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16GB of RAM Could Be the New Minimum in Apple's Upcoming M4 Macs
(www.macrumors.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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Yeah I think the joke just flew over your head.
Apple keeps saying that their RAM is somehow magic and therefore better than Windows RAM, which is a comment that obviously makes no sense.
I think they are able to share it with the GPU or something? It is maybe slightly better but it sure as fuck is not 2x better.
8 GB, even if it is "magic RAM," is a joke amount and has been for a long time.
That's just an APU, see consoles and laptops. The unified memory is basically just the above, but Apple also claims that due to Apple Silicon having the storage controller on board, the swap is magically faster 🤷
Also Mac OS/Linux use less RAM than Windows which certainly helps.
8GB is "fine™" on a MacBook Air, but it's criminal for a Pro machine, and it certainly should not cost £200 for an extra 8GB. That's genuinely insane pricing
That's the real issue, isn't it? The upgrade prices are disconnected from reality by a lot. If they were within the realm of sanity nobody would care much that the base is 8 GB.
I was saying this and my girlfriend when they first came out the whole thing is completely out of spec for everyone regardless of your use case.
She really only wants it for playing The Sims but you'll run into RAM limitations there, and as you say it's not worth paying so much more just to get a device that's actually functional.
If you want to use it for basic word processing then you really don't need that level of latency and you really don't need a CPU of that level of performance. You're just paying for stuff you're never going to use.
If you want it for gaming there isn't enough memory to make it worthwhile.
If you want it for intensive graphics editing work then there really isn't enough memory for that to work.
If you want it for advanced computation then you're probably not going for a laptop anyway. The M2 chip is obsessed with retaining battery life, which is fine in a laptop but if you want high performance applications you just want it to use more power.
It for some bizarre reason you wanted to do AI research on a laptop it's not too bad but you'd still need the pro version and there are better things on the market but it wouldn't be the worst I guess.
So outside of one very niche scenario it's literally a pointless device for 99% of the user base.
In the end we got a framework laptop, which is more than capable of doing what we wanted and didn't cost anywhere near as much. Plus it basically looks like a MacBook too. So even going to build quality wasn't a consideration. I got one too for no particular reason, and it still ended up cheaper.
I've been considering Framework for my next machine, AFAICT you made a great choice.
I realize this should be a joke, but I am still unsure if it is.
It is 100% a joke. Literally other than Windows being slightly more RAM hungry, there's not a huge difference between it and Mac's RAM
Memory is memory. If an application requires a lot of memory then it really doesn't matter what speed that memory is it's more important that there's enough of it.
There are plenty of applications that could theoretically run on the M2 MacBook in terms of processing capacity but can't run because there isn't enough RAM available. Oh they run in switching mode, which is super bad, because a, it's incredibly slow, and b, it's bad for the hard drive.