Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough

Comments

• Jtee@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  And now all the fan boys and girls will go out and buy another MacBook. That’s planned obsolescence for ya

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  • bamboo@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Someone who is buying a MacBook with the minimum specs probably isn’t the same person that’s going to run out and buy another one to get one specific feature in Xcode. Not trying to defend Apple here, but if you were a developer who would care about this, you probably would have paid for the upgrade when you bought it in the first place (or couldn’t afford it then or now).

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    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Well no, not this specific scenario, because of course devs will generally buy machines with more RAM.

      But there are definitely people who will buy an 8GB Apple laptop, run into performance issues, then think “oh I must need to buy a new MacBook”.

      If Apple didn’t purposely manufacture ewaste-tier 8GB laptops, that would be minimised.

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  • mp3@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And why they solder the RAM, or even worse make it part of the SoC.

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    • rockSlayer@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There are real world performance benefits to ram being as close as possible to the CPU, so it’s not entirely without merit. But that’s what CAMM modules are for.

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    • cm0002@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      BUT BUT you’ll get 5% fasTEr SpeED!!! And MOrE seCuRiTy!!!

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    • balder1991@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      In this particular case the RAM is part of the chip as an attempt to squeeze more performance. Nowadays, processors have become too fast but it’s useless if the rest of the components don’t catch up. The traditional memory architecture has become a bottleneck the same way HHDs were before the introduction of SSDs.

      You’ll see this same trend extend to Windows laptops as they shift to Snapdragon processors too.

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  • Mongostein@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And the apple haters will keep making this exact same comment on every post using their 3rd laptop in ten years while I’m still using my 2014 MacBook daily with no issues.

    Be more original.

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    • Jtee@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Nice attempt to justify planned obsolescence. To think apple hasn’t done this time and time again, you’d have to be a fool

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    • stoly@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      This is pretty much it. People really just want to find reasons to hate Apple over the past 2 - 3 years. You’re right, though, your Mac can run easily for 10+ years. You’re good basically until the web browsers no longer support your OS version, which is more in the 12-15 year range.

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    • helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They will keep making the same comment as long as it keeps being true.

      • Typed from my 2009 ThinkPad

      Meanwhile your 2014 MacBook stopped receiving OS updates 3 years ago.

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    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I still have a fully functioning Windows 95 machine.

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  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    These were obsolete the minute they were made, though… So it’s not really planned obsolescence. I got one for free (MacBook Air), and it’s always been trash.

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    • bamboo@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I have an M2 MBA and it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned or used, second to the M3 Max MBP I get to use for work. Silent, battery lasts all week, interface is fast and runs all my dev tools like a charm. Zero issues with the device.

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• Hux@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This isn’t a big deal.

  If you’re developing in Xcode, you did not buy an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years.

  If you are just using your Mac for Facebook and email, I don’t think you know what RAM is.

  If you know what RAM is, and you bought an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years, then you are likely self-aware of your limited demands and/or made an informed compromise.

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  • filister@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If you know what RAM is, and you bought an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years, then you are likely self-aware of your limited demands and/or made an informed compromise.

    Or you simply refuse to pay $200+ to get a proper machine. Like seriously, 8Gb Mac’s should have disappeared long ago, but nope, Apple stick to them with their planned obsolescence tactics on their hardware, and stubbornly refusing to admit that in 2023 releasing a MacBook with soldered 8Gb of RAM is wholy inadequate.

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    • Specal@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I get around this by simply not buying a Mac. Free’s up so much money for ram.

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    • sverit@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, the 8GB model’s purpose is to make an “starting at $xxxx” price tag possible.

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  • DJDarren@thelemmy.club ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m not gonna stand up and declare that 8gb is absolutely fine, because in very short order it won’t be. But yeah, currently for an average use case, it is.

    My work Mac mini has 8gb. It’s a 2014 so can’t be upgraded, but for the tasks I ask of it it’s ok. Sure, it gets sluggish if I’m using the Win11 VM I sometimes need, but generally I don’t really have any issues doing regular office tasks.

    That said, I sometimes gets a bee in my bonnet about it, so open Activity Monitor to see what’s it’s doing, and am shocked by how much RAM some websites consume in open tabs in Safari.

    8gb is generally ok on low end gear, but devs are working very hard to ensure that it’s not.

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  • stoly@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Funny: knowing that you only get one shot, I bought 32GB of RAM for my Mac Mini like 1.5 years ago. I figured that it gave me the best shot of keeping it usable past 5 years.

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• _number8_@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  imagine showing this post to someone in 1995

  shit has gotten too bloated these days. i mean even in my head 8GB still sounds like ‘a lot’ of RAM and 16GB feels extravagant

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I still can’t fully accept that 1GB is not normal, 2GB is not very good, and 4GB is not all you ever gonna need.

    If only it got bloated for some good reasons.

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    • Aux@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      High quality content is the reason. Sit in a terminal and your memory usage will be low.

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    • SpaceCadet@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I remember when I got my first computer with 1GB of RAM.

      It was like: holy shit, now I can put all the things in RAM. I will never run out.

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    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The moment you use a file that is bigger than 1GB, that computer will explode.

      Some of us do more than just browse Lemmy.

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  • cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I chalk it up to lazy rushed development. Good code is art.

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    • Aux@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s not true at all. The code doesn’t take much space. The content does. Your high quality high res photos, 4K HDR videos, lossless 96kHz audio, etc.

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  • Bjornir@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I have a VPS that uses 1GB of RAM, it has 6-7 apps running in docker containers which isn’t the most ram efficient method of running apps.

    A light OS really helps, plus the most used app that uses a lot of RAM actually reduce their consumption if needed, but use more when memory is free, the web browser. On one computer I have chrome running with some hundreds of MB used, instead of the usual GBs because RAM is running out.

    So it appears that memory is full,but you can actually have a bit more memory available that is “hidden”

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    • derpgon@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Same here. When idle, the apps basically consume nothing. If they are just a webserver that calls to some PHP script, it basically takes no RAM at all when idle, and some RAM when actually used.

      Websites and phone apps are such an unoptimized pieces if garbage that they are the sole reason for high RAM requirements. Also lots of background bloatware.

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    • Specal@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      This is resource reservation, it happens at an OS level. If chrome is using what appears to be alot of ram, it will be freed up once either the OS or another application requires it.

      It just exists so that an application knows that if it needs that resource it can use X amount for now.

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  • mycodesucks@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Absolutely.

    Bad, rushed software that wires together 200 different giant libraries just to use a fraction of them and then run it in a sandboxed container with three daemons it needs for some reason doesn’t mean “8 Gb isn’t enough”, it means write tighter, better software.

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    • AnxiousOtter@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That ship has long sailed unfortunately. The industry gave up on optimization in favour of praying that hardware advancements can keep up with the bloat.

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  • stoly@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You just have to watch your favorite tablet get slower year after year to understand that a lot of this is artificial. They could make applications that don’t need those resources but would never do so.

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  • Aux@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You can always switch to a text based terminal and free up your memory. Just don’t compain that YouTube doesn’t play 4K videos anymore.

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    • SpaceCadet@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Just don’t compain that YouTube doesn’t play 4K videos anymore.

      strange, mpv handles it just fine

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  • jas0n@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Guy from '95: “I bet it’s lightning fast though…”

    No dude. It peaks pretty soon. In my time, Microsoft is touring a chat program that starts in under 10 seconds. And they’re genuinely proud of it.

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    • uis@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      And latency is more shit that it ever was

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  • Shadywack@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    We measure success by how many GB’s we have consumed when the only keys depressed from power on to desktop is our password. This shit right here is the real issue.

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  • qqq@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I once went for lower CAS timing 2x 128MB ram sticks (256 MB) instead of 2x 256s with slower speeds because I thought 512MB was insane overkill. Realized how wrong I was when trying to play Star Wars galaxies mmorpg when a lot of people were on the screen it started swapping to disk. Look up the specs for an IBM Aptiva, first computer my parents bought, and you’ll understand how 512MB can seem like a lot.

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• resetbypeer@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Opens chrome on a 8GB Mac. Sees lifespan of SSD being reduced by 50%. After 2-3 years of heavy usage SSD starts to get errors. Apple solution: buy a new one. No wonder they are 2nd/3rd wealthiest company on the planet.

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  • otp@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    buy a new one.

    Buy a new SSD and swap out the old one?

    …but a new SSD, right??

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    • WereCat@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      SSD is soldered to the board. With only 8GB you’ll be using the swap partiton a lot so for anything exceeding 8GB of RAM you will be using the SSD as a slower “RAM” which will wear it’s lifespan down by constantly writing/reading into it’ s swap partition.

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    • resetbypeer@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You don’t get the most valuable company by selling an SSD. So, yeah a new Mac of course.

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    • 31337@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think SSDs are also soldered to the mainboard on most apple products.

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    • ebc@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Oh, my sweet summer child…

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    • piranhaphish@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Image

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    • vingetcxly@thelemmy.club ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Nah ur nat doin that with apple. Cmon just buy a new PC! Wa don car abt the env! Who cares anyway! Cmon not that expensive

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    • noerdman@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      staring Anakin

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• KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They moved to on-die RAM for a reason: To nickel and dime yo ass.

  I needed to expense a Mac Mini for iOS development, and everyone (Me, the company, our purchasing department) was baffled at how much it cost to get 16 GB. And they only go up to 24GB. Imagine how much they’ll charge for 32 in a year!

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s technically a bit faster, but yeah, I think charging more is the bigger motivation.

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    • dojan@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Companies primarily make decisions to maximise the profitability of someone and it’s never the consumer.

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    • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s a bit first but if their primary motivation was performance improvements they wouldn’t be soldering 16 GB.

      If you’re going to weld shoes to your feet, you better at keast make sure that they’re good shoes.

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    • Zink@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Sounds like one of those rare cases where engineering and marketing might agree on something.

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  • stoly@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Mac Mini is meant to be sort of the starter desktop. For higher end uses, they want you on the Mac Studio, an iMac, or a Mac Pro.

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• FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  HP seems to think 4 GB is an acceptable amount of RAM to put in a modern notebook (although they don’t charge even close to what Apple charges).

  www.amazon.com/…/B0947BJ67M

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  • woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Shipping with Windows S. That’s Microsoft’s version of a Chromebook for some light web browsing for 188 dollars. I wouldn’t buy it but this doesn’t look like a rip off at this price point.

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  • homura1650@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    At a $188 price point. An addition 4GB of memory would probably add ~$10 to the cost, which is over a 5% increase. However, that is not the only component they cheaped out on. The linked unit also only has 64GB of storage, which they should probably increase to have a usable system …

    And soon you find that you just reinvented a mid-market device instead of the low-market device you were trying to sell.

    4GB of ram is still plenty to have a functioning computer. It will not be as capable of a more powerful computer, but that comes with the territory of buying the low cost version of a product.

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  • 31337@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I was looking at notebooks at Walmart the other day, and I was amazed that they almost all had less or the same amount of RAM as my phone.

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  • cultsuperstar@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Sounds about right for HP.

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  • uis@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And worst part: they installed Windows on it.

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  • vingetcxly@thelemmy.club ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    4gb is acceptable. Some people just want a phone with a keyboard and bugger screen. Depends on the use case tho.

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• egeres@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Why do they sometimes struggle so much with “obvious things”? We wouldn’t have a type-C iphone if the EU didn’t pressured them to do so

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  • helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They don’t “struggle”. They are intentional and malicious decisions meant to drive revenue, as they have been since the beginning.

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  • TheSealStartedIt@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    💸💸💸

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  • dan@upvote.au ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They didn’t have a reason to switch to USB-C, and several reasons to avoid it for as long as possible. Their old Lightning connector (and the big 30-pin connector that came before it) was proprietary, and companies had to pay a royalty to Apple for every port and connector they manufactured. They made a lot of money off of the royalties.

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• SpeedLimit55@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment. Heck my M1 Macbook Air is even good with basic Photoshop/Illustrator work and light AV editing. I certainly prefer my PC laptop with 32GB and a dedicated GPU but its power adapter weighs more than a Macbook Air.

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  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    8GB would be fine for basic use if it was upgradable. With soldered RAM the laptop becomes e-waste when 8GB is no longer enough.

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  • Specal@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I mean I develop software on an 8GB laptop. Most of the time it’s fine, when I need more I have a desktop with 128GB ram available.

    Really depends what type of software you’re making. If you’re using python a few TB might be required.

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  • cheddar@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment.

    The thing is, basic office/school/work tasks can be done on any laptop that costs twice less than an 8GB MacBook.

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• Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  8GB of dedicated VRAM is hardly enough these days…

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• maxinstuff@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Oh man, I remember so many people defended 8GB since the M1 first came out (and since).

  I always argued it would significantly reduce the lifetimes of these machines if you bought one, not just because you’d be swapping a lot more on the (soldered in BTW) ssd, but because after a few years of updates it would become unbearably slow, or hardware would fail, or both.

  Didn’t stop people constantly “tHe aRchITecTuRE iS cOmPlETelY diFFeRenT!!!”

  Sure it’s different, but it’s still just a computer. A technical person can still look at the spec sheet and calculate effective performance accounting for bus widths etc.

  Disclosure: I bought a top spec 16GB M1 Mac Air on launch and have been extremely happy with it - it’s still going strong.

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• JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They should do 4Gb. I hear M3 mac’s make it seem like 8Gb.

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• RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I can’t believe, there’s no Linux reference yet!

  Give your “8 gigs not enough” hardware to one of us and see it revived running faster than whatever you’re running now with your subpar OS.

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• small44@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  From who? My mother who only use facebook, youtube and googling don’t need 8gb

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• helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I don’t consider that an “admission” at all…

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• poorlytunedAstring@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  For the record, on Windows 10, I’m using 9GB (rounded up from 8.something) to run Firefox and look at this website, can’t forget Discord inviting itself to my party in the background, and the OS. I had to close tabs to get down here. Streams really eat the RAM up.

  Throw a game in there, with FF open for advice and Discord running for all the usual gaming reasons, and yeah, way over.

  Notice I haven’t even touched any productivity stuff that demands more.

  8? Eat a penis, Apple. Fuckin clown hardware.

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• Nicoleism101@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I have everything from apple but I know that 8gb is basically planned obsolescence in a disguise

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• uis@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  To be fair there are only two reasons I hate it:

  1. People incorrectly use term UMA
  2. It’s crApple

  On Linux if you don’t compile rust or firefox 8GB is fine. 4 is fine too.

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• Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’d love to have 8GB of RAM. The SOC I’m working with has only 2K ;-)

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• 0x0@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The Voyager space probes disagree.

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• superb@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  My daily driver is an 8gb MacBook Air, I’m living pretty comfortably lol

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• ssebastianoo@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I have a macbook air m2 with 8gb of ram and I can even run ollama, never had ram problems, I don’t get all the hate

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• ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Wake me up when phones have enough ram to run good voice to text engines on the phone itself

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• Muffi@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Every time I compare specs to prices on Apples website, I get irrationally angry.

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