- cross-posted to:
- apple_enthusiast@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- apple_enthusiast@lemmy.world
There were a number of exciting announcements from Apple at WWDC 2024, from macOS Sequoia to Apple Intelligence. However, a subtle addition to Xcode 16 — the development environment for Apple platforms, like iOS and macOS — is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple’s claim that 8GB of unified memory was enough for base-model Apple silicon Macs, you won’t be able to use it. There’s a memory requirement for Predictive Code Completion in Xcode 16, and it’s the closest thing we’ll get from Apple to an admission that 8GB of memory isn’t really enough for a new Mac in 2024.
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This isn’t a big deal.
If you’re developing in Xcode, you did not buy an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years.
If you are just using your Mac for Facebook and email, I don’t think you know what RAM is.
If you know what RAM is, and you bought an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years, then you are likely self-aware of your limited demands and/or made an informed compromise.
If you know what RAM is, and you bought an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years, then you are likely self-aware of your limited demands and/or made an informed compromise.
Or you simply refuse to pay $200+ to get a proper machine. Like seriously, 8Gb Mac’s should have disappeared long ago, but nope, Apple stick to them with their planned obsolescence tactics on their hardware, and stubbornly refusing to admit that in 2023 releasing a MacBook with soldered 8Gb of RAM is wholy inadequate.
To be fair, it seems that even Windows ARM machines will have soldered RAMs.
Yeah, the 8GB model’s purpose is to make an “starting at $xxxx” price tag possible.
I get around this by simply not buying a Mac. Free’s up so much money for ram.
I’m not gonna stand up and declare that 8gb is absolutely fine, because in very short order it won’t be. But yeah, currently for an average use case, it is.
My work Mac mini has 8gb. It’s a 2014 so can’t be upgraded, but for the tasks I ask of it it’s ok. Sure, it gets sluggish if I’m using the Win11 VM I sometimes need, but generally I don’t really have any issues doing regular office tasks.
That said, I sometimes gets a bee in my bonnet about it, so open Activity Monitor to see what’s it’s doing, and am shocked by how much RAM some websites consume in open tabs in Safari.
8gb is generally ok on low end gear, but devs are working very hard to ensure that it’s not.
Funny: knowing that you only get one shot, I bought 32GB of RAM for my Mac Mini like 1.5 years ago. I figured that it gave me the best shot of keeping it usable past 5 years.
Why do they struggle so much with some “obvious things” sometimes ? We wouldn’t have a type-C iphone if the EU didn’t pressured them to do make the switch
They don’t “struggle”. They are intentional and malicious decisions meant to drive revenue, as they have been since the beginning.
The E-Mac (looks like a toilet, sounds like a jet) came with 256 MB of RAM in one of the two slots, adding a 512MB stick was dirt cheap (everyone had at the very least 1GB on their PC), well it was dirt cheap except if you bought it from Apple…
It’s how Apple monetizes their customers. Figuring out an artificial shortcoming they can sell as an upgrade to them (check out dongles for example).
💸💸💸
They didn’t have a reason to switch to USB-C, and several reasons to avoid it for as long as possible. Their old Lightning connector (and the big 30-pin connector that came before it) was proprietary, and companies had to pay a royalty to Apple for every port and connector they manufactured. They made a lot of money off of the royalties.
Apple has said that 8gb was enough for “general use,” meaning if you use the out-of-the-box applications (Safari, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc.) then 8gb is enough for general use to get basic things done. Apple is not going to say how much RAM is required for a third party application to run. That would be impossible. (Especially Chrome).
This article says that the limitation is occurring when running Xcode 16 with code completion. This is outside the definition of general use. Most people who are buying 8gb Macs are not going to be running Xcode at all.
The article and most of these comments are way, way outside the realm of common sense and simply looking for a reason to attack Apple.
If you don’t want to buy Apple, don’t buy it… and in the process, shut the fuck up.
I wonder what is the general use for the Mac Mini, MacBook Air, iMac, and MacBook Pro? People generally seem to do all the lightweight stuff like social media consumption on their phones; and desktops/laptops are used for the more heavy-weight stuff. The only reason I’ve ever used a Mac was for IOS development.
I have a friend who is self-employed. He uses an iPhone and a MacBook Air. He only uses iMessage, Numbers, Safari and Apple Music for entertainment. He gets away with 8gb just fine and rarely has to reboot.
He probably could use a Chromebook or something even lighter, but the support and ecosystem were enough for him to pay the premium. His time is valuable to him so it was worth it to him.
If you don’t want to buy Apple, don’t buy it…
Okay, we won’t!
and in the process, shut the fuck up.
Kiss my ass and go fuck yourself. If your opinions are so fragile that you can’t handle people rightly pointing this out, sounds like you have the problem, not everyone else Mr Skinner.
The unreasonable escalation of your response really makes you come across as exceedingly insecure.
I was quite literally illustrating the absurdity by being similarly absurd. Telling people to shut the fuck up about an issue is funny as hell to respond with a similar statement.
See the OP’s ending sentence for reference.
Sorry, boo, everyone wants to hate Apple these days. It’s the Zeitgeist. Even if you say something reasonable or perhaps factual, the people are against you and will react violently.
Accurate.
If you choose to be a weak little quiet corporate Stan then that’s up to you. Apple is well aware that third party apps exist and they’re well aware that machines with less ram will need replaced far sooner than machines with more. RAM is cheap and Apples intigrated memory is no different in the regard. The only reason to use less is planned obsolescence. If you don’t believe that then you’re either Tim Cook or you’re an idiot.
What is the obsession with shitting on people’s choices? I don’t understand the irony of demanding choice in this industry, then shitting on people when they make a choice you don’t agree with.
What is the obsession with shitting on people’s choices?
As much as people want to act like they are better than they were, say, 100 years ago, it’s not really true. Humans are really just advanced monkeys running around and very few can actually surpass that nature.
This we can agree on.
No one is shitting on other people’s choices. They are criticizing a major corporations choices to skimp on specs while charging a premium price. Specs that can’t be upgraded and will absolutely lead to a shorter usable life. I find it odd that people get upset about criticism that isn’t aimed at them at all. The only thing I can think is maybe they realize they were ripped off after putting so much money into Apple products and they need to defend their financial decisions. Even then I don’t fully understand. I’ve purchased overpriced junk many times and don’t feel the need to defend the offending company. Maybe it’s because Apple has managed to make their customers feel like they’re in an exclusive club even though everyone uses Apple products these days. A publicly traded company is around to make money and nothing more. They should never be held in reverence.
To be fair there are only two reasons I hate it:
- People incorrectly use term UMA
- It’s crApple
On Linux if you don’t compile rust or firefox 8GB is fine. 4 is fine too.
8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment. Heck my M1 Macbook Air is even good with basic Photoshop/Illustrator work and light AV editing. I certainly prefer my PC laptop with 32GB and a dedicated GPU but its power adapter weighs more than a Macbook Air.
I mean I develop software on an 8GB laptop. Most of the time it’s fine, when I need more I have a desktop with 128GB ram available.
Really depends what type of software you’re making. If you’re using python a few TB might be required.
8GB would be fine for basic use if it was upgradable. With soldered RAM the laptop becomes e-waste when 8GB is no longer enough.
Yeah, the soldering is outrageous. I miss the time when Apple was a (more) customer friendly company. I could open my Mac mini 2009 and just add more RAM, which I did.
When I bought my first MacBook in ‘07 I asked the guy in the store about upgrading the RAM. He told me that what Apple charged was outrageous and pointed me to a website where I’d get what I needed for much less.
I feel that if Apple could have soldered the RAM back then, they would have.
I feel that if Apple could have soldered the RAM back then, they would have.
Apple used to ship repair and upgrade kits with guides on how to apply them. Not sure they were as anti-repair then as they are now.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is an attitude for more than one company I guess.
8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment.
The thing is, basic office/school/work tasks can be done on any laptop that costs twice less than an 8GB MacBook.
This is true for part time or casual use but for all day work use including travel you get better build quality and far less problems with a pro grade machine. We spend the same on a macbook, thinkpad, surface or probook for our basic full time users.
While it may be a bit overkill for someone who spends their day in word, excel, chrome and zoom we save money in the long term due to reliability. There is far less downtime and IT time spent on each user over the life of the system (3-4 years). The same is true about higher quality computer accessories.
I can’t believe, there’s no Linux reference yet!
Give your “8 gigs not enough” hardware to one of us and see it revived running faster than whatever you’re running now with your subpar OS.
I can run Arch Linux (BTW!) in a potato with starch RAM!
Software and AI development would be hard with 8gb of RAM on Linux. Having you seen the memes on AI adding to global climate change? Not even Linux can fix the issues with ChatGPT…
I don’t think anyone anywhere is claiming 8GB RAM is enough for software and AI development. Pretty sure we’re talking about consumer-grade hardware here. And low-end at that.
My main development machine has 8 GB, for what it’s worth. And most of the software in use nowadays was developped when 8GB was a lot of RAM
This. My Mac has 16GB but I use half of it with a Linux virtual machine, since I use my Mac to write Linux (server) software.
I don’t need to do that - I could totally run that software directly on my Mac, but I like having a dev environment where I can just delete it all and start over without affecting my main OS. I could totally work effectively with 8GB. Also I don’t need to give the Linux VM less memory, all my production servers have way less than that. But I don’t need to - because 8GB for the host is more than enough.
Obviously it depends what software you’re running, but editing text, compiling code, and browsing the web… it doesn’t use that much. And the AI code completion system I use needs terabytes of RAM. Hard to believe Apple’s one that runs locally will be anywhere near as good.
Macbook Pros aren’t really consumer grade hardware. Nor are they priced like consumer grade hardware.
Nor are they priced like consumer grade hardware.
Apple products in general aren’t.
That’s not true at all. Macbook Air starts at $900. You can even find a used M1 Air for cheaper. Absolutely was a steal compared to the budget thin laptops from Asus, Acer, etc. which start around $700. Once you go below $700 in laptop market, corners are cut. Perhaps Mediatek WiFi chips are used, laptop isn’t thin, touchpad is awful, screen colors are worse. Apple usually puts iPad + keyboard in that market segment instead.
Tl; dr: Apple products are more expensive than budget electronics but priced comparatively to items that compete with it. However, electronic prices in the high end tier are getting hirer.
So it’s more expensive than the competitors which also have real budget options at easily half the price but then “corners are cut”.
You know, I won’t even argue about the quality of Apple products - they are top tier. But calling the pricing “a steal” is just dishonest.
They have consistently been averaging at 150-200% the price of comparable hardware at least since the 90s. While there may be examples like yours where the gap is smaller, there are plenty of outrageous examples like the infamous monitor stand or some ridiculously priced chargers.
The lede by OP here contains this:
[…] addition to Xcode 16 […] is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple’s claim that 8GB of unified memory was enough for base-model Apple silicon Macs, you won’t be able to use it
So either RecluseRamble meant that development with a feature like predictive code completion would work on 8 GB of RAM if you were using Linux or his comparison was shit.
That’s absolutely what I’m saying. Apple is just holding back that feature for upselling (as always) and because it’s hardly possible to debloat macOS.
What if I want to run applications that do not exist for Linux?
Do you actually want to run an application that doesn’t exist on Linux?
I use a virtual machines for the 2 or 3 times a year I need to use a couple garbage windows-only programs. Usually for configuring some arcane piece of proprietary hardware that people were getting rid of because it is incompatible with everything.
You come to my house and talk big about how I should do this that and the other, frankly it’s disrespectful.
“Disrespectful” would be telling you that you in particular should continue to use windows or mac, and avoid Linux like the plague.
OK you know what, let me make it up to you. Just walk down the street, third entry to the right, we came into some really nice designer clothes, choose whatever you want, it’s on the house. Just walk in the door, go ahead.
If I wanted your clothes, I wouldn’t have left them at goodwill.
As I said: feel free to upgrade your MacBook just don’t throw the one with a “meager” 8 gigs away since it’s totally usable with a non-bloated system.
what’s it to you? do I know you??
You replied, I replied back. That’s how public social media work. It’s unlikely we know each other.
we’re just talkin’ that’s right. you know what if you like talking so much, why don’t I send some of my guys over, just to talk.
I actually bought a m1 mini for a linux low power server. I was getting tired of the Pi4 being so slow when I needed to compile something. Works real well, just need the Asahi team to get TB working. And for my server stuff, 8gb is plenty.
You wouldn’t happen to run a jellyfin server on that mac mini would you? Currently looking to find something performant with small form factor and low power consumption.
Not sure about jellyfin, but I assume it uses ffmpeg? The M1 is fast enough that ffmpeg can re-encode raw video footage from a high end camera (talking file sizes in the 10s of gigabyte range) an order of magnitude faster than realtime.
That would be about 20W. Apparently it uses 5W while idle — which is low compared to an Intel CPU but actually surprisingly high.
Power consumption on my M1 laptop averages at about 2.5 watts with active use based on the battery size and how long it lasts on a charge and that includes the screen. Apple hasn’t optimised the Mac Mini for energy efficiency (though it is naturally pretty efficient).
TLDR if you really want the most energy efficient Mac, get a secondhand M1 MacBook Air. Or even better, consider an iPhone with Linux in a virtual machine - https://getutm.app/ - though I’m not sure how optimsied ffmpeg will be in that environment… the processor is certainly capable of encoding video quickly, it’s a camera so it has to be able to encode video well.
No I do not, but I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t work though. I have PiHole, Apache, email, cups, mythtv and samba currently.
I’ve run Plex servers on Mac Minis (M1). Docker on MacOS runs well finally — the issues that were everywhere a couple of years ago are resolved.
It ran very well on the hardware. The OP of this post is right, 8gb is not enough in 2024; however I would also wager that the vast majority of commenters have not used MacOS recently or regularly. It is actually very performant and has a memory scheduler that rivals that found on GNU/Linux. Apple’s users aren’t wrong when they talk about how much better the OS is than Windows at using memory.
I’d love to see you run xcode 16 code completion on your superior OS. Send me a link once you’ve uploaded the vid.
Why limit it to proprietary software? Almost every linux distro can run Github Copilot X and Jetbrains, which both have had more time to be publicly used and tested and work better in my opinion.
Send me a video link of Mac having direct access to containers without using a VM (which ruins the point of containers). THAT is directly related to my actual work, as opposed to needing a robot to code for me specifically using Apple’s AI
Because that was what the article was about…I actually am a Linux user and fan, folks just misreading the intentions of my post.
I would genuinely love to see it, because I’m stuck on mac hardware to do my job and I really hope one day they get crucified for their anticompetative practices so I can freely choose the OS my business uses.
There is a project being worked on called Darling, but it isn’t ready yet. The developers are making progress though.
We all know how that will end
Pls provide source code.
You can run Windows on 200 MB of RAM
Honestly I have no qualms with MacOS. Probably the best OS. Problem is you can’t run it on anything that is repairable or upgradeable, and in 7 years it won’t be supported any longer. If they would just sell me a $500 lifetime license for MacOS that I could install on a Framework laptop, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. But they know they make way more money by not making that option available.
I’d love to have 8GB of RAM. The SOC I’m working with has only 2K ;-)
Come on, man, AVR chips aren’t SoCs except in the technical sense.
No AVR, it’s a small LPC from NXP. Chosen for the price, of course, but I have to somehow squeeze the software in it. At this point, even 8k would make me happy…
NXP, fancy. I expected ST, AVR, nRF, WCH or some chinese cheaptroller.
Why them? Something to do with NFC?
2 kilobytes?
Yes. 2 kilobytes. Coincidentally, this is as big as the displays internal buffer, so I cannot even keep a shadow copy of it in my RAM for the GUI.
Thanks for clarification.
I’ve never seen backbuffer called shadow copy.
And I have never heard it called “backbuffer”, so we are even.
I guess so.
Example: https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Default_Framebuffer#Double_buffering
EDIT: Wait. Do you have framebuffer at all? Because from sounds of it, you might not even have it at all. If you don’t store entire frame in RAM, then you don’t have framebuffer, not just backbuffer.
I never said anything about framebuffers. The 256x64 pixel display in 16 brightness levels probably has something comparable inside. I just tell it that i want to update a rectangle, and send it some data for that.
Bet your compiler isnt running on that hardware either ;-)
Luckily, no ;-)
And now all the fan boys and girls will go out and buy another MacBook. That’s planned obsolescence for ya
And why they solder the RAM, or even worse make it part of the SoC.
In this particular case the RAM is part of the chip as an attempt to squeeze more performance. Nowadays, processors have become too fast but it’s useless if the rest of the components don’t catch up. The traditional memory architecture has become a bottleneck the same way HDDs were before the introduction of SSDs.
You’ll see this same trend extend to Windows laptops as they shift to Snapdragon processors too.
People do like to downplay this, but SoC is the future. There’s no way to get performance over a system bus anymore.
There is. It’s called CAMM.
Funny that within one minute, they state the exact same problem.
BUT BUT you’ll get 5% fasTEr SpeED!!! And MOrE seCuRiTy!!!
Well. The claim they made still holds true, despit how I dislike this design choice. It is faster, and more secure (though attacks on NAND chips are hard and require high skill levels that most attacker won’t posses).
And add one more: it saves power when using LPDDR5 rather DDR5. To a laptop that battery life matters a lot, I agree that’s important. However, I have no idea how much standby or active time it gain by using LPDDR5.
There are real world performance benefits to ram being as close as possible to the CPU, so it’s not entirely without merit. But that’s what CAMM modules are for.
Apple’s SoC long predates CAMM.
Dell first showed off CAMM in 2022, and it only became JEDEC standardised in December 2023.
That said, if Dell can create a really good memory standard and get JEDEC to make it an industry standard, so can Apple. They just chose not to.
But do those benefits outweigh doubling or tripling the amount of RAM by simply inserting another stick that you can buy for dozens of dollars?
Yes, there are massive advantages. It’s basically what makes unified memory possible on modern Macs. Especially with all the interest in AI nowadays, you really don’t want a machine with a discrete GPU/VRAM, a discrete NPU, etc.
Take for example a modern high-end PC with an RTX 4090. Those only have 24GB VRAM and that VRAM is only accessible through the (relatively slow) PCIe bus. AI models can get really big, and 24GB can be too little for the bigger models. You can spec an M2 Ultra with 192GB RAM and almost all of it is accessible by the GPU directly. Even better, the GPU can access that without any need for copying data back and forth over the PCIe bus, so literally 0 overhead.
The advantages of this multiply when you have more dedicated silicon. For example: if you have an NPU, that can use the same memory pool and access the same shared data as the CPU and GPU with no overhead. The M series also have dedicated video encoder/decoder hardware, which again can access the unified memory with zero overhead.
For example: you could have an application that replaces the background on a video using AI. It takes a video, decompresses it using the video decoder , the decompressed video frames are immediately available to all other components. The GPU can then be used to pre-process the frames, the NPU can use the processed frames as input to some AI model and generate a new frame and the video encoder can immediately access that result and compress it into a new video file.
The overhead of just copying data for such an operation on a system with non-unified memory would be huge. That’s why I think that the AI revolution is going to be one of the driving factors in killing systems with non-unified memory architectures, at least for end-user devices.
I feel like this is an arguement for new specialized computers at best. At worst it shows that this AI crap is even more harmful to the end user.
Bus goes Vrrrroom vrrooom. Fuck AI.
That’s extremely dependent on the use case, but in my opinion, generally no. However CAMM has been released as an official JEDEC interface and does a good job at being a middle ground between repairability and speed.
It’s an officially recognized spec, so Apple will ignore it as long as they can. Until they can find a way to make money from it or spin marketing as if it’s some miraculous new invention of theirs, for something that should just be how it’s done.
Parts pairing will do. That’s what Apple known for, knee capping consumer rights.
It’s highly dependent on the application.
For instance, I could absolutely see having certain models with LPCAMM expandability as a great move for Apple, particularly in the pro segment, so they’re not capped by whatever they can cram into their monolithic SoCs. But for most consumer (that is, non-engineer/non-developer users) applications, I don’t see them making it expandable.
Or more succinctly: they should absolutely put LPCAMM in the next generation of MBPs, in my opinion.
And the apple haters will keep making this exact same comment on every post using their 3rd laptop in ten years while I’m still using my 2014 MacBook daily with no issues.
Be more original.
I still have a fully functioning Windows 95 machine.
My daily driver desktop is also from around 2014.
They will keep making the same comment as long as it keeps being true.
- Typed from my 2009 ThinkPad
Meanwhile your 2014 MacBook stopped receiving OS updates 3 years ago.
Weren’t you just complaining about software bloat?
Nice attempt to justify planned obsolescence. To think apple hasn’t done this time and time again, you’d have to be a fool
👍
-posted from my ten year old MacBook which shows no need for replacement
At which point did Apple decide your MacBook was too old to be usable and stop giving updates or allow new software to run on it?
Still gets security updates. All the software I need to run on it runs on it.
My email, desktop, and calendar all still sync with my newer desktop. I can still play StarCraft. I can join zoom meetings while running Roll 20. I can even run Premiere and do video editing… to a point.
I guess if you need the latest and greatest then you might have a point, but I don’t.
This whole thread is bitching about software bloat and Apple does that to stop the software bloat on older machines, but noooo that’s planned obsolescence. 🙄
And is what, 3 or 4 operating systems behind due to it being obsolete
This is pretty much it. People really just want to find reasons to hate Apple over the past 2 - 3 years. You’re right, though, your Mac can run easily for 10+ years. You’re good basically until the web browsers no longer support your OS version, which is more in the 12-15 year range.
In fairness, most computers built after around 2014-2016+ last way longer, performance started to level off not long after that. After all, devs write software for what people have, if everyone had 128 gigs of RAM we’d load everything we could think of into memory and you’d need it to keep up
Macs did have some incredible build quality though, the newer ones aren’t holding up even close to as well. I’m still using a couple 2012 Macs to play videos, it’s slow as hell when you interact, but once the video is playing it still looks and sounds good
Someone who is buying a MacBook with the minimum specs probably isn’t the same person that’s going to run out and buy another one to get one specific feature in Xcode. Not trying to defend Apple here, but if you were a developer who would care about this, you probably would have paid for the upgrade when you bought it in the first place (or couldn’t afford it then or now).
Well no, not this specific scenario, because of course devs will generally buy machines with more RAM.
But there are definitely people who will buy an 8GB Apple laptop, run into performance issues, then think “oh I must need to buy a new MacBook”.
If Apple didn’t purposely manufacture ewaste-tier 8GB laptops, that would be minimised.
I wouldn’t be so sure. I feel like many people would not buy another MacBook if it were to feel a lot slower after just a few years.
This feels like short term gains vs. long term reputation.
These were obsolete the minute they were made, though… So it’s not really planned obsolescence. I got one for free (MacBook Air), and it’s always been trash.
I have an M2 MBA and it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned or used, second to the M3 Max MBP I get to use for work. Silent, battery lasts all week, interface is fast and runs all my dev tools like a charm. Zero issues with the device.
They should do 4Gb. I hear M3 mac’s make it seem like 8Gb.
I think you mean gigabytes, not gigabits.
8 Gb = 1 GB
Darn you broadband
That’s true. Data transmission is usually measured in bits, not bytes. Gigabit Ethernet can only transmit a maximum of ~128 MB/s.
You mean they can even make 0.5GB appear as 8GB?! That’s 16x! That apple silicon is just something else!
If you allocate it right, you can add 200GB of swap space and then that 4GB of RAM will feel like 408GB!
They moved to on-die RAM for a reason: To nickel and dime yo ass.
I needed to expense a Mac Mini for iOS development, and everyone (Me, the company, our purchasing department) was baffled at how much it cost to get 16 GB. And they only go up to 24GB. Imagine how much they’ll charge for 32 in a year!
It’s technically a bit faster, but yeah, I think charging more is the bigger motivation.
It’s a bit first but if their primary motivation was performance improvements they wouldn’t be soldering 16 GB.
If you’re going to weld shoes to your feet, you better at least make sure that they’re good shoes.
Why not? There is a performance benefit to being closer to the CPU, and soldering gets you a lot closer to the CPU. That’s a fact.
Yeah but if you’re only putting 8 GB of RAM on then you’re also going to be constantly querying the hard drive. So any performance gain you get from soldering, is lost by going all the way to the hard drive every 3 microseconds.
It’s only better performance on paper in reality there’s no real benefit. If you can run an application entirely entirely within the 8 GB of RAM, and assuming you’re not running anything else, then maybe you get better performance.
And that’s the idea. Soldering memory is an engineering decision. How much to solder is a marketing decision. Since users can’t easily add more, marketing can upsell on more RAM.
It’s not “on paper,” the RAM itself is performing better vs socketed RAM. Whether the system runs better depends on the configuration, as in, did you order enough RAM.
I can’t tell if you’re a stooge or if you really think that. I hope you are stooge, because otherwise that’s a really stupid position you’ve decided to take and you clearly don’t actually understand the issue.
Sounds like one of those rare cases where engineering and marketing might agree on something.
Companies primarily make decisions to maximise the profitability of someone and it’s never the consumer.
Mac Mini is meant to be sort of the starter desktop. For higher end uses, they want you on the Mac Studio, an iMac, or a Mac Pro.
I assumed that the Mini was the effectively a Mac without a monitor. Is it relatively underpowered too?
As far as I understand, the Mac lineup don’t have screens, the IMacs are stationary and do have a screen, the MacBooks are the laptops.
Its not underpowered for average users, but it’s not meant for professional uses beyond basic office work.
Similar to the mini they offer the Studio which doesn’t have a monitor built in https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/compare/?modelList=Mac-studio-2023,Mac-mini-M2
Then for the higher end uses they offer a more typical tower format https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
For the record, on Windows 10, I’m using 9GB (rounded up from 8.something) to run Firefox and look at this website, can’t forget Discord inviting itself to my party in the background, and the OS. I had to close tabs to get down here. Streams really eat the RAM up.
Throw a game in there, with FF open for advice and Discord running for all the usual gaming reasons, and yeah, way over.
Notice I haven’t even touched any productivity stuff that demands more.
8? Eat a penis, Apple. Fuckin clown hardware.
Also for the record, I have experienced an 8GB Mac Mini run Firefox with at least 20 tabs, Jetbrains Rider with code open and editable, Jetbrains DataGrip with queries, somehow Microsoft Teams, MS Outlook and didn’t seem to have a problem. Was also able to share the screen on a Teams call and switch between the applications without lag.
Windows OS couldn’t handle your application load? Eat a penis, Microsoft. Fucking clown memory management.
MacOS’s memory scheduler is leaps and bounds better than what Windows uses. It’s more apt to compare the RAM on a machine running MacOS to one running a common Linux distro. Windows needs more RAM than the other two by two to three times because it’s fuckterrible at using it.
I have everything from apple but I know that 8gb is basically planned obsolescence in disguise.
We pay serious extra cash for just a ‚notch’ more refined experience. However I had to try to buy every possible thing from apple at least once in my life to see if it is worth it and basically only M4 iPad Pro 13 is truly worth the money and irreplaceable for me.
Everything else is nice for someone who is super lazy like me but can be easily replaced with not much difference for cheaper shit
I have a macbook air m2 with 8gb of ram and I can even run ollama, never had ram problems, I don’t get all the hate
Which model with how many parameters du you use in ollama? With 8GB you should only be able to use the smallest models, which ist faaaar from ideal:
You should have at least 8 GB of RAM available to run the 7B models, 16 GB to run the 13B models, and 32 GB to run the 33B models.
maybe in a browser using external resources. open some chrometabs to feel the pain. apple is a joke.
vscode + photoshop + illustrator + discord + arc + chrome + screen recording and still no lag
so not a single cool app and yet you own a computer
I don’t consider that an “admission” at all…
HP seems to think 4 GB is an acceptable amount of RAM to put in a modern notebook (although they don’t charge even close to what Apple charges).
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Micro-edge-Microsoft-14-dq0040nr-Snowflake/dp/B0947BJ67M
Shipping with Windows S. That’s Microsoft’s version of a Chromebook for some light web browsing for 188 dollars. I wouldn’t buy it but this doesn’t look like a rip off at this price point.
They could just raise the prize to $198 and slap another 4GB of RAM on it.
And if they raised the price to $250, they could go with a faster processor and better wifi!
And if they raised another 2000$, they could add an RTX 4090 graphics card
S mode does allow you to turn it off, so it’s more like a hobbled version of home.
The computer is as bad as one I saw several years ago with 64g emmc and “Quad core processor.” not a quad core, it was literally the name that showed in system. It did have 4 cores: at 400Mhz, boosting to 1.1Ghz. Buyer changed their mind and we couldn’t give it away.
Of course that notebook is bad but for the price point of shitty hardware, you get shitty hardware. Apple sells shitty hardware at the cost of premium hardware.
4gb is acceptable. Some people just want a phone with a keyboard and bugger screen. Depends on the use case tho.
Sounds about right for HP.
I don’t even understand how HP still exists. Can anyone name a single product they’ve made in the last ~15 years that wasn’t a complete piece of junk?
HP printer ink, that is their main source of revenue
I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D
And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…
At a $188 price point. An addition 4GB of memory would probably add ~$10 to the cost, which is over a 5% increase. However, that is not the only component they cheaped out on. The linked unit also only has 64GB of storage, which they should probably increase to have a usable system …
And soon you find that you just reinvented a mid-market device instead of the low-market device you were trying to sell.
4GB of ram is still plenty to have a functioning computer. It will not be as capable of a more powerful computer, but that comes with the territory of buying the low cost version of a product.
Now let me present you the laptops with 2GB of RAM still being sold here in Brazil: https://www.zoom.com.br/notebook/notebook-multilaser-legacy-cloud-pc132-intel-atom-x5-z8350-14-2gb-windows-10-bluetooth
And it’s not on Linux! Wow. Sounds so horrible.
At that point you gotta wonder if it can keep up with an $80 Raspberry Pi, especially if HP tries to shoehorn Windows into that
In addition to the raw compute power, the HP laptop comrmes with a:
- monitor
- keyboard/trackpad
- charger
- windows 11
- active cooling system
- enclosure
I’ve been looking for a lapdock [0], and the absolute low-end of the market goes for over $200, which is already more expensive than the hp laptop despite spending no money on any actual compute components.
Granted, this is because lapdocks are a fairly niche product that are almost always either a luxury purchase (individual users) or a rounding error (datacenter users)
[0] Keyboard/monitor combo in a laptop form factor, but without a built in computer. It is intended to be used as an interface to an external computer (typically a smartphone or rackmounted server).
If they wanted it to be as cheap as possible, they could have installed Linux on it.
And worst part: they installed Windows on it.
I was looking at notebooks at Walmart the other day, and I was amazed that they almost all had less or the same amount of RAM as my phone.
Miniaturization is amazing. The limiting factor to how powerful we can make phones is not space to put in computational units (processors,ram,etc). It is the ability to deal with the heat they generate (and the related issue of rationing a limited amount of battery power)
