I was about to say that both my M2 Macs (laptop and mini) run fine with 8gb. Haven't noticed any problems. I don't play high-end games, though.

It's always amusing to see how Mx Mac fanbois always forget to add "in my use case".

I can never quite figure out what the use case is - as I sit here with 2 brave tabs open, my 10.13 mac is using up 13.58gb of ram.

These conversations usually usually end up at "my 8gb ram machine actually swaps constantly, but it's fine because otherwise I'd have to face the cognitive dissonance of justifying this purchase, so I'd rather repeat the apple marketing line they came up with to BS around their poor silicon yields"

That's so high I suspect measurement error. How did you come up with that number?

(It does look like my machine is using some swap space, but I don't notice any lag, so I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that.)

The SWE colleague sitting next to me has a M1 Air with 8 GB RAM and runs VS Code, multiple browsers with many tabs, Slack and Webpack with the TS/React app he works on just fine. Dual display setup too.

I’m not sure that usage means anything. If it needed more it would be more aggressive in clearing stuff out as far as I can tell.

Clearing out means swapping to disk, right?

Perhaps?

Maybe it’s the speed of the SSD that prevents me noticing it, but it sure feels fast and I don’t have a ton of memory

Of course it’s for their use case, what else would it be? Every use case?

"8GB should be enough for anybody"

640K was enough for anybody when that quote was made.

There are two things going on here. The M series seem quite efficient with ram, and Apple are ludicrously stingy with it.

yeah they should definitely add more to the lower end models these days. maybe they will in the next models, for onboard LLM support when Siri gets upgraded.

non-upgradeable as well.

My non apple linux desktop has a sweet 196 gb of ram 5200 mt/s. Love it.

5200 mt/s is 83 GB/s assuming dual channel, which isn't much compared to 100 GB/s for base M2, and 800 GB/s for M2 ultra[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2#:~:text=The%20SoC%20a....

The higher end M2s just run more chips in parallel. The bandwidth is there to support the GPU.

The latency of LPDDR is higher than desktop RAM, so it relies on the cache to get around that, and the cache is about the same as most x86 CPUs. So there isn't much benefit in the real world.

That’s okay given the size. The mobo can handle 8000 mt/s, and I can swap sticks whenever I want. Even my gpu has a sweet 24gb ram - more than an average m2. And I can do more than one if I need to train anything.

You are comparing one of the highest end RAM and graphics card to average M2. Don't you think it's bit disingenuous?

I am not entirely following. The m2 and m3 “scary fast” specs cost way more than my setup.

Don't you think it's bit disingenuous to compare only things where your favourite piece has the advantage?

apple silicone doesn't need any memory tho

Silicon, silicone is fake boob plastic.

And that’s a blatant lie from Apple, if anything, the GPU shares memory with the CPU therefore Apple Silicon needs MORE memory, not less.

And yet the machines are more performant with less memory than their Intel equivalents were (comparing Mac to Mac).

Somehow an efficiency has been made.

They handle memory management quite differently and the usage patterns on those devices is significantly different. You can get higher memory Apple kit if you need it…

> They handle memory management quite differently

Think different (tm). Snark aside you're right, Macs are much better at memory management than Linux, swap handling in particular. But that's a very low bar.

> the usage patterns on those devices is significantly different.

You're right, Mac users tend to run more multimedia productivity tools that benefit greatly from more RAM!

> You can get higher memory Apple kit if you need it…

You can pay the $800 premium yes, just make sure to plan what your future usage will be for the next 10 years because you can't buy it after the fact.

While I agree Apple’s RAM prices are absurd, there’s no reason to overstate them. It’s $200 to go from 8GB to 16GB, and $400 for 24GB.

Most of the people buying an $800 MacBook Air or lower memory variant of an Apple device are not worried about RAM and don’t use it in such a way that it matters. Yes, if you’re a professional using a macOS device you can pay the $400 premium for the highest memory variant. You either have the money to pay it, or the product justifies the amount. They are charging what their customers are willing to pay, it’s also somewhat inflated because the cost of maintaining those less popular SKUs.

Last point I’ll make on this topic, you are going to see more CPUs move to have RAM on die because of the physical limitations on latency. Modern storage speeds are also making this a moot point as RAM may become just another caching layer for ultra fast solid state storage.

To be fair my windows laptop also had 8 gigs and it runs just fine for most things. But a bit more ram wouldn’t hurt and a speed machine it’s not

you cannot compare an apple with 8 gb to a windows/linux machine running x86-64. you have two very different CPUs and architectures, and their use of memory is totally different.. those 8 Gb are the equivalent of 16 Gb on the x86-side. and 16 gb is decent for browsing, office work and even programing if you're not playing with kubernetes or some software.