…in 2030.
Good, 8 is unusable for my workloads and 12 feels like they’re just fucking with us
Linux requirements: CPU (optional)
i wonder if it’s actually possible to install linux on a machine without a CPU
These days, the CPU probably runs Linux on itself.
Storage drive control boards are basically small computers in their own right, now.
Linux is a bit heavy for embedded stuff.
Intel’s ME for an example, uses Minix.
Paper Linux, computing done olde world style 📜 🤖
for the same price other laptops sell for 64GB
what a bargain
Wait, that’s it? Seriously?
Minimum, the base model chip can also come with 32gb.
“640k ought to be enough for anyone.”
It’s amazing that with transparent huge pages in Linux I can have memory pages bigger than that entire 640k.
My CPU’s L1 cache is larger than that 640K system’s main memory.
EMACS: Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
i could run wing commander 2, ultima underworld, and lands of lore. who needs any more?
Welcome to 2010
I upgraded from 8GB to 16GB like 2 months ago.
Welcome to 2010 to you as well then!
Check out 9gag.com for funny pictures!
Or iFunny if you’re feelin’ saucy!
Golly, thanks Apple. It’s not like I can go buy a 256GB DIMM right now. 16GB what a joke.
Why are apple products always so anemic on memory?
Because a huge part of their business model over the past twenty years has been the upsell.
I bought my first MacBook in 2007. It had 2gb of RAM as standard. I asked about upgrading it, the guy told me to pick some up online as it would be waaaay cheaper, and he was right. Did the same for the MacBook Pro that replaced it a few years later, but in the meantime they moved to the soldered model so had to swallow the cost of the 16gb ‘upgrade’ in my M2 Air.
To be fair, the cost over time of my Macs has been incredible. My 2011 MBP is still trucking along, these days running Linux Mint. With the cost to upgrade the RAM and replace the HDD with an SSD, all in it cost me around £1200. Less than £100 a year for a laptop that still works perfectly fine.
Because there are two types of mac users:
- People that ate buying them with their own money because they’re trendy and just using them as glorified Internet browsers. 16gb is plenty.
- People using them professionally so their company is paying and Apple can over charge for the necessary memory upgrade
I have an m2 8 gb. And it’s plenty. It’s just a browsing/discord/stream box basically.
This pretty much. I don’t care that much that a maxed out MBP is $6000 or whatever, my employer pays for that.
Greed, it lowers the advertised price, but once you spec it decently you’ve added a grand in extras
Price discrimination based on memory loadout is real, but it’s not specific to Apple, either.
And it probably won’t be able to be upgraded by the user, which should be the bare minimum.
MacBooks have an SoC, so it doesn’t make sense for the ram to be upgradable.
An SOC is a bad idea for laptops in my opinion, it just makes it harder to repair and less modular. I understand that it helps to compact the device, but it should only be used in phones if at all.
I disagree. SoCs allow for lower power consumption and a larger battery. They definitely have disadvantages but I don’t see ARM computers ever using anything but SoCs.
🆗
And it
probablyabsolutely guaran-fucking-teed won’t be able to be upgraded by the user, which should be the bare minimum.You loose performance by making RAM upgradeable, hope the new RAM design, where you can install ram as if it was soldered in, is coming soon:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/motherboards/what-is-camm2
The amount of performance you lose is negligible compared to the amount of performance you lose in 5 years when the laptop’s processor is out of date and there’s barely enough ram to run a semi-heavy task.
You lose performance if you can’t upgrade.
Considering that RAM is shared with the GPU, it’s still not enough.
“yeah but that’s like having 32GB on a lame PC”
It’s OK - for an extra $400 they’ll sell you one with an extra $50 worth of RAM.
$800 for $30 of ram
It doesn’t even cost that for them.
I think they meant what the end user would NORMALLY pay, which is the better comparison.
But Apple isn’t buying consumer ram, they’re spending $8 to put on a different chip instead. If other laptop manufacturers are charging $50, it’s because they think they can get away with it, like apple.
Think that’s not really what’s being compared, but ok
The point is that the scam is actually even worse.
It’s really not. Other companies with socketed RAM also upsell, they are just limited in how much they can ask because the customer has the option to DIY adding more RAM. So the cost these companies charge is roughly the price to the customer of upgrading their own RAM, plus a bit extra for the convenience of not having to do that.
For example, Framework upcharges by something like 20-50% for RAM and SSDs when comparing to equivalent parts. It’s not just Apple, all OEMs do it, but Apple can charge much more because the user can’t easily replace either on their own.
I remember an Apple fanboy arguing that this made things better!
It does make some things better, but there are a number of downsides too. The biggest downside is that it’s not practical to make the memory socketed because of the speed that’s required.
Isn’t Apple the company that charges $5k+ for 16GB? All while intentionally deprecating the hardware within 2 years. /s
I’ve had to support their products on a professional level for over a decade. I will NEVER buy an Apple product.
I’ve had to support their products on a professional level for over a decade.
Their enterprise stuff…can only be described as a quintessential example of an ill-conceived, horrendously executed fiasco, so utterly devoid of utility and coherence that it defies all logic and reasonable expectation. It stands as a paragon of dysfunction, a conflagration of conceptual failures so intense and egregious that it resembles a blazing inferno of pure, unadulterated refuse. It is, in every conceivable sense, a searing, molten heap of garbage—hot, steaming, and reeking with the unmistakable stench of profound ineptitude and sheer impracticality.
That was…. poetry!
xServes were pretty cool though
It’s about time.
I know it’s not a like for like comparison, but the Pixel 9 Pro that launched this month has 16gb of RAM.
Yup, while the current iPhone 15 Pro is the only model which has 8 GB of RAM, with the regular iPhone 15 having 6 GB. All iPhone 16 models (launching next month) will still only have 8 GB according to rumors, which happens to be the bare minimum required to run Apple Intelligence.
Giving the new models only 8 GB seems a bit shortsighted and will likely mean that more complex AI models in future iOS versions won’t run on these devices. It could also mean that these devices won’t be able to keep a lot of apps ready in the background if running an AI model in-between.
16 GB is proper future-proofing on Google’s part (unless they lock new software features behind newer models anyway down the road), and Apple will likely only gradually increase memory on their devices.
I don’t use Apple computers but if we’re going into phones, iOS is extremely memory efficient. I’m on a six year old XS max with 4GB and it works like the day I got it, running circles around Android phones half its age.
If you were being cynical, you could say it was planned obsolescence and that when the new ai feature set rolls out that you have to get the new phone for them.
I think they got caught with their pants down when everybody started doing AI and they were like “hey, we have this cool VR headset”. Otherwise they would’ve at least prepared the regular iPhone 15 (6 GB) to be ready for Apple Intelligence. Every (Apple Silicon) device with 8 GB or more get Apple Intelligence, so M1 iPads from 2021 get it as well for example, even though the M1’s NPU is much weaker than some of the NPUs in unsupported devices with less RAM.
They are launching their AI (or at least everything under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella) with iOS 18.1 which won’t even release with the launch of the new iPhones, and it’ll be US only (or at least English only) with several of the features announced at WWDC still missing/coming later and it’s unclear how they proceed in the EU.
With how polished Apples AI on mobile was at launch compared to Gemini on Android at launch were it could not even do basics like timers I suspect Apple had it in the works for far longer and it would not have been a total surprise.
Also you are describing the situation at launch for new hardware, the software will evolve every year going forward and the requirements will likely increase every year. If I am buying a flagship phone right now I want it to last at least 3 years of updates, if not 5 years. The phone has to be able to cope with what is a very basic requirement that is enough RAM.
This isn’t some NPU thing, this is just basic common sense that more RAM is better for this, something the flagship iPhones could have benefited from for a while now.
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing or disagreeing with me here. Either way, hardware has a substantially longer turnaround time compared to software. The iPhone 15 would’ve been in development years before release (I’m assuming they’re developing multiple generations in parallel, which is very likely the case) and keep in mind that the internals are basically identical to the iPhone 14 Pro, featuring the same SoC.
AI and maybe AAA games like Resident Evil aside, 6 GB seems to work very well on iPhones. If I had a Pixel 6/7/8 Pro with 12 GB and an iPhone 12/13/14 Pro (or 15) with 6 GB, I likely wouldn’t notice the difference unless I specifically counted the number of recent applications I could reopen without them reloading. 6 GB keeps plenty of recent apps in memory on iOS.
But I’m not sure going with 8 GB in the new models knowing that AI is a thing and the minimum requirement for their first series of models is 8 GB is too reassuring. I’m sure these devices will get 5-8 years of software updates, but new AI features might be reduced or not present at all on these models then.
When talking about “AI” in this context I’m talking about everything new under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella, like LLMs and image generators. They’ve done what you’d call “AI” nowadays for many years on their devices, like photo analysis, computational photography, voice isolation, “Siri” recommendations etc.
I was under the impression that ios used sleight of hand with apps to reduce memory footprint for inactive apps rather than how android manages its recent apps list? Is it still requiring special permissions to run non apple apps in the background as active tasks? AI will need to run the background and will need a decent chunk of RAM to do so.
I completely agree that changing the processor or revising NPU or similar is too much to do late stage, I reject that for increasing RAM or storage, both can be changed closer than 12 months from release and I would also reject that apple had the AI changes planned for much less than 12 months out as well. It just feels like a big fuck you to anybody buying a flagship from apple this year as it wont last the length of time it should do for normal consumers who would expect all of the latest AI features to roll out during the supported window.
I would say it is more so they can advertise a lower price. But then expect you to get the more expensive ones as the bare minimum is just not enough.
For the base model yeah, but apple loves charging a packet for more memory so I don’t see it for the top of the range models. Would be typical for them to only offer 16gb with the increased storage as well, just to bump the price up
Pretty much what NVIDIA is doing with their GPUs. Refusing to provide adequate future proof amount of VRAM on their cards. That’s planned obsolescence in action.
And like Apple, Nvidia has no shortage of fanboys that insist the pitiful amounts of (V)RAM is enough. The marketing sway those two companies have is incredible.
It’s a complete joke that Sapphire had an 8GB version of the R9 290X, what, 11 years ago or something? And yet Nvidia is still selling 8GB cards now, for exorbitant prices.
This happens if you sell your hardware as DRM key to use their software (i(Pad)OS, macOS etc. and Cuda)
The current GPU situation actually has me curious about AMDs upcoming Halo APU chips. They’re likely going to be pretty expensive relative to their potential GPU equivelent performance but if they work out similar to the combined price of a CPU and GPU then it might be worthwhile as they use onboard RAM as their VRAM. Probably a crazy idea but one I look forward to theory-building in spring when they release.
I remember back in the early 2000s when I saw a PDA with a 232mhz cpu and 64mb ram, and I realized how far technology had come since I got my computer with a 233mhz cpu and 64mb ram…
Obviously different architechtures, but damn that felt strange…
Some phones have 24gb since 2 years ago already
Which phone(s) had 24Gb standard?
I didn’t think any of those are the base model. Anything with Pro or Ultra in the name should have more than 8Gb of RAM in my opinion. It also seems dominated by OnePlus as the others listed are not really players in the larger market. You could possibly argue that Xaomi is but I’ve never even seen one of these phones in the real world. In fact it looks like most of these are only available in China variant.
I am writing this using my Xiaomi poco x3 pro, although it have 8gb ram and 256gb memory, it also have headphone jack and micro SD slot
It’s a good comparison actually because Apple keeps saying that their ram is faster because it’s soldered (Which is true but only if you squint). I don’t really think it makes a difference because if you run out of space you still run out of space, the fact that you can access the limited space more quickly doesn’t really help.
Well phone RAM also tends to be solded onto the board too so it’s a pretty good comparison.
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
