I really don't get it. How much difference could 8 to 16gb be in terms of price? Is Apple really doing this to save 20$ per machine?

Even if you somehow could argue that 8 is all you need now, what about in few years? No one should ever buy this device.

They aren't doing it to save 20$ per machine, they are doing it to make the higher price of a 16GB machine seem more reasonable than if it was the base model.

Yeah this screams classic Apple. Advertise the cost of the Mac as lower, but with a shitty option that most people will have to upgrade. Majority are not going to want to buy a 8gb laptop for that kind of money and not just bump it up to 16gb.

This reminds me of how movie theatres offer a small, medium and large but the large popcorn only costs slightly more than the medium, thus enticing you to go for the large.

Yes, not just classic Apple but classic lots of things. Cars are sold the same way

I’ll add classic Lenovo to the list, whose base level thinkpad are underspeced and have terrible screens. The fact that apple doesnt perpetually claim their machines are on sale is their last bastion of superiority

What do you mean? I scored a sweet ThinkPad deal — $2,000 off using code “SUCKER” at checkout!

You used to be able to replace/extend ThinkPad parts quite easily. We'd buy base models exclusively and just add extra stick of ram and flip the CD rom to another hard drive or battery - those were super cheap high quality laptops.

Only recently Lenovo started to solder their parts so base models lost their power :(

It's worth noting that they are charging $200 for the 8GB memory upgrade.

The spot price for 16GB of LPDDR4 looks like it's currently ~$8 per DRAMexchange: https://www.dramexchange.com/

They're also charging $200 for a 256GB storage upgrade - spot price of 3D TLC is $3/256Gb ($24 for 256GB) - you can currently buy a 256GB NVMe SSD (full stick with controller) at retail for <$30 as well.

That is like saying the materials the baker needs to bake bread cost 5¢. Why doesn’t the baker price his bread at 5¢?

That might be a somewhat relevant analogy if you had a choice to go somewhere else to buy bread elsewhere, but since both memory and storage are now soldered, you are forced to upgrade for the lifetime of the product at purchase. The relevance on the parts pricing here is to point out that Apple is being extremely abusive in their pricing to their customers.

Many laptops now have soldered RAM, but other vendors have not chosen to do what Apple has done. In HP's premium laptop (Spectre x360 13t), adding 8GB of RAM is a +$70 option. For reference, an 8GB DDR4 SODIMM at retail pricing is about $30.

Also, AFAIK, no other major laptop or mini-desktop manufacturer uses soldered storage like Apple does, so in this case, the retail cost for storage is even more relevant.

These are commodity parts, so there's not any R&D to recoup - this is just profiteering on Apple's part. Especially for the Mac Mini, where there's not the same space constraints, the lack of storage upgradability is also a rather egregious form of forced obsolescence. Fine from a business perspective, but hypocritical for a company that claims to care about the environment.

Well, no. Apple buys RAM chips at that price, and they just have to swap one chip for another. The differential in price from one to the other including all costs is that much. Labour costs and OpEx are not affected by choosing Chip A or Chip B that are essentially identical.

This is pretty much the reason why I'll never will buy apple devices again. Recently I bought iphone 11 for my girlfriend as a present and the price difference between 64GB model (which honestly might as well be a dead brick in this data age) and 256GB model was around 30% in my country which is beyond absurd.

You can call me bitter but this sort of manipulation is making me extremely salty to the point where I'll be having seething hate for the company for the rest of my life.

> How much difference could 8 to 16gb be in terms of price?

The RAM is embedded into the SoC. Maybe the 8GB are salvaged chips where half of the memory is unusable?

$20 at the volume they sell does add up.

But I think a more important factor is future sales. They will likely sell more laptops as these 8GB owners upgrade earlier (in 2-3 years) as the OS and apps continue to bloat.

So on one side they save $20 per laptop and they likely sell more laptops.

> $20 at the volume they sell does add up.

So charge $50 more per laptop and make $30 more profit while not producing 8 GB junk that'll be e-waste in a few years because that's barely enough RAM to run an average browser session anymore.

>Even if you somehow could argue that 8 is all you need now, what about in few years?

What about it? It's not like someone who mostly browses the web, checks email, works with office documents, and so on, will change what he does in a few years...

> will change what he does in a few years...

The fatal flaw in this argument is the failure to realize that web pages are bloating, video is becoming more prevalent, higher resolution images, etc.

So “browses the web” has ever increasing hardware requirements if you want to maintain the experience.

Not to mention they love talking about video editing, Neural Engine, etc. Those things eat RAM as well

8GB is definitely underpowered

The large consumer market that uses mac for common computing activities will not need more soon, perhaps, but many of Apple's bulwark clients - graphic designers, musicians, and even developers - probably will.

Despite the software they demoed, the machines they show (with exception of the mini) were all for the non-demanding users.

I would like to see Photos on those benchmarks, that is one program that would benefit from lots of ram, and would be used by many of the Air’s customers.

Those don't buy the base configuration, and never had.

Don't forget - with unified memory that means that the GPU has to pull from the same pool, so your usable RAM after display buffers is likely much less.

That's the case for any integrated GPU, even the Intel ones Apple has been using since 2000s

>that caused someone in management to believe 8GB is an adequate base spec for RAM in 2020.

And yet most PC laptops, with same or higher prices, have the same base spec, so there's that...

Not everyone is you.

It is definitely an adequate base spec. What would the random MacBook user fill 16GB of RAM with?

I have Firefox, Slack, MS Team, MS Word, MS Excel, and Onenote opened. The world's most boring office worker use case.

I know it's a deceptive metric but Task Manager shows 12.5GB "In Use". 16.2 Committed.

Each Firefox tab has between 250mb and 1g "Memory (Active Working Area)".

HUUUUUGeeeee long tail of 100MB trailing down to 20MB services and things. Adobe has half a dozen at all times, etc etc etc.

I'm game to use any other "more realistic" specification or monitor as I know that with memory paging and virtualization things are wonky.

I don't think this indicates I MUST have 12 or 16 or 32GB - I have a 4GB media PC that works just fine. But I do believe it's an indicator average user can use 16GB, if it's available. Or in other words, if I buy a $1000USD laptop, I don't think 16GB is going to waste away unused with zero benefit ever :-\

Again, perfectly willing to be educated :).

> Slack

You're lucky any of those other applications opened at all!

Those apps will use memory as they are given it, for the most part.

Yes, largely because two of those are (bad) Electron apps that eat way more memory than they have any right to.

What is the person buying a laptop supposed to do about that?

Oh, I don't disagree even remotely! We can have a nice thread about optimized apps and 4k demos :)

But in context of expectations in the $1k laptop market, my point was that perfectly normal usage can grow to benefit from over 8GB of RAM these days, whatever the background reasons may be.

For a $1,000 laptop? I disagree. It’s fine for a $500 one but Apple doesn’t sell those.

There are tons of $1000 PC laptops with worse build and 8GB

That $500 difference goes towards a higher quality product with good support, not necessarily just system specs.

I think what they're saying is that they'd expect a $500 price increase to update specs as well.

On my MBP with Catalina just browsing will get me over 8 gigs. Reaching 16 is another thing, that i did not manage even with Docker and mutiple IDEs in a typical day.

I personally wouldn't buy something without 32GB these days. But I would tell family/friends to get at least 16GB. With 32GB, I rarely have to think about RAM. But I'm probably 85%+ utilization all the time. I'll admit that I'm a "power user", but my wife has a fairly new laptop with 8GB and it fills up FAST, even when doing nothing serious. It's at 81% right now with just Firefox, Word, and Evernote.

If I were going for a desktop it'd be at least 64GB.

More than one electron app?

We are not looking at a typical Mac user here, are we?

Slack, Whatsapp, Discord, and Skype, pick any two and I don't think it's unusual.

I'm not saying your wrong, but this is such a catch-22.

When people complain about Electron apps, the response is always "modern computers have so much memory anyway, it's fine!"

But then when a manufacturer introduces a computer with slightly less memory (but still a perfectly reasonable amount) the big question is whether it can run all those Electron apps!

Is there a way to break the cycle? This isn't good!

Never measured whatsapp but it's really pretty performant. Is it heavy?

Slack and discord, on the other hand, are real drags.

> Never measured whatsapp but it's really pretty performant

are we really talking about the same whatsapp ? it takes a good 4 seconds to load here. I don't remember ever waiting for MSN Messenger to load, on potato-powered computers.

I think that's because it's trying to connect to your phone since that's where the messages etc are stored.

Electron is cancer .. but Skype is native (for now, at least on Linux. Although I'm sure they'll switch to the Teams codebase and Skype native will disappear forever too)

Is that recent? It definitely used to be Electron https://www.codepicky.com/hacking-electron-restyle-skype/

Skype 7 was native; Skype 8 is Electron. So is Teams.

Electron is recent. What are good and widely used cross platform application frameworks other than electron?

Qt?

I'm not sure 16 GB is enough.

Chrome?

I don’t do any tab-hoarding in Chrome (that’s the job of Safari on my machine), but I’m pretty sure that it will suspend tabs long before you run out of RAM. 8 GB is still plenty for web browsing.

I started surfing the net in the 90s with 8MB. :D

BRB gonna fire up Netscape on my brand new MacBook Air

Netscape?! That's for the kids, we used NCSA Mosaic and liked it. I suspect lynx is still around in some form.

Lynx is definitely still around. Useful for a quick "can I actually get to this site" sanity checks on servers.

Lynx is bloatware. Just use telnet.

Unless it’s HTTPS-only, which is most sites these days....

(I’m definitely not arguing that that’s a bad thing; it just makes Telnet more annoying)

Yeah, but I need both browser + IntelliJ. I run out of 8 GB pretty damn quickly.

Definitely not the random user, but the moment you start running docker containers, you are screwed.

Chrome, Slack, Docker. Pick 1 (and only 1)!

At least for Slack there's would be the iOS version available.

Another chrome tab!

That will do it.

Better yet, pick 0 and 8GB is fine.

Electron apps.

Chrome, Slack, Zoom, Docker, k8s, VS Code, etc.

The median Macbook user is not a developer. A web browser and videocalling are the only two from that list you'd expect the median user to be doing with a Macbook.

1. The market those as "Pro"

2. Their entire presentation focuses on editing large image files, editing 4k video, machine learning, and graphics-intensive games (games were mentioned more than anything else)

So, given how these are marketed, they are extremely low on RAM and storage.

Also Office. Lots of open Word documents.

My "typical Mac user" in this case, is my wife. Her 8GB MBP is holding up very well.

Does macOS handle memory in a way where it just lets RAM fill up to some point before actively doing something about it? Because on my 16gig Macbook 8 gigs are gone just with browsing & spotify.

Yes. If you run vm_stat in the Terminal, you can see how few pages of RAM are actually left free at any given time. Modern operating systems aggressively cache files in RAM to improve performance.

The green/yellow/red graph in the Memory tab of Activity Manager is the best way of seeing if you need more RAM at a glance. In my experience, macOS won't do any swapping in the green. In the yellow, the system is still pretty usable but there's some swapping going on. When it turns red, your SSD will be getting thrashed pretty hard.

Thanks for the hint!

They're not really "gone", they've just been put to use because there's no point in leaving RAM empty. You can do much more than run a browser and Spotify with 8GB of RAM.

Thanks, memory stats sure look different than with linux. Switched a short while back & was surprised, but that would explain it.

It's a good question -- do most people still use desktop office suites these days? I don't know the answer. I use the Google Docs suite for both work and for personal stuff, and I personally haven't seen the need to pay for Office in awhile.

Google Docs and Slides browser tabs can take a decent amount of resources too.

Your definition of random user seems a little off.

>8GB is an adequate base spec for RAM in 2020.

Why wouldn't it be? The iPad Pros max out at 6gb and yet they overperform the vast majority of laptops out there.

I bought a 16GB MacBook Pro in 2013. It’s still going strong.

Today I wouldn’t buy less than 32GB.

Performance is always better and the machine will last much longer

> and the machine will last much longer.

At the moment, that's debatable, since the only 32GB Macs you can buy are Intel ones...

I have a Mac mini that still had upgradable ram, and was able to be kidded to add a second hard drive. I put 32 gigs of ran and an 1 tb ssd into it. I’ve had it for roughly 7 years. Any current Mac mini is a downgrade except in processor speed.

Would complain that nothing is built well / to last any more... but was recommended a NUC, and now it's my new Mini. Absolutely love it.

Enjoy that while it lasts... Hackintoshes are going to be a dying breed in two years.

Do they overperform for laptop use cases or for iPad use cases?

Video encoding is one example of a laptop use case where the iPad Pro has very competitive performance. Gaming is another.

We're talking about RAM. RAM usage is a direct function of how many apps you have open at the same time. For an iPad that number is a lot smaller than for a laptop.

I don't think that's the reason the iPad Pro performs well at video encoding (or else you'd be able to say the same thing for any Android tablet). It's a combination of dedicated hardware and a fast CPU.

What I'm saying is that just because the iPad Pro is good at video encoding it doesn't mean that it is capable of running a windowed OS with real multitasking. For that you need more RAM. The iPad is built for a specific workflow where you use one or two apps at a time, laptops are designed for a workflow that involves more multitasking.

What Apple appears to have done is transpose the hardware from iPad to Mac without thinking about the different requirements of each. There is a reason that RAM is not part of the package on laptop CPUs. This might work for casual users but people spending $$$ on a "pro" computer will wise up pretty fast.

I used to run a Windowed OS with real multitasking on a 33MHz 486 DX with 4MB of RAM! Sure, apps are a little more resource hungry these days, but there's nothing about multitasking or windowing that inherently requires tons of RAM. An iPad could for sure enable full multitasking without any problems. Apple has made millions of laptops that ran OS X perfectly fine with less than 6GB of RAM. It's just that iPad users aren't accustomed to having to manually manage which apps are open at any given time.

I have a 2019 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM and it runs OS X fine for dev work. RAM compression and fast SSD storage make a big difference. The newer Macbooks will have even faster SSDs.

I think the main reason Apple don't want to add lots of RAM to the base Macbook models is that it's the wrong compromise between battery life and performance for most users. They are probably betting on continuing gains in SSD performance obviating the need for additional RAM.

Video encoding is usually special dedicated hardware, so it's more measuring the hardware encoder than the general speed of the device. Go head to head with AV1 encoding for example and you'll see it matches it's general benchmark.

Also, hardware encoders produce much less efficient results (in terms of the ratio of quality to file size) then the best software encoders like x264.

Yes, but Apple are moving in the direction of adding dedicated hardware to support a lot of common use cases. The point remains that video encoding is something that people often use laptops for. Users just want it to go fast; they don't care how exactly the hardware is making that happen.

The iPad Pro has strong raw CPU performance in any case. It certainly outperforms plenty of entry-level Windows laptops.

What's the difference nowadays?

The vast majority of people need a social media, word editor, reminder list, chat machine.

Last time I checked, my laptop doesn't run the oom killer constantly.

For a lot of people, that will be four running copies of Chromium.

Seriously though what’s the connection between it being 2020 and there being more default RAM? Are you suggesting that in the year 2030 we should expect 100gb of RAM?

The goal shouldn’t be to increase ageing technology but to replace it with something better.

If you do anything like virtualization 8GB of RAM is absolutely paltry, borderline unusable - due to the need, e.g. to allocate a specific amount of RAM to a running VM.

To be honest, I find even 16GB to be limiting. The lack of offering of a 32GB configuration killed the immediate sale for me, absolutely no exaggeration.

Because you can't upgrade it post-market, I'd consider these to be some of the least future-proofed releases from Apple in a while.

> Are you suggesting that in the year 2030 we should expect 100gb of RAM?

100GB sounds like paltry for 10 years of technological advancement. In 2010 DDR4 didn't exist yet and DDR3 only supported up to 16GB per ram stick (8 on Intel at the time). Now we have ram sticks with capacities up to 256GB. The 2010 MacBook Pro only came with 4GB! But really "640K ought to be enough for anybody", am I right?

Well, I get where you're coming from, but would compare it maybe to electric or hydrogen vs gas cars. If I was in the market for a new car and drove certain distances regularly, I probably wouldn't be the first to buy something that could only go half the distance less conveniently, but does it faster.

> Are you suggesting that in the year 2030 we should expect 100gb of RAM?

You can buy a Thinkpad P15 with 128GB of RAM today, so I'd expect more like multi-TB RAM by 2030.

I think I'm with you here.

I've had 16 gigs for the last 8 years. I thought about getting 32, but I haven't noticed needing more memory and it does use (battery) energy so I decided against it.

More ram is patch for components that aren’t hyper-optimized to work together. The whole point of what apple is doing with their own silicon is to create that optimization, thus reducing the need for excessive ram.

It’s worked for them for iPad and iPhone. Samsung et all would boast more ram but oddly enough iPhones were and remain faster

An iPad and iPhone mostly display one thing. One app or maybe a second one in split screen.

A laptop can run many things simultaneously. Web browser, Office suite, Musik, EMail client, Cloud sync... Even my mother struggled with 8GB RAM on here work machine and she is by far no PC expert. She writes emails and letters, opens spreadsheets and websites. Sometimes she gets a call and has to open another document or website. End of RAM.

I would NOT recommend the 8GB Macbook Pro for professional work.

Not sure the downvoting ...

Even with 16, 32gb of ram, Android phones still don’t have buttery smooth 60 FPS while iOS has never been smoother

You're confusing CPU and memory pressure, and attributing blame to the wrong component.

Android's lack of smoothness is due to thread contention, whereas the iOS kernel uses a dedicated UI thread running at high priority. RAM size has no impact on UI performance, beyond a sufficient amount for the kernel.

To add on to this, the person you are replying to is also quite wrong. Android devices definitely can be smooth and many go past 60hz now and have higher refresh rates than Apple products.

I don't care that the p90 UI latency performance is better, the p99 performance on Android devices is terrible (UI stuttering).

I use a Pixel 3 and iPhone 8 on a daily basis.

Agreed. I have a pixel work phone and iPhone (XS/12 pro) for personal usage. Even though the Android is also current gen it can be unresponsive at times and also the face unlock is terrible on the android. I can’t remember the last time faceid failed but on Android it’s atleast 2-3 times a day.

You're getting downvoted because "hyper-optimizing" isn't going to let me run another VM or launch another instance of Xcode.

95% percent of laptop users wont run VMs or Xcode, so there's that...

MacBooks and PowerBooks before them where about that 5% of power users who fell in love with their tools and preached to all their friends and family to get one too.

Now that apple has the remaining 95%, it is letting their power users down. But that is only natural, establishing a beachhead with the powerusers was "just" a genious marketing move that worked pretty well.

>MacBooks and PowerBooks before them where about that 5% of power users who fell in love with their tools and preached to all their friends and family to get one too.

And they still are. Just not in their base configuration, like they have never been. I've been using their stuff since the Motorola era.

Was there any time Apple gave "ample" RAM/DISK in their base configuration? No.

If anything, now it's better than ever...