't edit this comment anymore so I'll just add here that I misread smcleod's comment – I thought they were implying that most people don't use computers/laptops these days, something that I've heard in tech circles before.
Sorry, but I think you forgot to make your actual point.
You haven't mentioned how your "anecdata" supports either viewpoint.
Do they have Apple laptops? What actual applications do they use? Do they run out of memory?
I can't see a previous comment from you that would provide context...
I was only making a point to the part of the comment that I quoted, where they surmised that most people don't use computers these days. I don't personally think this bit of tech folklore holds true.
Edit: actually I see now that I misread the comment, so my reply was indeed out of place.
To back parent's point, students (including moddle/high school) have roughly the same requirements and can get by with iPads or chromebooks, sometimes with 4Gb(!) of RAM.
So I'd agree there's some non negligible amount of users that will be fine with the absolute most basic functioning computer.
The question could be why that user base would buy a Mac when they could get something way more cheaper and probably better adapted to their needs ? My answer would be they don't need to care about the money or utterly like macs, and it's their choice. It's still surprising Apple caters to those users though.
AI is here now and here to stay. By locking students into RAM suited for 2008~ era machines you’re locking them out of any local AI / LLM tooling and to the current apps they can (just) run today. RAM is super cheap - we can’t normalise companies hamstringing devices at almost no cost savings just to lock people into future upgrades.
Agreed, but better-than-middling small model local LLM inference on the M-series has largely been a happy accident that Apple have been silently capitalizing on without bothering to correct. They were first in mobile, not the best.
Generative performance and training are poor to nonexistent, Core ML is incomplete and underdeveloped, memory bandwidth was decreased on the M3 Pros, and eGPUs don't work with Apple Silicon - and what, normalizing 16GB of memory will encourage Apple to stop segmenting when they already have so little to offer? They're paygating /inference/ performance beyond their Pro chips. That's their official stance.
Even Intel wasn't prepared for the Cambrian explosion of AGI, and their libraries and APIs have been taught in higher ed for the past decade. The good news is that Apple are not the best or only consumer option and will likely be out-classed by AMD and Intel in the next 18 months. The price of any new Mac for inference today would be better spent renting GPU time.
I'm a SWE by day. But on my personal Mac all I do is have a tons of Chrome tabs open, Discord, Apple Notes and Spotify. Once in a while I'll compile and run random projects off GitHub (nothing too heavy) for fun.
The iPad Air has 8G RAM and it’s enough for my spouse to run a $B business. Office, Safari, etc. It all runs fine. Doctors in my family are fine with 8G. My mom is fine with it. In fact I could use just 8G because I ssh into giant HPCs. Frankly a minority needs more than 8 and, behold, they have that option. Isn’t choice wonderful?
Your iPad runs an optimised, cut down OS and doesn’t run a bunch of electron apps or a chrome browser. Nor does it have apps that may be downloaded and running the background.
