8gb in a “pro” machine is rediculous. And the 8gb == 16gb thing was always rubbish.
And at this point the cost difference couldn’t possibly be so stark that they have to make it a great leap in price. I think they offer these 8GB models for non power-users. People doing spreadsheets and presentations all day, but honestly even then 8GB of memory just seems like they’re cheaping out.
Even then, 8GB isn’t really enough. Get a few browser tabs going (with full apps integrated) in a Zoom meeting and you’ll run out of memory right quick.
Hell, I regularly use all of my 32GB of memory. Granted, with my job and ADHD, I often have 20+ tabs open in each of several browser windows at the same time with multiple documents and spreadsheets and other apps all running.
But, still. 16GB+ is non-negotiable for me in an entry-level laptop today. And there are decent options available for under $500 CAD rn.
Hell, I regularly use all of my 32GB of memory
On what operating system?
I have 16GB on my Mac and half of it goes to a virtual machine. And I’m definitely a heavy user - five browser windows open with who knows how many tabs is pretty common. An IDE or even two, plus all sorts of other stuff, and a bunch of electron apps too.
MacOS definitely uses “all of the memory”, but often at least a few gigabytes (as in, almost half my memory aside from the VM) is dedicated to caching files on disk. And with a fast SSD that’s not buying you much performance.
My company is deploying new basic, mass-produced, small form-factor office PCs. No graphics-editing, no programming, integrated graphics card, just basically spreadsheets and web browsers. The standard is that each of them have 32gb of memory. 8 is ridiculous…
Computers are cheap, employee time is expensive. Giving your employees computers that limit or slow them down is a very poor investment. Maxing RAM, CPU and GPU even for relatively basic work can make some sense if you look at it that way (within reason, dont need to give everyone 4090’s, but definitely go better than an etch-a-sketch :) ).
Is it just me or is 16GB even on the low side for a pro user? I have 128 on my desktop and 80GB usage is normal for what I do (software dev; lots of local virtualization)
All I do is game and stream, occasionally edit some photos and 32GB is the minimum for me now.
Yeah, this is pretty much what I thought. So I don’t understand why people are pretending that eight or 16 is going to cut it.
Maybe they are just happy purposefully limiting usage due to a constraint that they don’t realize is easy to raise.
I like to have 3 4k monitors and four desktops and 10 chrome tabs opened on each one along with SQL stuff and a half dozen vscode windows, and a full visual studio or 2, wsl2 running with a dozen docker containers, plus all of the collaboration programs like Telegram and Discord. And I don’t like to close any of that down when I go play flight simulator. So the extra couple hundos is nothing so that I can be sure to never run out of ram.
The M3 is powerful enough that even 32GB can be a constraint for what you’d be able to run on it
That entirely depends on if what you’re running requires lots of ram or is more cpu bound. I wouldn’t conflate the two as directly related.
Answer probably depends on the nature of your usage?
I have a 16gb m1 air, and it is okay for development, but i dont have any VMs (except docker i guess, and also android VMs). I have run out of RAM once, with multiple pycharm/clion/browser windows open. Its not great, but its livable. I run out of screen realestate first usually. I use it for personal projects to kill time on trains, so not super heavy stuff.
But otherwise yeah, more is better. I have 64 gb in my desktop and 96gb in my work PC, and occasionally i can hit the limits there.
Let’s be honest 8gb is lower end for a phone now never mind a computer. Then again if someone just wants to watch YouTube or shop on the Web it’s fine.
Shouldn’t be on anything named pro though.
… one of the tests here is editing an 8K video. That’s not an every day use case.
There are pro users that don’t need anywhere near that much memory.
For example QLab. It’s definitely “pro” software - but it’s just automation software and commonly used for tasks like sending a 20 character text string to another computer on the network when you hit a button… it can do more complex things but most of the time the cheapest Raspberry Pi has enough compute power (you can’t run it, or anything like it, on Linux however).
A MacBook Air would be useless, because it doesn’t have HDMI, and that often is needed. Professionals don’t want to use dongles.
While most people running QLab won’t be too budget sensitive… they might be buying six Macs that won’t be used to do anything else ever*,… so since it only uses a few hundred megabytes of RAM why spend Apple’s premium prices on 16GB?
(* half of them will probably never even be used, since they’d be backups powered on and ready to swap in with a few seconds notice if the main one fails, which almost never happens)
There are pro users that don’t need anywhere near that much memory.
Well, every computer is ”Pro” if you take professional writers as an example. But this is a marketing term anyways, not a definition. If it was an actual definition then I’d take it to cover ”most professional computing tasks”.
It’s the year 2033, Apple releases the M11 MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM.
Apple enthusiasts claim it’s literally double the amount of RAM they need for their workload. They proceed to watch Netflix in a google chrome window where it’s the only tab open on their 2500 dollar computer.
It does. I have 16GB on my Mac, and half of it is given over to a virtual machine running Linux.
Chrome (and 20 or so other things) runs fine on the remaining 8GB.
Mac SSDs are fast, but they are not nearly fast enough to replace RAM - especially in a UMA where RAM speed is critical to performance. 8GB in a Pro machine is not enough. It’s barely enough for a ChromeBook in this age of electron and web app everything. The prosumer market needs 16GB starting, and while we’re on the topic we need 512GB standard storage too.
8gb RAM and 256 gb storage is perfectly fine for a pro-ish machine in 2023. What’s not fine is the price point they are offering it (but if idiots still buy that, that’s on them and not apple). I’ve been using a 8gb ram 256 gb storage Thinkpad for lecturing and light video editing (e.g. zoom recordings) this past year, it works perfectly fine. But as soon as I have to run my own research code, back to the 2022 Xeon I go.
Is it Apple’s fault people treat browser tabs as a bookmarking mechanism? No. Is it unethical for Apple to say that their 8GB model fits this weirdly common use case? Definitely.
Pro-ish is not Pro though. I could barely run Docker and PyCharm with a few Safari tabs without it paging to SSD and chugging on an 8GB machine, never mind an entire k8ts cluster. If for some reason you also need a VM you are going to feel it Mr. Krabs with only 8GBs of RAM. Any sort of multi-tasking require more than 8GB these days, and as an SRE I’m not just running my dev environment. Slack, Email, Teams, and the dozen other productivity and business apps all eat RAM I cannot spare on an 8GB system. I’m not worried about price because my field in general isn’t sensitive to that, but perhaps Apple is trying to please both crowds here? IDK. Like you allude to, heavy or extended workloads go on dedicated servers, but I still need to be able to develop for those systems and the thought they sell a “Pro” machine to anyone with such anemic specs is concerning.
I don’t think either of us is the target audience here. I can see a “cheaper” (questionable) Pro laptop being useful for students going into college with a limited budget. An undergrad CS/graphic design degree shouldn’t tax an 8gb machine too much, assuming students shut down everything else when doing their once-a-semester major rendering/compiling/model training. If people just want Macbook pro software with more ports, a “cheaper” machine is better than none. Personally, I would still get a used/refurbished machine though.
That being said, my current laptop workload tends to be emacs, qpdfview, Firefox, and tmux on EL9. For the remaining stuff, I usually just spin up a VM then ssh/xrdp into it. As for slack, teams, jabber, etc, I’m happy to report I’ve been out of industry/IT for 1+ years and don’t plan on going back anytime soon. For all I care, Apple can call their models unicorn edition. As long as it sells it’s not stupid.
It’s the ultimate cash grab in my opinion. Just imagine how much faster the SSD will wear out from all the swap that’ll be needed. The SOLDERED SSD.
