Things have been much better after updating to an M2 with 16GB of RAM.
Which is fine, but this wears out the disks quite a bit.
So of you’re pushing past the 8gb memory size… your macbook will die earlier. And since the flash chips are not replaceable… you get the point.
You don’t buy a Pro model and let it swap with only 8GB
See various anecdotal reports such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38103103 in this very thread.
I bought a 15” Air two weeks ago with 16GB and I expect I’ll still be able to use it a decade from now.
Have barely used the Air because my software is set up on my Intel. Will transition soon and will be able to compare performance.
I think whether or not people always encounter it "feeling slow" is a different concern as to whether or not 8GB of RAM should ever even be offered by Apple on a system that will for sure eventually swap to disk for users. Adding Apple's huge margins on RAM upgrades on top of this just makes it even more disgusting... they should start their models at a higher baseline- it costs them next to nothing (8GB RAM vs 16GB RAM is not a cost-to-Apple issue, it's an extremely cheap component), but then of course they can't squeeze customers for ludicrous amounts of upsell margins (their cost-to-consumer RAM upgrade margins are absolutely appalling)
Selling suboptimal hardware configurations might be a good business decision but I wish our standards weren't so low for companies, especially ones selling $1600 machines with 2013-amounts of RAM in them
I’m puzzled by the idea that there’s something inherently bad about swapping. It’s a natural consequence of virtual memory and is pretty much required for optimal exploitation of available RAM. Let apps allocate as much RAM as they’d ideally like to have, and then leave it to the OS to keep the most frequently used pages in physical RAM.
Most users don't need 3 whole Thunderbolt ports either, why put that on there too?
More RAM in the base-model Pro signals that it is a higher-end product. It raises the bar for the entire product category and makes it easier to not depreciate an entire year's worth of functional computers (you know how Apple is). It decreases the write pressure on the soldered SSD, and ensures that future MacOS releases, AI features and games don't get bottlenecked by a $15 component. It reduces the friction when casual users want to use their current Mac for more demanding workloads. It future-proofs against needing a newer machine and increases the value of said laptop secondhand.
In every way, the old Macbook Pro 14" pricing model was a more sustainable, attractive and user-friendly. This spec drop is a sad excuse to direct would-be 13" owners to a more expensive alternative.
> I’m puzzled by the idea that there’s something inherently bad about swapping.
If you're doing it to non-replaceable flash storage, then yeah there is something inherently wrong about relying on swap.
At a guess, because varying the number of physical ports between models complicates production more than varying which RAM chips are soldered to the board. (Apple has generally shunned having physically identical USB-C ports with differing capabilities.)
>If you're doing it to non-replaceable flash storage, then yeah there is something inherently wrong about relying on swap.
All modern multitasking desktop OSes rely on swap and have since the mid 90s.
SSD lifetime concerns are way overblown in my opinion. The first MacBooks with soldered SSDs came out in 2016. I'm sure there are individual instances of SSDs failing, but the much-heralded SSD lifetime apocalypse seems not to have materialised.
What you really want with an SSD isn't the theoretical highly-conservative estimate of its lifetime write limit, but the probability that it is going to be the thing that fails on your laptop after n years, in comparison to all the other things that could fail. My guess is that by the time the SSD has a significant probability of failing (which is going to take many years, even with heavy usage), then many other components are going to have a higher probability of failing.
Perhaps, but I would like to see evidence for this based on actual tests. Most of the commentary here just takes it as axiomatic that 8GB won't be enough and isn't based on actual comparisons of the 8GB and 16GB models.
I obviously don’t have stats on this, but I suspect it’s a tiny minority of base model MacBook Pros that ever run a container.
They completely forget that the OS memory management is _totally_ different. iOS doesn't need multiple gigabytes of RAM, because only one piece of software can be active at a time, the rest are suspended and can just get limited activations - and the OS decides when.
That said I still wouldn't recommend 8gb to anyone.
My only quibble here is that I think people are a touch too cynical about Apple's motives for putting 8GB in the base models. I suspect the reason is just that their research shows that most people wouldn't notice any difference from the extra 8GB of RAM. That makes it difficult to justify putting it in the base model. We tend to focus a lot on specs on HN, but the money saved from the 8GB potentially frees up additional resources for features that a typical user might well care about much more (e.g. speaker and microphone quality – often neglected by competing manufacturers).
It seems like a scam to list at $1,600, but then, surprise, you need an extra $200 to get to the level of RAM you expect in a professional device.
I assume you are right if they only go up to 24 max, but they should explain better why 8 Gb is acceptable.
The thinkpad x220 from 2012 could host 16gb ram already.
I really can’t understand why 8gb ram is still so common. A lot of performances issue would just disappear with more ram.