Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models

https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/apple-to-upgrade-base-macs-to-16gb-ram-starting-from-m4-models-report-124082600272_1.html

by ripjaygn • 2 years ago

56 103 2 years ago

business-standard.com

talldayo2• 2 years ago

Wow, if their marketing is anything to go by that's like 32gb on a Windows machine!

ComputerGuru2• 2 years ago

All modern operating systems compress inactive pages.

ghostpepper• 2 years ago

It's not just compression - also the unified memory architecture.

HumblyTossed• 2 years ago

What is the effect on battery life vs keeping an actual 32GB or RAM powered?

Eric_WVGG2• 2 years ago

My understanding is that the performance is based around Apple silicon being optimized for the NeXT/ObjC model of retain/release, which they got down from 30 nanoseconds on Intel to 6.5ns on M1 (14ns on emulated Intel).

https://singhkays.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-black-magic/#is-...

IMO 8gb is still barely acceptable for most consumers in 2024, but not for any laptop that you'd expect to get more than say two years of usefulness out of, so… yeah it's about time.

somehnguy• 2 years ago

They're referring to these, when Apple said 8GB = 16GB elsewhere -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40024631

https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/08/m3-macbook-pro-ram/

IshKebab• 2 years ago

I don't think Linux does by default. You need to enable it, via some moderately complex commands line commands.

danielfoster• 2 years ago

I’d love to see an Air with an M4 chip and 64GB RAM.

gigatexal• 2 years ago

I’d trade my m3 max for this.

switch0072• 2 years ago

The non-integer scaling on the Airs puts me off. I want perfect text rendering at a great resolution as that's well over 50% of the reason to get a MacBook. So it's the Pro for me

wmf8• 2 years ago

Can't you set the resolution to whatever you want?

wpm2• 2 years ago

Apple just needs to add sub pixel anti aliasing back. It’s utterly disgusting to use macOS on some third party displays.

nwienert• 2 years ago

if they can get the better screen from the pro into an air it'd be ideal

hfgjbcgjbvg• 2 years ago

Bout time.

Kalanos2• 2 years ago

https://youtu.be/BNWpZ-Y_KvU?si=0ANC62CFyCt8vLFW&t=99

doodpants• 2 years ago

Interesting choice; I would have expected Ode to Joy, or Hallelujah Chorus.

replete10• 2 years ago

I hope one day they can fix the engineering problems so I can buy a machine and keep it for more than two years without fear of some cheap components exploding. A purchased computer should work for a decade at least. If this sounds over the top, look at what the repair shop guys are saying...

Edit: Thanks for the downvotes, its not popular but an unfortunate reality. These issues are related to 2016-present Apple laptops. My 2012 MBA is running just fine, but I cannot trust these soldered systems.. there's other content around about the 13v being dumped into the SSDs when another component fails. There are engineering issues.

If you want to understand what I'm talking about:

Apple SSDs engineered in the worst way possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qbrLiGY4Cg

Exploding USB-C MacBook Ports Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAGnMR1aVuE

Kalanos2• 2 years ago

My 2014 pro is still going strong

replete10• 2 years ago

I knew I'd get downvoted, but there are known SSD / T2 chip issues with 2016+ macs. Still present in Mx mac laptops. 2012 Macbook Air was my favourite laptop ever. See Louis Rossman etc... if you get lucky you get lucky, but I don't like the odds, so Apple hardware for me is a subscription model...

talldatethrow2• 2 years ago

There are some people with 300k on their original Chevy Silverado transmission. But there are MANY people that have them blow up every 100k miles. So, would you say the 4l60e is a good transmission because yours went 300k?

Im in the Central valley and have helped at least 5 friends replace or rebuild theirs. If you visit a transmission shop, this is the transmission that keeps them in business because it's one of the few cars where someone will still spend $3k to fix a 20 year old car.

replete10• 2 years ago

My 2012 11" MBA is the same, love that machine. It's an issue with 2016-present laptops unfortunately

switch0072• 2 years ago

I wonder whether we'll pay for it with bumped prices too. Time will tell. And also how much of the extra RAM will be taken up by MacOS AI bloat?

akmarinov2• 2 years ago

Zero in the EU

burnte• 2 years ago

Are Apple not allowed to offer AI features in the EU?

mjsweet• 2 years ago

Could this be related to their plans for local inference? Maybe the need to load larger models into memory has driven their decision?

bearjaws• 2 years ago

Has to be, even a small model is 4gb of RAM. Open up any O365 based product in Chrome and kiss another 2gb goodbye if you only have 8gb you're left with very little after the OS...

surfingdino2• 2 years ago

So no actual increase in available RAM and no improvement in performance then. That'll be an extra £999, sir.

throwthrowuknow• 2 years ago

Still pretty puny for RAM these days

Night_Thastus• 2 years ago

Depends a lot on what you do. For casual browsing, even 8GB can be fine. For gaming, 16GB is often more than enough, though rarely 32 has minor benefits. For productivity, 32 is fine. Only really heavy stuff needs more.

mcphage• 2 years ago

Is it? I don't know what the most popular Windows laptops are, but tooling around Lenovo's site, the starting configs for laptops seem to be either 8, 16, or 32 GB. Some soldered, some not.

tom_• 2 years ago

I was thinking the opposite: it's actually surprising how long 16 GB has remained a useful amount of RAM? At home I use a 10 year old 16 GB laptop and the amount of RAM never seems to be the problem. Any sloth is always due to one or both of the outdated GPU and outdated CPU.

(First time I bought a PC with 16 GB RAM was 2011. It wasn't a ridiculous amount of RAM back then, just usefully more than necessary. 16 GB has probably been a sensible amount for 15 years now.)

(Whether I'd buy a computer today with 16 GB of soldered-in non-upgradeable RAM - that's another question. And my answer would be: I wouldn't. However that is not because it would be useless on day of purchase!)

Euphorbium• 2 years ago

Should upgrade ssd to at least 1TB

yonatan8070• 2 years ago

I doubt that's needed. 1TB is great and all, but unless you're downloading games or handling a lot of media, you're unlikely to use it all. I don't think most people need that much, and will get by just fine with 512GB or even less (my current work laptop for software dev has a 256GB SSD, and while I could use more if I wanted to, I don't need to think about disk usage, even with a small Windows 11 VM on the same disk)

danielktdoranie2• 2 years ago

My MacBook Air M1 has 16GB RAM and the base 256GB RAM. I decided I wanted to try some native Apple Silicon games like “Resident Evil: The Village” and “Death Stranding”. So I took a 1 TB WD_BLACK external SSD, installed macOS Sonoma and made sure to boot from that hard drive when I wanted to play games. It works perfectly. Sadly there is no way to add RAM externally ha ha.

I boot from the 256GB storage that is soldered on the MacBook Air M1’s logic board when I want to do anything else. I have about 174 GB free currently.

superkuh• 2 years ago

Finally. With 16B the amount of tech support I do for Apple M* products will likely drastically reduce. But unless they also upgrade the storage there'll still be people filling up the internal and then being unable to create the timemachine backups for their octopus of external storage devices.

mathverse• 2 years ago

With the amount of electron apps we use we definitely need more ram in laptops.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

16GB of RAM Could Be the New Minimum in Apple's Upcoming M4 Macs

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/26/apple-new-macs-16gb-ram...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41357796

wmf8• 2 years ago

Coincidentally Intel is bumping up base RAM to 16 GB also.

TiredOfLife2• 2 years ago

Only for Copilot+ branded ones.

toddmorey• 2 years ago

I hate to say it but their minimum configs feel like a pricing scam. Like the price of a hotel room before taxes & fees. Even store employees will tell you that you really have to go one level up.

bhj• 2 years ago

And each level up in RAM typically includes a bump to CPU and/or GPU core counts as well, so it is even more difficult to discern the true pricing. Annoying, but also understandable that they don't want to produce every possible combination of specs.

Don't get me started on needing to buy a 1TB+ iPad Pro to get double the RAM, though.

chazeon• 2 years ago

Exactly, and I feel this is true American marketing, and what makes Apple a real California company.

Just like American subway, or airfare, or greyhound buses, or even healthcare: at a high, advertised price, it gives you a standard, but miserable, bare minimum, and unsustainable way of living, and pushing you to pay for a high premium to upgrade to make it bearable, at a price a lot of people can’t afford. It’s why Apple is an American company at heart.

Europe doesn’t do that.

danielktdoranie2• 2 years ago

As an Apple fan, what Apple charges for RAM is insulting. Pre 2012 it was standard practice to buy your MacBook Pro with the minimum RAM, and you could upgrade the RAM yourself buying from Crucial and the like for WAY CHEAPER than what Apple sold the RAM for. To stop that Apple started soldering the RAM to the logic board. I’d have no problem buying RAM from Apple if they charged a fair market price. Sadly Apple seem hell bent on ripping us off.

Cockbrand2• 2 years ago

Sadly Apple seem hell bent on ripping us off.

Did you mean "Fortunately, Apple are laser-focused on maximizing shareholder value"?

VancouverMan• 2 years ago

While some customers will end up paying a lot for more RAM, I have to wonder if Apple really has a good idea about how many potential sales they're losing at the same time, too.

They've lost several Mac purchases I would have otherwise made over the last decade, thanks solely to the unjustifiable cost of getting a reasonable amount of RAM for my needs.

Yet, as far as I know, Apple has no way of tracking those lost sales. They've never asked me, and I've never told them.

I know I'm not alone. I have a number of colleagues, friends, and family who've been ready to buy different types of Apple computers, but then opted not to once they see how much even a relatively small RAM upgrade will cost. Again, I doubt that Apple is aware of those lost sales.

getcrunk2• 2 years ago

The sad part is that people assume those two ate roughly inversely related. But I feel like there’s a lot of negative externalities and long term system effects that would disprove it.

mxmilkiib• 2 years ago

Why not both

dzonga• 2 years ago

in the days of the macs being on intel silicon yeah ram was crucial. with the 16gb most dev's those doing web api's and fronteds will find 16gb sufficient. at one point I had a 32gb m1 - 16". just too heavy yet performance was similar to my m2 air with 16gb ram. performance as in never felt the difference.

wpm2• 2 years ago

There were plenty of other reasons they started soldering the RAM, and their desire to lock in customers to bogus upgrade prices simply meant that “but customers will lose the ability to upgrade their RAM from third parties for cheaper!” argument to not solder the RAM fell on deaf ears.

croutonwagon• 2 years ago

THey did VERY similar with HDD's.

We were well into years of SSD's in laptops in the 2.5" sata format and Macbooks of the time (ie: 2012 models and even some after) were still chucking 5400 rpm spinning rust in there AND charging SSD prices for it.

It was bananas then, and they are just doing the same with a different component now.

sliken• 2 years ago

It's easy to assume it's malicious. But instead this allows laptops to be thinner, cheaper, and have MUCH better performance.

Nearly all PC and laptops have 128 bit memory busses, which is a major bottleneck for iGPUs, as well as weird use cases like LLM.

However the M2 pro doubles the memory memory width. M3 Max doubles it again, twice as wide as an AMD threadripper.

myrandomcomment3• 2 years ago

This is likely a function of yields of the process. The better the yields, less the need to bin chips by what works. Likely the M4 yields are quite good at this point. Just a WAG.

wmf8• 2 years ago

An 8 GB Mac is not a 16 GB with defective RAM; it literally only has 8 GB. The RAM is separate dies and Apple presumably buys known good DRAM so the yield isn't their problem.

myrandomcomment3• 2 years ago

Both the memory controllers and RAM on the Mx are on die components. The number of controllers (binned) count here. I should have been more specific in what I was saying.

"The 14-core M3 Max only enables 24 out of the 32 controllers, therefore it has 300 GB/sec vs. the 400 GB/sec for all models of the M1 and M2 Max, while the 16-core M3 Max has the same 400 GB/sec as the prior M1 and M2 Max models."

znpy• 2 years ago

Welcome to 2014!

The ThinkPad X220 I had in university could be loaded with 16gb ddr3 ram... Who knows what apple will re-introduce in 2034 as an "incredible innovation in computing".

_boffin_• 2 years ago

Any news / releases / speculation on the bandwidth of M4 and the integrated memory?

wmf8• 2 years ago

The standard this year seems to be LPDDR5-8500 which gives around 130 GB/s.

takiyo• 2 years ago

Welcome to 2008 apple!

solarkraft2• 2 years ago

8/256 really are okay for light use and even quite a lot of dev work.

But they absolutely aren’t on Pro models. That’s insane.

kuhl• 2 years ago

I think the one thing people are missing about Apple is that they silently aren't a PC parts maker anymore. They make the high performance competitor to something like the Raspberry Pi, not a traditional PC. This bump is largely going to be keeping their system specs good enough for AI specs while also supporting someone's normal workload. It's a great upgrade if you're never going to use AI. Apple has made something special with tight specs that the average user doesn't fully understand yet.

Apple to upgrade base Macs to 16GB RAM, starting from Apple M4 models

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