Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB on a PC
theregister.com
theregister.com
The 16GB pc equivalent, especially for equivalent pricing of a mbp is going to have a video card with dedicated vram in addition. A $1549 dell xps has a 6GB Nvidia card, with options for 4GB-8GB cards.
8GB equivalent to 22GB is the real comparison we should be making and the answer is obviously no. Especially with all the other io performance cuts apple has been making.
Now you will say theres far more bloatware on the windows laptop, especially in a corporate environment necessitating all that ram, and thats true.
For light use 8gb would be plenty, but its not going to cut it for power users.
Im also curious what the "memory compression" they use is, i would imagine its similar to linux compressed in memory swap. Unless they are just talking standard gpu texture compression and such.
It’s possible that Apple Silicon has some hardware acceleration for doing this in-place memory compression, but otherwise it’s pretty old news, which makes this marketing shtick even more frustrating. 8GB was borderline not enough even back when memory compression was added to macOS (maybe ~10 years ago?).
So has Windows.
With multi-core CPUs, it’s easy to do so without impacting performance in most cases.
That's fine for a low-end laptop in 2023, and if you're upfront about that tradeoff.
For a ~$1500 laptop, that's just marketing bs.
It’s like AMD saying our megahertz are better than your megahertz. It may be true but people just look at standard numbers.
Like theregister puts it:
> There's a reason why we used to refer to Apple as the Cupertino idiot-tax operation.
It has been known for years that megahertz are a terrible metric to measure CPU performance. The peak of that discussion was during the launch of Pentium 4, where it was proven that the IPC was much worse when comparing to a previous Pentium even though it had a lot more the clock speed.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4 (Microarchitecture)
I told him many times that he could have gotten a computer at one third the price that would have done essentially the same thing just as well, but he doesn't believe it. He thinks Apple is obviously better and obviously longer. Even though I'm tech geek using Apple hardware before he even knew Apple existed. He also has a fetish for Apple cables and chargers, because somehow, they are the only ones who know how to build those things (not that they are bad per se, but there are better options at half the price...).
It's really a lot like a religion or some sort of cult at this point. Unsurprisingly this guy has a lot of beliefs about many things; true Apple fanboys are very often like that.
As far as I'm concerned, Apple stuff is pretty good but the pricing just doesn't make sense, especially nowadays considering of the locked everything down...
This is amazing to witness as a Linux person that is apathetic to the Windows/Mac thing. Windows people never do this stuff.
Interesting. So my sound samples magically shrink by a factor of two?
Just to nitpick, on Linux it depends on your distribution (or yourself) having enabled zram; some modern distributions enable it by default on recent releases, but yours might not have.
You can run 'zramctl' to see the current status of the zram devices.
@2800 vs. $4200. That's $1400 cheaper, in today's dollars, than what I paid back then - and I'm getting a helluva lot better machine for it, and I should be able to get a machine I can use for at least 8-10 years.
Is it the cheapest route? Probably not. Is MacOS the best OS today? For my purposes, yes, but it's not a hands-down yes. Yes, this machine costs more than $1599, $1200 more. But it's a machine I'm planning on using for 10 years so that works out to $10 per month. I think it's worth it.
Apple is just tricking people that they get "Pro" machine, but in reality it is not "Pro".
The only times I’ve ever known that I needed more than 8 GiB on my Air is working with VMs. This is presumably a common use case for devs via Docker, but for anything else I question the actual need for more.
The properties surely vary among drives... but this isn't worth much concern
I'd throw a computer swapping this much out the window before the NAND would give up
[1] https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/intern...
I expect nothing more than OEM support in that warranty... and that things generally continue to work outside of it.
Techreport (and others, before we go down that path too) tested those along with many other drives. They were written to for more than a year and a half continuously.
Sure, Samsung and others only agree to financially be on the hook for N bytes. The point is, the drive can handle it - and the situation doesn't make sense.
Let's take a step back or two. We're focusing on numbers one would never even have the patience to reach while swapping
... and didn't walk away from it for days, if not weeks, while it was swapping. Ignore the numbers. The proposed problem is ridiculous.
For anyone else wondering, that test did use one TLC disc (Samsung 840). It had a major issue at 300TB, then went on till 800 (failed somewhere around 900).
Not many new MLC/SLC in the consumer market.
https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-t...
Unless you meant another test?
That's a good/fair distinction - QLC or whatever now is probably less reliable.
My point remains, though. Worrying about the lifetime of the drive by way of memory/swapping is silly.
You'd have to leave the box unusable for days, if not weeks, to meaningfully contribute to wear.
I rarely ever buy new and usually got hand-me-down equipment at work. The last brand new equipment I was issued on the job was probably 2013.
At some point, they went to a 4 year cycle. Employees can keep equipment as long as they want - 4 years is the minimum to request new hardware (without a reason and approval). The give away disappeared as well, not sure what happens to the old stuff today.
Back when I was on Windows/Dell, that 3-4 year replacement cycle for crucial. The systems just didn't hold up over time. Even more so for people who travelled. Now that I'm on a Mac, the hardware seems to hold up much better (aside from the occasional poor design like the keyboards of ~5 years ago).
The arguments I've seen defending Apple seem to boil down to one of a few different base arguments:
* The software is better optimized! (dubious, needs evidence)
* Even when the software isn't as optimized, the OS does memory compression so swapping doesn't happen as often! (true, but so does Windows and Linux, so it's not a differentiator for Macs)
* Okay but when swapping does happen, the SSDs are super fast! (true, but not any faster than a comparably-equipped PC, and often slower if you're looking at PCs in the same price range as the Mac)
I could be missing something but I haven't yet seen any credible argument backed by evidence that Macs are anything but mediocre with 8GB of memory.
BUT, even if there were such arguments, it would add literally a few dollars to the BOM to make 16GB the base, so why are we all bending over backwards to defend Apple?
edited to add: don't tell me that it would cost more than a few dollars to make 16GB the base -- another common false argument is that the memory in a mac is somehow "special." It's not, it's completely standard LPDDR4X or LPDDR5, sourced from the same suppliers as everyone else uses.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/17qhxbl/ssd_ben...
Add to that the fact that the terminal is nix instead of Windows (Powershell is not the same, and if you’re falling back to WSL then congrats on admitting nix tooling is superior), and it’s a very compelling machine.
That’s why used the term mediocre, and I stand by it.
I don’t have much to say about the terminal stuff other than that my personal thinkpad that runs Linux does the terminal thing a hell of a lot better than my Mac does.
My work Mac is perma-docked, but my personal Air spends most of its time on my lap, and I greatly value the battery life.
But I've been doing my usual (Firefox with many tabs, VS Code with a bunch of tabs and a couple windows, a Next.js dev server or two, multiple terminals, sometimes even more apps open) and I haven't noticed even a slight struggle to handle the load, no frame drops or anything.
Of course, it only supports 1 external monitor instead of the 2 I was using with the Pro. I'm sure it would struggle with the heavier VM/docker workloads. But it handles medium demands just fine.
Come on. Smartphones have 8GB ram now.
I took a quick look at the site of a major retailer here, and the first smartphone I clicked on (Moto E22) has 4GB of RAM; I then clicked on five other smartphone models, and of them, three also have 4GB of RAM (the other two have 2GB and 3GB). My own main smartphone (which is neither of these models, and is a reasonably high-end model) also has 4GB of RAM. From this quick look, it seems 8GB of RAM isn't that common for smartphones.
Your example phone is less than $100 and they can provide 4GB RAM in that price range.
MacBook Pro with 8GB is $1600. I guess your comment just proved parent comments point.
Motorola Edge (2023), $349.99 (USD) has 8GB of RAM.
They work differently from what you're probably used to from older/different systems.
They don't run into a brick wall when swapping, in fact they swap all the time (very heavily; a lot of a running Application can be swapped-out on normal use). You're never really "out of RAM", you're just increasing memory pressure which gradually impacts the system's responsiveness.
Though I might add is that at some point they do fail catastrophically (extreme lag sometimes leading to crashes) once the pressure goes into the red.
I’m not sure what has changed, but it definitely doesn’t feel like that anymore, even after a fresh reinstall.
I quite like their hardware as well as their software, but moves like this continue to sully my view of the company.
Or is there something special about Macs I don't know.