8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

Comments

• ApeNo1@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I think they simply mean analogous in price.

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  • iminahurry@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What, no! 8 GB Apple RAM costs 4 times that of 16 GB regular DDR4 RAM module.

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• db2@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Bullshit.

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• LEDZeppelin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  My dick is 2 inches long. That’s analogous to 10 inches on Mars.

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  • bingbong@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Enough with this Martian slander

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• Synthead@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  RAM is RAM. If you’re able to manage it better, that’s nice, but programs will still use whatever RAM they were designed to use. If you need to store 5 GiB of something in memory, what happens with the other 2.5 GiB, if they claim that it’s 2x as “efficient?”

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  • NIB@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    RAM is not RAM though. If a RAM is twice as fast than some other RAM, then it can swap shit back and forth really fast, making it more efficient per size. Because Apple is soldering ram next to the chip, it enables them to make their RAM a lot faster. M3 max’s ram has 6x more bandwidth than ddr5 and a lot lower latency too.

    Also macos needs less ram in general. Is 8gB ram enough? No. But i would bet money on 12gB m3 over 16gB pc to have fewer ram issues and faster performance.

    Most of the things that “use” ram on every day pc use, dont need ram. It is just parked assets, webpages, etc. Things that if you have a really fast ram, can be re-cached to ram pretty fast, especially if your storage is also really fast.

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    • azuth@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      RAM transfer rate is is not important when swapping as the bottleneck will be storage transfer rate when reading and writing to swap.

      Which I doubt Apple can make as fast as DDR4 bandwidth.

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    • uis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Because Apple is soldering ram next to the chip, it enables them to make their RAM a lot faster.

      What a bullshit I see.

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  • thejml@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Definitely true, but I will say Mac has pretty decent compression on RAM. I’m assuming that’s why they feel this way. My old MBP 2013 had 8, and I used it constantly until earlier this year when I finally upgraded. It was doing pretty well all things considered, mostly because of on the fly RAM compression.

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    • olympicyes@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Lower end macs tend to have slower SSDs so this could be a double whammy on these machines.

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    • Sylvartas@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Pretty sure windows has been doing some pretty efficient RAM compression on its own since 98SE or something

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    • uis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Did you know that you could do RAM compression on “old” MBP 2013? All you had to do is install Linux and enable memory compression.

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• raptir@lemdro.id ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Holy crap, apple charges $200 to add 8GB of RAM. I just bought 32GB of DDR5 for the Framework I have on order for $95.

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  • AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.

    Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.

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    • Wolo@lemmy.wtf ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That might be true but it’s also embarrassing for all pc brands who get slaughtered by apples performance as soon as they actually attempt to make things. For example there isn’t a single laptop in the windows world that can match anything apple does

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    • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The infamous Apple Water…

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  • WallEx@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And now look at the actual chip prices and you’ll know, why apple is so fucking rich

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  • abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    DDR5 runs at 52GB/s. Macs run at up to 800GB/s (depending on the model, but it’s never as slow as DDR5). It’s not really comparible.

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    • Albbi@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Huge doubt here. Apple RAM is LPDDR5. That’s Low Power DDR5.

      Citing this site:

      LPDDR5 runs up to 6400 Mbps with many low-power and RAS features including a novel clocking architecture for easier timing closure. DDR5 DRAMs with a data-rate up to 6400 Mbps support higher density including a dual-channel DIMM topology for higher channel efficiency and performance.

      I’m looking at the Apple M2 Wikipedia page and it has the 800GB/s number you have, but that’s gotta be something like RAM speed times number of RAM unit blocks for overall bandwidth.

      Apple RAM is not magically 15 times faster than DDR5.

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    • BURN@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Faster isn’t everything. Less, faster ram is only applicable to a few application, where more, slower ram is going to benefit everything.

      It’s definitely comparable because that’s what it’s competing against. 16gb of Ram is 16gb of Ram, no matter how fast it is. Pricing it at 2-3x the cost for any other equivalent isn’t competitive at all.

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    • jj4211@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You’re comparing single channel performance to entire system performance.

      That statement simply means the most highest of the high end Mac has 16 memory channels (admittedly more than EPYCs 12, but EPYC is in the ballpark). The mere mortal entry M2 has two channels, just like almost every desktop/laptop grade x86 CPU. They are not getting 800 out of only 8Gb of modules.

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    • GeneralVincent@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’m really interested in this kinda thing, do you have sources I can read?

      What I found was DDR5 runs at a max of 64 GB/s, and the M2 Pro runs at 400 GB/s. I can’t find anything about it being faster due to running in parallel.

      Also, the PS5 allegedly has over 400GB/s bandwidth just for perspective

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    • Albbi@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Sorry you got down voted so hard. Your comment spawned a lot of discussion which is a good thing.

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  • Gruntyfish@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Won’t someone please consider that Apple has to spend all the extra effort soldering the ram to the motherboard?? Only $200 extra is a steal!

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  • AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.

    Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.

    source
  • AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.

    Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.

    source
  • AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.

    Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.

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• anon_8675309@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  More apple gaslighting.

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  • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Since 1990.

    I remember their CPU cycles were “worth more”.

    They also always cheapens out on stuff, even when they used “PC” hardware, CPU from 4 years ago etc and RAM & HDD/SSD were so small you basicallyhad to buy a “next tier” machine (much more expensive).

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    • superschurke@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I remember their CPU cycles were “worth more”.

      But this exists… There’s still differences amongst PC CPUs in per-cycle performance…

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    • uis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It is not theirs, it is IBM’s. Or rather Freescale’s, now bought out by NXP. Was true at the time.

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• mlg@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Lol no. My poor linux kernel barely keeps everything stable in 8GB and even then by shoving stuff into swapon zram.

  I can just barely run a game and have a ton of FF tabs open + an IDE + discord + multiple desktops

  WIndows basically dies once you hit the swap, and it usually starts at like 2GB used.

  I’m assuming MacOS lies between Linux and Windows in memory management and performance, so it’ll definitely start lagging if you open too much.

  And this is all ignoring the fact that this is a scam statement that should be struck down by the FTC. You can’t call an 8 gallon gas tank equivalent to a 16 gallon gas tank even if your car has better MPG. In that case you advertise the MPG. And in Apple’s case, it would be something like “X% less RAM usage per system process” which we all know doesn’t actually exist because its snake ass Apple.

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  • xts@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And this is all ignoring the fact that this is a scam statement that should be struck down by the FTC. You can’t call an 8 gallon gas tank equivalent to a 16 gallon gas tank even if your car has better MPG.

    lol good luck when Tesla literally charges $12k for “full self driving” software that does not do what’s advertised nor do what was promised over the last 10 years the CEO has been selling it. FTC and other orgs are toothless when it comes to false advertising, they’ll do nothing.

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  • kalleboo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What helps these machines are built-in SSDs that operate at about 2 GB/s. If swapping out 4 GB of background tabs you’re not looking out when you switch to your IDE takes 2 seconds, you’re not really going to notice it. Only if you’re actually trying to operate with all the memory at the same time (big Kubernetes test suites or something) is when the swapping becomes noticeable.

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• Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Image

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• bulwark@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  So are they going to make the software smaller? What about iOS? Physically how does 8GB = 16GB? Can’t wait to see Photoshop open a RAW and run out of memory. I will say the M2 CPU was pretty slick and if I got one cheap I’d throw Linux on there.

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  • BURN@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This ^

    Architecture changes can happen as much as they want, but there’s certain tasks that require a fixed amount of memory, and between that and poor developer optimization I doubt these improvements will be seen by the end user.

    The CPUs really are great. It’s hard to want any other laptop when the performance/battery life are so great on the M series

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    • jmp242@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I find it pretty easy to want other laptops because I don’t use Apple stuff because I dislike their UX. I know I’m weird but if I never have to get close to OSX or iOS I’m pretty happy.

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    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      there’s certain tasks that require a fixed amount of memory

      Sure… and 8GB of memory is enough to edit photos (raw or jpeg is irrelevant by the way - once decompressed they both use the same amount of RAM and they are decompressed when you’re editing them).

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• BURN@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I call BS. My 8gb Mac Mini is terrible and constantly running out of memory.

  I’m in need of a new laptop, but the lack of upgradeable RAM in these has really made it hard to justify. A minimum of 32gb, preferred 64gb (photographer working with very large files) costs hundreds extra and can’t be done by myself anymore. It’s also hard to find these ones used as the people who buy them have a specific use case and don’t replace them often.

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  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Same here with my M1 MBA. Simply opening a browser with a bunch of tabs + a couple of productivity apps eats up your RAM.

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    • scytale@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Thanks for sharing. I was eyeing the M2 MBA for my wife because I’m pretty satisfied with my work M1 MBP (32GB RAM), but it seems even apple silicon won’t really do much with just 8GB RAM anyway.

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  • LazaroFilm@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Is it an M3?

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    • BURN@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      M1, but same idea. One app can take 8gb of RAM easy on it. No matter the improvements to the architecture, they’re not going to be able to solve for poor implementation on the dev side

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  • uis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m in need of a new laptop, but the lack of upgradeable RAM in these has really made it hard to justify.

    Framework. Framework or desktop computer.

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    • BURN@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Framework doesn’t fit the usecase, and I’m not running Linux or windows on a laptop

      I need a laptop with specifically huge battery life, a mainstream OS and Adobe compatibility.

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• onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Absolutely hilarious. But I’ve heard MacBoys parrot this exact same line of propaganda for years now.

  16GB are totally enough! Apple will manage my 20GB of required RAM in such a way that it’ll fit in my 16GB (actually ~15)

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  • kinttach@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I have not. As someone in the Mac community I can tell you that Apple enthusiasts are Apple’s harshest critics. They are the type of people who care a lot about details like this, and have been criticizing Apple for years on the amount of RAM in entry level systems, as well as the absolute rip-off prices they charge for RAM upgrades.

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    • nutsack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      the apple community

      holy fuck i hate capitalism

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    • onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If they are rip-off prices and bad RAM, then why continue buying them? Doesn’t that imply getting ripped off?

      When I argued that for the money you shell out for a mac, you could get a machine with 1.5-2x the specs, the constant thing I heard was “yeah, but you can’t compare a SoC with a normal laptop/PC”. Then came the argument about RAM not mattering, CPU speed not mattering, and so on. It would be cheaper for companies to give devs linux machines than macs, but they don’t want to hear it because macs are now the table tennis tables, pool tables, arcade machines, avocado toast, and “we’re a family” of companies.

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• Rentlar@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Just waiting for Apple to just start trademarking and “inventing” units…

  Our new Mac has the highest amount of “Rapid Storage Blocks ™” of any Mac ever! Enough to run 30 “Safari Experiences ™”.

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  • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Check out their “SSD”:s, hard drives with SSD cache memory.

    Not a bad idea (if made correctly and not creating two failur points) but it was so ridiculously small, both of them, like 32GB SSD for 1TB DD when 1TB SSD was for like 200€…

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    • xts@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      They haven’t sold FusionDrives in years.

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• WereCat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  My 0.7l wine bottle can fit in 3l of water

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• iminahurry@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Yes, which is why anyone spending anywhere close to this on a laptop gets 32 GB RAM

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• qwertyqwertyqwerty@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  MacOS is pretty decent at memory management. That being said, 8GB of RAM is ridiculous in 2023. Newer and updated applications are tossing memory management out the windows. Platforms like Electron wreck memory usage, and many apps popular desktop apps are using Electron now. 12GB is the new 8GB, for Macs. 32GB is the new 16GB for PC’s. I wouldn’t recommend a computer with less than 12GB of RAM for more than $300.

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• Dkarma@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  You can’t play games so you won’t be able to notice the difference.

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  • lorez@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Tell that to my Ableton Live copy and all the plugins.

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    • Dkarma@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Ok this is completely valid. Those plugins suck the jooce.

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  • laxmanndhotre@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    But apple says Mac will get AAA games

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  • And009@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Softwares and large files need ram too

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• BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Thanks to RAM Doubler and DoubleSpace you won’t feel the difference.

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  • BURN@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Downloadmoreram.com is going to get a lot more traffic

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• Gruntyfish@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  “lol” said Apple “lmao”

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• YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Not if it’s sharing memory with the GPU. Then its 6Gb is analogous to what exactly?

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• albert180@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I call Bullshit

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• vodkasolution@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  *half the ram, double the price! *That sounds catchy…

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• Vilian@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  and they wanted to bring games to mac??, like how?

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  • crandlecan@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Instant ram tar compression. What else?

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    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      RAM is commonly compressed on MacOS. My Mac is only using 8GB right now and a fair bit of that is cached files… which is kinda pointless since the SSD is plenty fast enough.

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  • f314@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I mean, I’ve been playing about 100 hours of Baldur’s Gate 3 on my M1 MacBook Pro, on the ultra preset. It runs just fine, and the machine barely gets hot while being nearly quiet. In fact, it is a very pleasant gaming experience!

    Could the game run better on a dedicated gaming PC? Sure! Does it need to? Nah, not for me. The fact that I can play on the couch while my SO watches something else is worth a lot more than some extra FPS, to me.

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  • Kazumara@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    A good first step would be: don’t make your own proprietary graphics API (Metal) and support Khronos standards (OpenGL, Vulkan) instead.

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    • Vilian@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      basicly what everyone is doing except apple

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• ogeist@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Ha! Of course we will see this as a reduction in price, right?.. Tim Apple?.. Are you there?..

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• crispy_kilt@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Image

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• Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I bought a 8gig and I’m usually running apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. I really feel the hit.

  Work bought me 16gig M1 and it is noticeably faster when swapping around between apps.

  Fuck 8gigs

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• JigglySackles@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Fucking apple with the dumb ass marketing again. Can’t wait to explain to fanbois you can’t shove 16 lbs of shit into an 8 lbs bag…

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  • dewritoninja@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You see with apple the whole product is made of shit. That’s 60 percent more shit per shit

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• PeterPoopshit@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Fucking lol

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• somenonewho@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’ve been on 16GB of ram on all of my machines for so long … It’s really the sweet spot for everything I do (gaming etc. ) I don’t do media production or anything like that. All that said I’m currently in the market for a new machine and will probably get 32GB “just to be safe” but since my next laptop will probably be a framework I don’t have to make the decision till I actually need the ram and even then I can still decide to get one stick first the other later and the prices scales pretty linearly.

  8GB might still be enough for some web browsing and stuff but apple should not put this little RAM in anything they call professional.

  And before anyone says “you only need that much ram in Windows” well … I don’t and won’t be running Windows ;)

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  • Blisterexe@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Linux Or templeos?

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    • somenonewho@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      What? Linux.

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• Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I don’t even think I’ve ever even seen my work MacBook using under 8GB of RAM and I’m fairly RAM efficient in my workflow. You’d start Docker on that thing and half your RAM is gone already, add VSCode and Chrome and everything is trashing already.

  For the average user? Yeah, compression and swap is probably good enough. For professional use? Hell no.

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• PeachMan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I don’t disagree that the M processors need less RAM, but the idea that they need half as much is bullshit. My poor little 8GB M1 struggles with more than 20 chrome tabs open, and it especially struggles when running apps that aren’t built to be M1 compatible (through Rosetta).

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  • darth_helmet@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They share ram with gpu, which means they need more of it for equivalent memory space, not less. There’s no magic that makes less memory work like more other than swap, and swap is slow as fuck, even with a high speed ssd (which the m3’s actually have slower ones).

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    • PeachMan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It’s an entirely different architecture, so every program needs less RAM (with exceptions like I mentioned above). That’s why they’re using shared RAM; because they can pull it off (mostly).

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