- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests::Apple’s new MacBook Pro models are powered by cutting-edge M3 Apple silicon, but the base configuration 14-inch model starting at $1,599…
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The sheer idea of selling a 8gb machine in 2023 is kinda wild
8 gigs of ram for some shitty laptop is fine. Like the air shipping with 8 gigs of ram is fine (not great, but fine)
But for a “Pro” machine, let alone a 1600 dollar computer is insane.
MacBook Air is a $1000 computer too though :/ I bought a Thinkpad t480s with 8gb of (upgradable) ram for less than that back in 2019. currently running it with 24gb.
Even Lenovo is starting to drop upgradable ram from their machines. T480 was the last T*4 series with dual upgradeable ram slots. T490 and up all have at least 1 soldered stick, and the AMD machines now don’t come with any upgradeable ram. Their prices to upgrade are at least reasonable unlike Apples.
Shit I got a T16 gen 3(?) for my mom a few months ago and it came with only 8 gigs of soldered ram. That machine is even worse than Apple because AMD locks away 1.5 gigs of ram for just the APU. Intel at least only hard reserves like 256MB or something. Apple gives you the full 8 gigs of ram to play with, no duplicates in CPU memory and GPU memory, plus their really fast swap.
Lenovo isn’t exactly a consumer friendly company themselves. Weren’t they the ones with the hardware set up to reinstall their preinstalled spyware if you removed it?
AMD locks away 1.5 gigs of ram for just the APU
You can change this allocation from the BIOS if you are so inclined. Not that it makes it any better. Sharing 8 gigs between cpu and iGPU is only acceptable when you are doing nothing but web browsing on the laptop/pc
I looked and it’s either 1.5 or auto, and auto only does 1.5
Hmm must be that different manufacturers allow for different allocations. I am on an MSI laptop and I have the options of Auto, 256M, 512M, 768M and 1024M
My kid grabbed an 8/256 M2 Air when they first launched last year, and is still overjoyed with its performance. He has a PS5 for gaming, so the Mac is for uni work and downloading shit. 8gb RAM isn’t inherently bad.
It’s just as you said though; it’s bad for a “Pro” machine.
$1000+ for basic word processing and web is bonkers to me.
Fair. But he likes using it and there’s more to value than the monetary cost of a device. For a start, there’s the build quality, but also the integration with his iPhone.
Oh it’s entirely up to him how he spends his money, didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.
1000$+ for uni shit is the most astounding thing I’ve ever heard
Man, you should watch new series of Planet Earth then, because there are some significantly more astounding things on that than someone spending their own money on a computer they wanted.
🚑🚑🚑
No thanks. People making dumb financial decisions will be always more astounding.
Maybe because I didn’t grow in rich family but okay carry on, I wasn’t judging. It was genuinely fascinating to me
What is someone likely to use a shitty laptop for? Open a web browser to run ~1080p video?
My exeperience is lot of people just want an ipad they can type on. The m2 air is basically the same size and weight as an ipad pro, and the screen is more protected if you carry it in a backpack. It’s also probably cheaper, especially if you want any of the accessories that make it “pro” ipad.
I have a Chromebook that I put Linux onto. It’s got a Celeron and 4gb ram. It’s fine for web browsing email, etc on the go. It can play a ton of older games just fine, too; half-life 2 and episodes run surprisingly well. Minecraft with sodium and all settings turned down works okay, too.
This is the same as the air, but with a better screen (basically).
The M3 Pro MacBook Pro has a minimum of 18GB of ram.
Maybe you’re not supposed to do any pro stuff with it. Just watch youtube videos and browse FB or whatever it is that grandmas do these days. Many apple products don’t really feel as pro as you’re lead to believe by the marketing team.
Just today I ran into a strange issue with the iMovie on iOS. You literally can’t edit a vertical video in any sensible way. Either you shoot horizontal video or you don’t shoot at all. These are the only options Apple gives for you.
You can’t use iMovie for 1:1 video either. You have to edit clips with fat borders at the edges, then export it to Photos in order to crop it square. It’s such a weird thing to miss out.
I’ve been using an 8GB laptop for a few years now and don’t feel the need to have more. But if I’m paying that much I’d expect at least 16GB.
That’s my problem with the 8GB. I even have the Air with that much memory. It’s fine… but I also got it secondhand. For new, I can’t pay that much money for entry level RAM specs.
Yeah I have 8GB of RAM on my Macbook Air and it works fine, I just need to manage my browser tabs and restart Chrome sometimes. But if I was paying $1600 or more for a “Pro” laptop…the fuck?
My company computer had 4 GBs of RAM… And an HDD with Windows 11, the worst fucking experience.
HDD in 2023? Why?
Meanwhile my i7 thinkpad with nvme somehow is not compatible with windows 11.
Well neither is my surface pro 4 but I don’t want 11 and that machine still works great anyway.
That was the weird thing as well, only my PC was eligible for an upgrade lol.
Based on everything else, price.
Dumb company decisions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think it’s so you can write 1000GB on it and have be cheaper than a 256GB machine. My folks had a 2019 laptop with an HDD, I’m not even being figurative here, they literally could not use it, 10+ minutes to boot it and load a program. Constant 100% I/O usage. Stuck some RAM and and a SATA SSD in it, it’s been a daily driver ever since.
The computers from 1921. As a standard in a corporate environment
I open the two essential Excel tools that we use all day + teams and outlook and I’m at 10gb of memory usage…
Yeah I know, 4 GBs was a fucking nightmare back in the days when I did my colleague homework in 2014… It is even worse now.
No doubt. Even wilder to me is the idea of buying a Mac with 8GB in 2023, speaking as a long time Mac owner. Mine is from several years ago. I wonder if Apple execs ever pull their heads out of their asses. This feels like the late 90s all over again.
Don’t tell that to Nvidia.
I bought a Dell 6core AMD laptop on some sale and it was little 345 after tax and shipping. Then I immediately replaced the nvme with a 1tb one for another 70? I think. Laptop is really nice for the price.
Same with NVIDIA, who are stubbornly refusing to give their overpriced GPUs the VRAM they deserve.
For $1,599 you’d at least expect 16GB+ RAM given how cheap RAM is…
I think Apple gets all their RAM from 2008, because they charge $50/GB for it.
Don’t they also solder it to the motherboard so you can’t upgrade your RAM as well?
It’s not so much soldered to the motherboard as much as part of the same package as the CPU. As in: there are no separate memory chips.
But they did indeed solder it in before that, on their old Intel laptops. I think they started doing that in 2013 or 2014 but I forget exactly.
That has more to do with faster traces; the ram is “closer” to the CPU so the signal is cleaner.
Not defending the move, I’d take upgradability in a laptop.
Only makes a difference at oc levels of manual tuning. Which apple isn’t doing at their factory I reckon.
I mean, when you’re the one manufacturing the board, I’m pretty sure you could eek out some more baseline performance without having to tweak each one for OC in the production line, my dude.
This is both great, and incredibly annoying because they selected 8gb as the base…
So wait- if you want to increase your RAM, you have to install a whole new CPU?
You buy a whole new Macbook
That’s soldered as well! It’s theoretically possible but way too involved for most to bother with hiring a professional to get it done or what have you.
No, you just buy one with the amount of RAM you need.
Imagine buying a laptop at all
Sincerely, A Framework user
Imagine spending $400 for 24GB of ram.
Sincerely, another Framework user
You don’t buy a laptop, you have your employer buy it for you.
Lol, the ram is part of the m3 chip That’s a reason why it is so efficient. The storage in m3 is for RAM and videoRAM.
Wikipedia: The M3’s Unified Memory Architecture features up to 24 GB RAM, the M3 Pro up to 36 GB, and the M3 Max up to 128 GB. Like the M2 generation, the M3 SoCs use 6,400 MT/s LPDDR5 SDRAM. As with prior M series SoCs, this serves as both RAM and video RAM.
That’s literally how Intel integrated GPUs work too
The RAM being shared with the GPU, that is.
Yea but the RAM is not on the located within the chip design, is it?
With Apple’s chips the RAM is all on the CPU die so both CPU and GPU get the performance benefit. With Intel’s, none of it is.
"What Apple calls “unified memory” is RAM (random-access memory) used as “main memory” (not a CPU or GPU cache and not mass storage either).
The term “unified” refers to the fact that the memory is shared by the CPU cores and the GPU cores. That’s not novel: “integrated graphics” options in Intel x86 chips (like Iris Xe) do the same, as do just about all modern smartphones."
I’m not talking about the merits or otherwise of “unified memory”, I’m pointing out that because Apple’s RAM is physically integrated into the CPU, it can provide more memory bandwidth than regular DDR5 DIMMs.
Well yeah, if you were paying $50 a GB wouldn’t you too? Got to lock that shit down!
How the fuck did Apple manage to be the largest company on the planet doing shit like this? Are Apple users really that fucking dumb?
Because they have an extremely consumer friendly UI/UX and a very stable OS.
And they’re much better at marketing than they are at making computers or phones. Apple is probably the most successful marketing company in the world.
Not sure “friendly” is quite the right word… you can argue it’s well designed or cultivated users but Apple is anything but a "friend"ly.
Their UI and UX is shit. You basically can’t use it for many basic tasks without installing a bunch of third party (proprietary and expensive) software.
Apple loves under ramming (to give a word a new meaning) and forcing everyone to pay for upgrades. The problem is there are always people that buy the base.
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I think the point is to squeeze out a couple extra hundred dollars from customers.
Apple has long done price anchoring with their products just like in this case.
At this point I’m pretty sure the ram costs more than the rest of the laptop.
Apple’s RAM isn’t as cheap as you might think, because it’s all built directly onto the CPU die. That’s part of what makes its computers so fast.
It’s iRAM!
The people to whom this discussion ought to matter (the prospective buyers of an 8GB RAM machine) are utterly oblivious to this discussion. They’ll continue to walk into an Apple Store and buy these machines. We are like body builders arguing about how obese people should stop eating shit.
Us power lifters over here looking around nervously while double fisting big macs lol.
You’re much better off double fisting big PCs.
or double fisting your mom
heh, wrecked.
This matters to the prospective buyers of 16gb machines too… Who want it for cheaper.
Ah it’s cool, you can just open the little door in the back and upgrade the RAM anytime you want.
Right??
Sir, this is apple.
Gotta buy their apple 5 point screwdriver
Open back
Remove adhesive & battery
Dismount motherboard and keyboard
Find out it’s soldered ram
Kill self
With a hot air rework station anything is upgradable, laptops, phones, babies… ok not babies, but like lots of other stuff.
Maybe, in the future, lamps will be permanently wired into house walls. Who even needs outlets? Just buy a new house if you don’t like the lamp anymore.
Isn’t that what ceiling recessed lights are?
Yeah, I get OP’s joke, but “permanent” doesn’t really apply to anything about houses. “Wired into wall” just means you need a screwdriver and a circuit breaker flip to change it, or maybe cutting into wall panels.
I mean it doesn’t matter if the house around the wiring falls apart first. Most modern construction is like one step above paper mache.
It’s Apple so they probably do some kind of bullshit key pairing nonsense to prevent you being able to upgrade the RAM even with the soldering iron.
I really wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not actually possible
Oh it’s not even close to being user-upgradeable. As in, the RAM module is part of the silicon M3 chipset. You can’t upgrade it because it is literally part of the CPU die.
Of course, apple could address this by also offering expansion slots that users can install ram in, but that would mean being nice to consumers, which we all know apple is fundamentally opposed to.
It’s hard to take the Mac seriously. This is even more dumbfounding because they have an excellent processor. Then they pair it with anemic RAM and make demonstrably false statements about the system’s performance. I don’t get it.
soldering in an unusably low amount of memory or storage into the base model is classic bait and switch. they get to advertise a much lower price than what you will end up paying
And if people buy the low-end one, they’ll feel like they need to upgrade sooner.
Surely they’ll just get a rep for poor performance?
They won’t. Because Apple is the best and very customer friendly. /s
If that was really a danger for them, the original iMac would have killed the company. At least it had a nice colourful case to look at while waiting for it to do things or restart after its latest crash.
Maybe we should all start calling it the “MacBook Semi-Pro”.
8gb ram has been common for over a decade now. It’s what I would expect in a sub-$400 laptop.
Or a raspberry pi.
$75, 8gb, and this isn’t even the latest model. https://www.microcenter.com/product/622539/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-8gb-ddr4
And Apple charges $200 for just an additional 8GB of RAM.
The LPDDR4X RAM in the Raspberry Pi isn’t QUITE the same as the on-die stuff in the M3 processor.
My four year old phone has more RAM than an expensive macbook? LMFAO 🤭🤭🤭
Um actthually mac is so oPtimized so 1gb mac = 12.3gb windows 🤓
STFU it physically has less ram than a potato while costing the price of a nasa rocket
Also Apple™ RAM costs like 4 to 8 times as much. Being $200 for 8GB. So assuming fantasy land Apple™ iMagic™ means 8GB = 16GB it’s still a minimum of twice the cost per dollar
Apple ram actually is just more dense. They can fit more binary in each gigabyte.
Ok, so a tech neophyte here so please dont crucify me. Would that not be adding more transistors to the ram? And, would that not affect clock speed?
Echo Dot’s joking, more binary per gigabyte doesn’t actually make sense
You done got whooshed 😂
an explanation of the joke :D, he is saying more binary in a gigabyte, I get what u mean with the transistors but he aint talking about that, he talks about being able to fit more data (binary, the raw data, ones and zeroes) in the same space (one gigabyte, like 1024^9 or around 1billions spaces for the ones and zerors) bc ofc, it’s apple so they somehow can save morr info in the same amount of space, that’s whatvhe meant :)
Thanks for the clarification! I appreciate it. I guess I was equating the binary, ones and zeroes, to the transistor gates either been on or off. Again, thank you!
and if u spend another 200 it goes from 16 to 32, so apparrntly somehow 8gb can cost 200 or 100 bc apple
Who mentioned Windows??
Did you watch the video? The 8GB model is like 1/4 the speed of the 16GB model.
It’s a bottleneck, clear as day. I just thought it was funny that Apple is so stingy that they’d even consider putting an offensive 8GB of ram on this laptop.
Darken was poking fun at the Mac fan boy trope.
LOL. That went over my head. 😂
✈️
🙄Normally I hate emojis, but I have to admit that they are a powerful and very concise language.
Apple did https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/08/8gb-ram-m3-macbook-pro-like-16-gb-pc/
It’s not directly mentioned in this conversation, but the excuse as to why they put such a pathetic amount of RAM in the laptop is that “Macs use it more efficiently”
edit: The quote is “Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently.”
Apple being apple… marketing at it’s worst.
Sure, it’s “more efficient” than other operating systems if you want to look at how much space is being utilized, but other operating systems don’t seem to have the same catastrophic performance bottlenecks as this apple laptop apparently does.
The fact that going from 8gb to 16gb improves system performance by 4-5x is something you’d never see happen in a “less efficient” operating system, so what’s Apple’s excuse for using it?
so what’s Apple’s excuse for using it?
Money
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Yeah, no your post went right over my head. LOL
Apple had to know these reviews were coming. A new iteration on their custom SOC is obviously going to make every tech site go bananas benchmarking and their claim that 8GB = 16GB is going to make them punish the machine even harder.
It’s like they decided a few bad reviews would cost them less than cutting their markup on RAM to make a 16GB entry level Pro machine for less than $2k.
What’s worse is that their “8GB = 16GB” claim has a tiny bit of truth in it: many apps that are GPU-accelerated usually load/generate stuff on host RAM and then transfer it to the GPU RAM to launch some shaders/kernels on it and they do this repeatedly. The idea with Apple (also AMD when you consider APUs) is that since the RAM is “unified” you just have one RAM and you probably don’t have that redundancy anymore if those apps are built with that in mind, so in a sense if previously you had a 1GB buffer that had to live on both CPU and GPU RAM, this time it will only live in as a single 1GB buffer on Apple’s “unified” RAM. That’s still very different from the “8GB = 16GB” deceptive marketing by Apple.
You don’t have to put unified in quotes, it’s the proper term for an SoC that shares the same memory between the CPU and GPU.
The major advantage of unified memory is that it doesn’t have the copy overhead. When using a discrete GPU you need to load data onto the host and then copy it over to the GPU. And then if data on the GPU needs to be processed separately by the CPU (saved to a file, sent over the network, etc) you incur more overhead again. And let’s ignore more specific technologies like Direct I/O and io_uring for this discussion.
On an SoC with unified memory you don’t have this overhead. The CPU can (in theory) access the same memory space as the GPU with zero overhead, and it makes the performance hit from shuttling the data back and forth non-existent.
But there’s a massive downside, and it’s that it drastically cuts down your available memory, because now the CPU and GPU have only a single 8GB pool to use for both. Whereas in a system without unified memory and a discreet GPU would have the 8GB for the CPU in addition to whatever the GPU has. They don’t step on each other’s toes.
For example, if I use a system with 8GB of host RAM and a GPU with 6GB of VRAM to run a model of some kind (let’s say stable diffusion), it will load the model into the VRAM and not clog up the host RAM. Yes, the host will initially use system RAM to load the file descriptors and then shuttle the data to the GPU, but once that’s done the model isn’t kept on the host.
On a Mac it would load it onto the only memory available and the CPU would not have the full 8GB available to it the way an x86 system would have.
The point I’m making is that because of the unified architecture the 8GB is effectively even less than 8GB in a discrete GPU system. It’s worse.
The worst part is that in many retail chains like Costco, you can only get the 8GB version. I suspect the review reading segment of the population is smaller than we’d expect for such an expensive purchase. Previously they’ve crippled M1 machines that have 256Gb storage, only including one controller instead of two as in the 512+ machines. It’s a shame for MacBook Air, but totally unacceptable for a computer marketed as “Pro”
Not a pro cpu, just a pro chassis.
“Pro”
Ahem. Yeah right
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Macbooks are both fit and pro at the same time
Bravo 👏🏼
It looks like the 24 GiB (?) real-Pro MacBook.
The cpu is the M3, the same one they’ll put in the air. NOT a “pro” cpu, just a “pro” chassis.
With all the ports a pro needs, right. Right? 😅
I tell you what, i do love my lenovo x1 carbon. I used to have a real macbook pro from back in the day. Loved it. Upgradable, ports everywhere. Fast. Beautiful.
I had to move to Linux and a machine like the lenovo as i was not going to put up with 1 port and a fuck you very much.
However, they also have soldered in parts now, so next machine will be something else.
My 350€ three-year old phone has an SoC with 12GB of RAM.
With that kind of memory swapping, the soldered ssd gonna be toasts within 1 or 2 yrs. Its already a known problem in previous macbooks, where people runs memory intensive programs and find thier mac book dead after even 6 months to 1 yr
Does it swap to the SSD or does it use a compressed area of RAM?
From what i read the previous cases it uses the ssd. Thus the ssd write cycle maxed out after 6 months leaving the mac dead. And then Apple sent a replacement, the guy use it as he usually did, and in 6months dead again.
Pretty sure it just doesn’t do anything. I’m not going to get one and test it because I’m not insane but from the performance specs of people are putting out it looks like it just maxes out the ram and then does nothing.
I was saying this when the M2 was first announced. It’s impressive for what it is, but what it is, is actually kind of crap.
“it just maxes out the ram and then does nothing.” is absolute nonsense. The programs need memory to operate.
If your RAM is maxed out and the programs seem to operate just as fine, the OS is doing something behind the scenes, it’s just a matter of what that something is. And memory swapping / virtual memory is a well-known method of alleviating RAM overuse, at the cost of murdering your SSD/HDD lifespan.
Yup this.
- It’s purely academic to me, as I have no intention of buying any Apple products or any desktop not assembled myself.
- interesting how I asked an honest question and am being downvoted without further comment. Have the Steve Jobs fuckbois already infested the fediverse?
I think selling an 8GB laptop with a Pro moniker is a terrible move. But you’ll need to cite examples (more than one, because sometimes components just fail under the best of circumstances).
And then wonder why Mac sales tanked 27% in their last financial report. Selling 8Gb laptops is an offence.
And seriously for their price, I would much prefer a laptop like Framework that I know I can easily swap components and make it workable even after a while.
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They’ll still sell like hot cakes 😂
Apple is the proof Marketting >> Quality.
They sell the premium dream making the user think it’s the best.
My current phone, and my last phone both had more ram. For significantly less money.
100 percent in agreement that apples ram pricing is lunacy
But my brother. Wtf do you need that much ram in a phone for lol. Mine has 6gb (12 pro lmao) and that causes me zero issues. Granted, I don’t game on my phone. But is phone gaming really eating that much ram these days?
I also have 12 GB. There are usage patterns where additional RAM wull be useful or even necessary on a phone. When you have more RAM, the phone can sleep tasks and leave background apps alone without having to discard their contents from RAM. This means fewer cold startups. Also, more contents can be cached, which means faster app startups. Both of these techniques also reduce CPU usage and improve battery life. You can also achieve more tabs in your browsers and more and bigger apps running at the same time. More RAM also means fewer situations where swapping is done or needed, so additional CPU and disk cycles are saved and battery usage is reduced. Some apps will actually require more RAM or spin more when memory is scarce. Examples can be advanced content creation apps in audio, video, or picture/photography. Also, some games, especially in high settings.
Are these additional GBs necessary? No. And most people would not notice them, as even 6 GB is overkill for quite a number of peoples’ usage patterns. Your phone does maybe 95% of what it does just about as well, even when you have a low-midrange CPU and GPU that is from a few years ago, and just 4 or 6gb of RAM.
This holds true for iOS and Android. They’ve both done a fair bit of housekeeping and software improvements to reel in excessive resource usage gen over gen. I think Android was doing some catch-up here for a while, but I don’t know how they go toe to toe on this anymore, and it’s difficult to empirically compare the two in this area.
