All of Apple's upcoming new Macs this year are likely to have at least 16GB of RAM pre-installed as standard, breaking a years-long tradition of...
  • padge@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    My sister just bought a MacBook Air for college, and I had to beg her to spend the extra money on 16gb of memory. It feels like a scam that it appears cheap with the starting at price, but nobody should actually go with those “starting at” specs.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Yeah it’s about future proofing. 8 GB might be okay for basic browsing and text editing now, but in the future that might not be the case. Also in my experience people who only want to do basic browsing and word editing, end up inevitably wanting to do more complex things and not understanding that their device is not capable of it.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        It’s not an upgrade though it’s just a different model. They’re not modules you can install and I don’t even think Apple can install them you just get a different motherboard.

        Which is objectionable for so many reasons, not least of all E-Waste.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Ooohhh, wowie!

    Meanwhile.im looking into upgrading my 64 gigs to 128, in small part because I might need to, in large Bart because I CAN.

    Stop buying apple crap

    • boonhet@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Isn’t the RAM inside the actual SoC with the Apple Silicon line? I haven’t really opened any of 'em up.

      As for older Macs - sure, I know someone who replaced 8 gigs with 16 on either an Air or Pro model that had 16 available as an option but was shipped with 8. It’s just something you do when you have way too many Mac boards lying around at work and your bosses say you can’t get a new work laptop.

  • flop_leash_973@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Naturally the price for the cheapest model will also be going to up several orders of magnitude more than the cost of materials, labor, and healthy profit margin to account for that as well I’m sure.

    • lengau@midwest.socialEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      My Linux machine has 64 GiB of RAM, which is like 128 GiB of Mac RAM. It’s still not enough

  • OmegaLemmy@discuss.onlineEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I always thought 8gb was a fine amount for daily use if you never did anything too heavy, are apps really that ram intense now?

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Yep. I work in IT support, almost entirely Windows but similar concepts apply.

      I see people pushing 6G+ with the OS and remote desktop applications open sometimes. My current shop does almost everything by VDI/remote desktop… So that’s literally the only thing they need to load, it’s just not good.

      On the remote desktop side, we recently shifted from a balanced remote desktop server, over to a “memory optimised” VM, basically has more RAM but the same or similar CPU, because we kept running out of RAM for users, even though there was plenty of CPU available… It caused problems.

      Memory is continually getting more important.

      When I do the math on the bandwidth requirements to run everything, the next limit I think we’re likely to hit is RAM access speed and bandwidth. We’re just dealing with so much RAM at this point that the available bandwidth from the CPU to the RAM is less than the total memory allocation for the virtual system. Eg: 256G for the VM, and the CPU runs at, say, 288GB/s…

      Luckily DDR 4/5 brings improvements here, though a lot of that stuff has yet to filter into datacenters

    • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Yes. Just as 4GB was barely enough a decade ago.

      I usually find myself either capping out the 8GB of RAM on my laptop, or getting close to it if I have Firefox, Discord and a word processor open. Especially if I have Youtube or Spotify going.