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The MacBook Air gets an M3 upgrade
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Less RAM than my toaster
Sure but when you can do a thousand disk I/O operations in less time than it takes to draw to an LCD screen... is the user going to notice that not everything is in RAM?
Apple has been progressively moving things out of RAM and onto the SSD for about ten years now. Try running modern MacOS on a spinning rust hard drive and it's completely unusable these days.
I've been using the same 16GB of RAM on my Mac workstations for the last 10 years and I have more memory headroom every year. Right now I've got two Linux Virtual Machines running on my Mac and I still have so much free memory that 6GB are being used as a filesystem cache (so... a lot of those SSD file reads which would be plenty fast enough, aren't even going to hit the SSD).
If all you do is browse the web... 8GB is plenty. And it also improves battery life - Apple doesn't publish stats but it's common for RAM to draw more power than these laptops can afford with only a 50Wh battery. I'd like to see a test, but I bet upgrading from 8GB to 24GB comes with a considerable real world battery life penalty.
It's too early for third party tests on this model, but the old had the same "up to 18 hours" marketing and third party tests found it lasts between 3 hours playing CPU/GPU intensive games and 30 hours if you really stretch the battery and don't do much (e.g. just read an ebook in a dark room with low screen brightness). You're not going to get anywhere near the highest numbers even under light load with fully upgraded RAM, since it draws quite a bit of power even when it's idle.
8gb is not enough for these machines. Not in the slightest.‘. When you just want to „lightly browse the web“ you don’t need an M3 Chip.
Why would you buy the 8gb version? No one is forcing you to.
That’s why I didn’t. But that is not the argument. The argument is that 8gb is not enough for a machine like this, especially when compared to cpu and gpu power.
Yeah, onto an SSD that will eventually die and are not user replaceable. It really is incredible how some consumers will defend this type of bullshit.
RAM can die too. Most user replaceable stuff is slow in comparison. I'm will wait for no computer.
Yeah but it's pretty uncommon. There's a reason why RAM has a lifetime warranty and SSDs have 3 to 5 years usually.
Also, no one said soldered RAM doesn't suck balls as well. Because it does.
Lastly, no, it wouldn't necessarily be slower. SSDs are crazy fast nowadays.
Yeah, just start any Minecraft modpack and you have something worse than a toaster on a Mac
Only if you’re using an x86 version of Java. I have quite a few modpacks and realistic shaders and get 100+ fps using Azul’s Zulu JDK on a M2.
I guess you are talking about modpack that contain 10 mods and not 60-200. Idk what the worsr modpack was and I can imagine modpacks with 60 mods can still be handled by my laptop with 8GB Ram but have fun using larger modpacks while consuming youtube or something in parallel. All the mods modpack was one of the worst
I have a MacBook for work with only 16GB of RAM and I'm constantly running into problems of not having enough and my computer running slowly because of it. Credit where credit is due though, they did an amazing job of making it so when I'm having to use 16GB of swap space, my computer doesn't come to a screeching halt. That doesn't change the fact that I don't have enough to run the applications I need to on a day to day basis.
I remember back in like 2010 there was discussion of RAM that only uses electricity for the actively used RAM, or free memory doesn't use electricity. I'm guessing nothing has come of that.