Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB on a PC

Even if it was like 16GB on a PC still not worth $1.6k

With Apple's new iBits™ the 0s are so much rounder and the 1s are so smooth and shiny that they're worth at least twice as much as regular bits.

Just upgrade the RAM yourself.

Oh wait, you can't because it's 2023 and it's become inexplicably acceptable to solder it to the motherboard.

In my entirely anecdotal experience, MacOS is significantly better at RAM management than Windows. But it's still a $1,600 USD computer, and 16GB of RAM costs nearly nothing, it's just classic Apple greed.

8GB for this price in 2023 is a SCAM. All Apple devices are a SCAM. Many pay small fortunes for luxurious devices full of spyware and which they have absolutely no control over. It's insane. They like to be chained in their golden shackles.

Pairing a chip this capable with just 8GB of shared memory is also just a waste of good silicon. Which makes the price all the more insulting to me.

Like, this is the equivalent of Usain Bolt losing one of his legs

Seems fair, you pay 1000 for the logo and 600 for the hardware.

For the last time, PC means personal computer, not windows computer, if a mac isn't a personal computer then what is it?

Instead I feel it's the opposite because that memory is shared with the GPU. So if you're gaming even with some old game, it's like having 4gb for the system and 4gb to the GPU. They might claim that their scheduler is magic and can predict memory usage with perfect accuracy but still, it would be like 6+2 GB. If a game has heavy textures they will steal memory from the system. Maybe you want to have a browser for watching a tutorial on YouTube during gaming, or a chat. That's another 1-2 gb stolen from the CPU and GPU.

Their pricing for the ram is ridiculous, they're charging $300 for just 8gb of additional memory! We're not in the 2010s anymore!

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Apple exec doesn't actually understand how computers work and think that that actually might be a reasonable arguement.

It doesn't matter how good your processor is if you can only bank 8 GB of something into memory it's going to be slow. The only way an 8 GB device would beat a 16 GB device would be if the 16 GB device had the world's slowest processor. Like something from 2005. Taking stuff out of RAM is the single slowest operation you can perform other than loading from a hard drive.

Tell that to Google Chrome

It makes it not feel like a premium device

I felt getting ripped off by just reading the article. My recent PC build has 32 GB, is cheaper and the upgrade to 64 GB (meaning additional pair of 16 GB) only costs me around 100 Euros. It's nice that their devices are probably more effective and need less RAM, which the iPhones proved to be correct. But that does not mean the cost of the additional RAM units are more expensive. Apple chose to make them expensive.

Do they store 32-bit integers as 16-bit internally or how does macOS magically only use half the RAM? Hint: it doesn't.

Even if macOS was more lightweight than Windows - which might well be true will all the bs processes running in Windows 11 especially - third party multiplatform apps will use similar amounts of memory no matter the platform they run on. Even for simple use cases, 8 GB is on the limit (though it'll likely still be fine) as Electron apps tend to eat RAM for breakfast. Love it or hate it Apple, people often (need to) use these memory-hogging apps like Teams or even Spotify, they are not native Swift apps.

I love my M1 Max MacBook Pro, but fuck right off with that bullshit, it's straight up lying.

16 gb optiplexes on sale for 85 dollars on eBay. Dont come with windows, but neither do macs :P

I looked at a few Lenovo and MS laptops to see what they are charging to jumps from 8 to 16 GB.
They are very close to what Apple charges.
So, they are ALL ripping us off!

I switched back to Apple recently, but used to sell them.

1 week before Bootcamp was released, I was selling Apple gear, and I showed a sales manager who was visiting how we got Windows running on the new Intel Mac Mini, and explained how this was great, because it was a great transition technology

In front of customers, as I was explaining, he basically called me an idiot, and said "why would anyone want to run windows on a mac".

A week or so later, bootcamp was released, and he was back.. He was now using the arguments I made a week early as a template for bragging about bootcamp to us and explaining the benefits. No apologies for any of the previous discussion.

They make decent products otherwise, and management doesn't even need to act like wankers or be deceptive either

I only now using Apple again because Microsoft has finally pushed me over the edge with windows (literally, when they started hijacking my chrome tabs EVERY bootup, and opening Edge automatically), and the fact my Xbox Series X wouldn't even play remote on Windows (their own OS)

Lol. My personal iMac has 32GB, and I'm happy with it. My POS work MBP has only 8GB, and I wanna frisbee the fucken thing out the window pretty much every day.

My research disproves this clown's hypothesis.

Emulators disagree.

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My 16GB XPS running Linux almost fills up entirely when running several docker containers, IDEA, Firefox, Teams, Postman and a few other, smaller apps, but it fits still, and I can work with it (tho I can't wait to get my 32GB framework laptop)

Now gimme a 8GB MBP and I'll show you that I wouldn't get shit done on that configuration. And at 1600 it's just crazy.

The best part is people complaining to them for pointing out that 8gb is laughable little. Ah, the sweet fanboys.

Alright! Opens 20 Electron apps on my 32GB mac

But it's $1600 Apple. Not the cheapest Mac book air.

16gb is always better, and I usually recommend it to people looking to buy a Mac, but they aren’t wrong about Macs handling RAM more efficiently. They still sound arrogant af when using that as their excuse, though.

Introducing the new Apple MagicRAM(c)(tm)!

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I still hate that they killed the mid-range model. Your option is the lower end MacBook Air with no fan, or the higher-end MacBook Pro. There is no in between.

I absolutely love the snappiness of the m1 chip in my current 2020 MBP, and how much more efficient ARM is compared to x86, but it seems really hard to justify going an extra 300$ in the future.

I really just wish they would bring back the original MacBook (with no suffixes at the end)

Ridiculous.

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With the launch of Apple's M3 MacBook Pros last month, a base 14-inch $1,599 model with an M3 chip still only gets you 8GB of unified DRAM that's shared between the CPU, GPU, and neural network accelerator.

In a show of Apple's typical modesty, the tech giant's veep of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers has argued, in an interview with machine learning engineer and content creator Lin YilYi, that the Arm-compatible, Apple-designed M-series silicon and software stack is so memory efficient that 8GB on a Mac may equal to 16GB on a PC – so we therefore ought to be happy with it.

With that said, macOS does make use of several tricks to optimize memory utilization, including caching as much data as it can in free RAM to avoid running to and from slower storage for stuff (there's no point in having unused physical RAM in a machine) and compressing information in memory, all of which other operating systems, including Windows and Linux, do too in their own ways.

Given a fast enough SSD, the degradation in performance associated with running low on RAM can be hidden to a degree, though it does come at the expense of additional wear on the NAND flash modules.

We'd hate to say that Apple has designed its computers so that they perform stunningly in the shop for a few minutes, and work differently after a few months at home or in the office.

His comment is also somewhat ironic in that much of the focus of YilYi's interview with Borchers centered around the use of Apple Silicon in machine-learning development, which you don't do in a store.

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Macrumors just released an article talking about how the 8gb is a bottleneck in the new M3 models lol

My GeoTIFFs do not agree.