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It’s really sad that this needs to be an actual headline.
Lol, right? I had a dell laptop with 16GB in 2010. How are apple customers ok with this?
Even phones have been available with more than 8 gigs of ram for ~5 years
Wait, that’s it? Seriously?
Minimum, the base model chip can also come with 32gb.
Considering that RAM is shared with the GPU, it’s still not enough.
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.
“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.
They balance that out by having almost no games for the Mac anyway.
deleted by creator
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
I always thought 8gb was a fine amount for daily use if you never did anything too heavy, are apps really that ram intense now?
Heavily depends on what you use, on a Linux server as a NAS I’m able to get away with 2gb, an orange pi zero 3 1gb but it essentially only ever ones one app at a time.
Im sure a hardcore rgb gamer could need 32gb pretty quick by leaving open twitch streams, discord, a couple games in the background, a couple chrome tabs open all on windows 11
Yes. Just as 4GB was barely enough a decade ago.
I usually find myself either capping out the 8GB of RAM on my laptop, or getting close to it if I have Firefox, Discord and a word processor open. Especially if I have Youtube or Spotify going.
Most of that is discord, they can’t manage a single good thing right Use more GPU than the game I’m playing? Check. Have an inefficient method of streaming a game? Check. Be laggy as fuck when no longer on GPU acceleration when lemmy and guilded is fine? Check.
I can get over 8 GB just running Discord, Steam, Shapes2
I am pretty sure most of that is just discord.
Imagine how much more room we’d have if everything wasn’t dragging a big trailer full of Chrome behind it.
I’m pretty sure Chrome doesn’t even use the memory for anything it just likes it allocated.
RAM is cheaper than my time.
I kinda consider 32GB as a minimum for anyone working on my team.
Yep. I work in IT support, almost entirely Windows but similar concepts apply.
I see people pushing 6G+ with the OS and remote desktop applications open sometimes. My current shop does almost everything by VDI/remote desktop… So that’s literally the only thing they need to load, it’s just not good.
On the remote desktop side, we recently shifted from a balanced remote desktop server, over to a “memory optimised” VM, basically has more RAM but the same or similar CPU, because we kept running out of RAM for users, even though there was plenty of CPU available… It caused problems.
Memory is continually getting more important.
When I do the math on the bandwidth requirements to run everything, the next limit I think we’re likely to hit is RAM access speed and bandwidth. We’re just dealing with so much RAM at this point that the available bandwidth from the CPU to the RAM is less than the total memory allocation for the virtual system. Eg: 256G for the VM, and the CPU runs at, say, 288GB/s…
Luckily DDR 4/5 brings improvements here, though a lot of that stuff has yet to filter into datacenters
Imagine how far you can go on 8GB of RAM if every piece of software were still well optimized and free of bloat.
Recently I downloaded Chrome for some testing that I wanted to let separate from my Firefox browser. After a while I realized my computer was always getting hot every time I opened chrome. I took a look at the system monitor: chrome was using 30% of of my CPU power to play a single YouTube video in the background. What the fuck? I ended up switching the testing environment over the libreWolf and CPU load went down to only 10%.
I’d say to try chromium, but you basically need to compile it yourself to get support for all the video codecs.
Stop. You’re scaring todays companies. Optimization? That’s a no-no word.
Now please eat whole ass libraries imported for one function, or that react + laravel site which amounts to most stock bootsrap looking blog.
My sister just bought a MacBook Air for college, and I had to beg her to spend the extra money on 16gb of memory. It feels like a scam that it appears cheap with the starting at price, but nobody should actually go with those “starting at” specs.
Yeah it’s about future proofing. 8 GB might be okay for basic browsing and text editing now, but in the future that might not be the case. Also in my experience people who only want to do basic browsing and word editing, end up inevitably wanting to do more complex things and not understanding that their device is not capable of it.
Exactly. I told her that 8gb might be fine for a year or two, but if she wants this thousand plus dollar laptop to last four years she needs to invest the extra money now. Especially once she told me she might want to play Minecraft or Shadow of the Tomb Raider on it
It’s about time.
for the same price other laptops sell for 64GB
what a bargain
Naturally the price for the cheapest model will also be going to up several orders of magnitude more than the cost of materials, labor, and healthy profit margin to account for that as well I’m sure.
In 1999, the iBook was US$1599 (equivalent to $2925 in 2023) (source).
The 2010 13" Air was $1299 (more in today’s $) (source).
The current 13" M3 Air is $1099 (source).
So yeah, they may well raise prices, but the cost of Apple’s entry-level hardware has decreased in absolute terms over the years, and has decreased substantially if inflation is taken into account. Not to say the margins aren’t higher (no idea about that), but it’s interesting.
Yeah it’s when you need a reasonable amount of RAM or disk that they really bend you over.
It’s because AI needs a not a ram. I think Apple did not expect or plan for ai which shows in the fact that only the latest pro phone can have Apple intelligence. It’s because that phone has enough ram.
Now they will boost ram across the board because Apple intelligence will not run well without it.
Depending on pricing, I may actually buy a MacBook in 2025.
I’ve wanted one since the m1, but I’ve held out until 16gb was the starting amount of ram.
Or you could just get just about any other non-mac system that lets you upgrade RAM easily when you need too…
Just stop supporting Apples soldered in BS
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but most things and light laptops have had soldered ram for many years now. There are exceptions, but they’re few and far between.
What? Lol nah plenty of laptops have removable RAM. It tended to show up often on the “Ultralight” tier, but outside of that and Chromebooks it’s been by no means the norm
It has kind of come with newer laptops being driven to be thinner, and for newer devices, because the old SODIMM format is no longer capable of the throughput/latencies needed for higher speed memory.
From memory, 2.1Ghz DDR5 is where it caps out. Anything faster, like 2.8 GHz either requires it to be soldered, or one of the new formats like the one Dell has started using.
The replacement you’re talking about is called [CAMM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module\)) and personally I’m excited about it. Not only does it support faster speeds than SO-DIMM, it takes up less physical space. And I believe you can’t even put LPDDR on a SODIMM, so CAMM should also use less power?
I know what you mean, but I’m tired of window’s bullshit too.
I’d keep pc hardware if my work could happen on Linux, but it’s sadly not an option at the moment.
But RAM on the non-mac side is plentiful and relatively cheap. For the same cost of that base model 16GB Mac you can get a PC laptop with 64GBs of RAM and plenty of storage
With all that RAM and storage you can slap Linux on it and run Windows on a VM for that work software that doesn’t work under alternatives such as Wine
Or alternatively run a hackintosh-VM then you can have MacOS without supporting Apples user-hostile decisions
Bad news: literally all current CPU gen laptops use soldered RAM.
All of them. Every single one. No exceptions.
Hopefully that’ll change, but as it stands right now, if you want newest gen, you cannot get replaceable RAM.
And even before current gen, the vast majority of Windows laptops were soldered too.
E: idk why you’re downvoting, it’s true lol.
I really don’t know where you’re looking because I only see that in business-class laptops and even then not all of them have soldered RAM.
And I’m already counting the ones with one expansion slot with the soldered bunch.
Of course, if you paid attention only to HP, Dell and Lenovo, then I’d see why you’d think so. But beyond those brands, you don’t have that soldered nonsense everywhere. At the very least, you have things like Clevo, Framework and the like to sell you laptops without soldered ram.
I bet there are even websites that let you filter laptop models without soldered ram. Personally, I only know about Germany-based websites like that, though.
You are looking at previous-gen platforms.
E.g. for Framework, you’re looking at APUs like the 7840U, which is not current gen. It’s two generations old. (7840U/Phoenix > 8850U/Hawk Point > AI 9 365 (awful naming btw AMD)/Strix Point).
Like I said, all current CPU gen laptops cannot use SODIMM. I really hope that changes though.
And let me be clear here, I’m not exaggerating for effect; I do not mean most of them. I do not mean the vast majority of them. I do not mean practically all of them. I literally mean all of them. 100% of them. Every single one that exists.
AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm do not currently have compatibility with SODIMM on their newest gen mobile CPUs.
I hope that changes, and I expect it eventually will, but as it stands right now, no you cannot have SODIMM modules if you are buying any laptop with the newest gen CPUs.
Well fudge me sideways. Every day is a school day.
They’ve all got LPDDR5, so yeah, you’re unfortunately right. It feels kinda weird having to consider the 7000 and 8000-series last gen already; true as it is, though.
Don’t worry, the latest chips were just built to only handle CAMM2, a new removable RAM standard that replaced SODIMM
It’s a bit confusing though because both soldered and CAMM2 are listed as LPDDR5 on spec sheets, from what I’ve looked at it appears if there’s an x at the end of the LPDDR5 it should be CAMM2
It’s also brand BRAND new, so I’m sure quite a few manufacturers rushed out the door with the new chips just soldering on the RAM because they couldn’t get CAMM2 in it in time for whatever reason
I looked into it, yea current gen chips aren’t compatible with SODIMM
Because they’re compatible with the brand new removable RAM standard, CAMM2. It is confusing though, as everywhere I’ve looked both soldered and CAMM2 were listed as LPDDR5 which is what makes you think it’s just soldered RAM. So far it looks like if a spec sheet lists LPDDR5x it should be a CAMM2
CAMM2 is also very very new, so I’m sure a few manufacturers in their rush to get the new/current gen chips out the door just used soldered RAM.
CAMM2 is very exciting, it basically eats into all of Apples listed pros for having soldered in RAM as close to the CPU as possible while still being user removable. (Performance, efficiency etc)
Is Intel Core Ultra Series 1 current gen, or is it a gen old by now? Framework has them, but I suppose you technically can’t get them since they’re currently on preorder
…in 2030.
Good, 8 is unusable for my workloads and 12 feels like they’re just fucking with us
Has anyone ever successfully de-soldered Apple RAM and replaced it?
dosdude on YouTube I think has done this
I thought that too, but just looking at his channel it seems that he’s only done the storage on an M1 mini, not RAM.
I think it’s proprietary ram as well so you can’t just get something off the market and solder it on. It has to be their ram or it won’t work.
That…does not sound right
Isn’t the RAM inside the actual SoC with the Apple Silicon line? I haven’t really opened any of 'em up.
As for older Macs - sure, I know someone who replaced 8 gigs with 16 on either an Air or Pro model that had 16 available as an option but was shipped with 8. It’s just something you do when you have way too many Mac boards lying around at work and your bosses say you can’t get a new work laptop.
Yeah, I think so.
Can probably upgrade the SSD with a soldering iron, but not the RAM.
Pretty sure it is baked in as part of the SOC, not soldered on after the fact?
Golly, thanks Apple. It’s not like I can go buy a 256GB DIMM right now. 16GB what a joke.
And it probably won’t be able to be upgraded by the user, which should be the bare minimum.
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.
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.
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