This comes up frequently. 8GB is sufficient for most casual and light productivity use cases. Not everyone is a power user, in fact, most people aren’t.

That would be fine if the 8GB model was also priced for casual and light productivity use cases. But alas, this is Apple we're talking about.

MacBook Air starts at 1,199 euro. For insane battery life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the lightest chassis. Find me comparable laptop, I’ll wait.

The screen is the killer. you can have a nice-ish 2nd corporate laptop with decent and swappable battery on which you can install a decent OS (non Windows) and get good milage but the screen is something else.

Forgot to mention that it must be completely silent.

Asking for a machine with "insane battery life, amazing performance, great screen and one of the lightest chassis" and oh, it must be completely silent is a loaded set of demands. Apple in the current market is essentially the only player that can actually make a laptop that can meet your demands, at least without doing a bunch of research into something that's equivalent and hoping the goal posts don't move again.

this is extremely funny in the context of the protracted argument up-thread about what you could reasonably be comparing the macbook air against.

like, the $359 acer shitbox probably doesn't do all the exact same thing as the MBA either, but that's actually ok and really only demonstrates the MBA is an unaffordable luxury product, basically the same as a gold-plated diamond-encrusted flip-phone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292839

Not your circus, not your clowns, but this is sort of the duality of apple: "it's all marketing and glitz, a luxury product, there's no reason to buy it, and the fact that they have a better product only PROVES it" vs "of course no PC manufacturer could possibly be expected to offer a top-notch 120hz mini-LED screen, a good keyboard, great trackpad, good speakers, and good SOC performance in a thin-n-light..."

My dev laptop is an 8GB M1. It's fine. Mostly.

I can't run podman, slack, teams, and llama3-8B in llama.cpp at the same time. Oddly enough, this is rarely a problem.

Local LLMs are sluggish on my M2 Air 8GB,

but up until these these things I felt I could run whatever I wanted, including Baldur’s Gate 3.

It’s the “Mostly” part that sucks. What’s the price difference between 8 and 16? Like $3 in wholesale prices.

This just seems like lameness on Apple’s part.

It's not quite like that. Apple's RAM is in the SoC package, it might be closer to 20$, but still.

They have always done this, for some reason people buy it anyway, so they have no incentive to stop doing it.

> What’s the price difference between 8 and 16? Like $3 in wholesale prices.

Your estimates are not even close. You can't honestly think that LPDDR5 at leading edge speeds is only $3 per 64 Gb (aka 8GB), right?

Your estimate is off my an order of magnitude. The memory Apple is using is closer to $40 for that increment, not $3.

And yes, they include a markup, because nobody is integrating hardware parts and selling them at cost. But if you think the fastest LPDDR5 around only costs $3 for 8GB, that's completely out of touch with reality.

Even if taking raising market prices into account, your estimate for the RAM module price is waaaaaaay off.

You can get 8GB of good quality DDR5 DIMMs for 40$, there is no way in hell that Apple is paying anywhere near that.

Going from 8 to 16GBs is probably somewhere between 3-8$ purely in material costs for Apple, not taking into account any other costs associated

GP said "LPDDR5" and that Apple won't sell at component prices.

You mention DIMMs and component prices instead. This is unhelpful.

See https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/memory/774... for LPDDR5 prices. You can get a price of $48/chip at a volume of 2000 chips. Assuming that Apple got a deal of $30-40-ish at a few orders of magnitude larger order is quite fair. Though it certainly would be nicer if Apple priced 8GB increments not much above $80-120.

I am aware that there are differences, I just took RAM DIMMs as a reference because there is a >0% chance that anyone reading this has actually ever bought a comparable product themselves.

As for prices, the prices you cited are not at all comparable. Apple is absolutely certainly buying directly from manufacturers without a middleman since we're talking about millions of units delivered each quarter. Based on those quantities, unit prices are guaranteed to be substantially lower than what DigiKey offers.

Based on what little public information I was able to find, spot market prices for LPDDR4 RAM seem to be somewhere in the 3 to 5$ range for 16GB modules. Let's be generous and put LPDDR5 at tripe the price with 15$ a 16GB module. Given the upgrade price for going from 8 to 16GB is 230 EUR Apple is surely making a huge profit on those upgrades alone by selling an essentially unusable base configuration for a supposed "Pro" product.

Mind the difference between GB and Gb.

DDR5 DIMMs and LPDDR chips as in the MacBooks are not the same beasts at all.

A DIMM is 8 or 16 chips (9/18 is ECC), while the LPDDR is a single chip for the same storage. The wild density difference in chip capacity (512MB or 1GB vs 8GB) makes a huge difference, and how a stick can be sold at retail for cheaper than the bare LPDDR chip in volume.

Same here. My secondary laptop is 8GB of RAM and it's fine.

As devs and power users we'll always have an edge case for higher RAM usage, but the average consumer is going to be perfectly fine with 8GB of RAM.

All of these comments about how 8GB of RAM is going to make it "unusable" or a "waste of components" are absurd.

The point you're missing is that it's about the future. I generally agree, but it's obvious everything becomes more RAM intensive as time goes on. Hell, even games can take more than 8 GB of purely VRam these days.

It's really not weird. The more you charge for the base product and upgrades, serving the bare minimum becomes less acceptable. It also doesn't help that the 4GB base models from years past aged super quickly compared to it's higher end cousins.

Programming has a wierd way of requirering basically nothing some times, but other times you need to build the latest version of your toolchain, or you are working on some similarly huge project that takes ages to compile.

I was using my 4gb ram pinebook pro in public transport yesterday, and decided to turn of all cores except for a single Cortex-A53, to safe some battery. I had no problems for my usecase of a text editor + shell to compile for doing some SIMD programming.

At this point I don't think the frustration has much to do with the performance but rather RAM is so cheap that intentionally creating a bottleneck to extract another $150 from a customer comes across as greedy, and I am inclined to agree. Maybe the shared memory makes things more expensive but the upgrade cost has always been around the same amount.

It's not quite in the same ballpark as showing apartment or airfare listings without mandatory fees but it is at the ticket booth outside of the stadium.

The bigger problem is when you need a new machine fast, the apple store doesn't have anything but the base models in stock. In my org we bought a machine for a new developer who was leaving town, and were forced to buy an 8gb machine because the store didn't have other options (it was going to be a 2 week wait). As you can imagine, the machine sucked for running Docker etc and we had to sell it on facebook marketplace for a loss.

I've never encountered an actual Apple Store not having specced up machines on hand (maybe not EVERY possible configuration, but a decent selection). If you go to a non-Apple retailer, afaik, they are limited to the base spec machines (RAM wise), it's not even a matter of them being out of stock. If you want anything other than 8GB (or whatever the base amount is for that model) of RAM you need to go through Apple directly. This was the case, at least in Canada a few years ago, correct me if I'm wrong/things have changed.

I imagine you don't have browsers with many tabs.

how many is "many"? I'm also on an M1 Mac 8 GB RAM and I have 146 chrome tabs open without any issues.

The number of tabs you have doesn’t correlate to the number of active web views you have, if you use any browser that unloads background tabs while still saving their state.

I'm fairly sure that if you open up the web messengers, Gmail, etc, the browser can't and won't unload them, because they're active in the background.

It's fairly easy to hit a few GB of RAM used up just with those.

I could never understand how people operate with more than a dozen or so open tabs.

Those are the type of "I'll go back later to it", The workflow on modern browser is broken. Instead of leveraging the bookmark functionality to improve the UX, we have this situation of user having 50+ tabs open, because they can. It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs to a more manageable numbers.

Well, there are how many browser out there? 50? And opening tabs with something like Tree Style Tabs still is the best user experience.

> It takes quite a bit of discipline to close down tabs to a more manageable numbers.

Or you just click the little chevron in Tree Style Tabs or equivalent and 100 tabs are just hidden in the UI.

Mine is 8GB M1 and it is not fine. But the actual issue for me isn't RAM as much as it is disk space, I'm pretty confident if it wasn't also the 128 GB SSD model it would handle the small memory just fine.

I'm still getting at least 16 GB on my next one though.

Yeah, that's definitely a thing. Podman specifically eats a lot.

My exact-ish headache, I have to check my free disk space before launching Docker.

Yeah personally I find cheaping out on the storage far more egregious than cheaping out on the RAM. Even if you have most things offloaded onto the cloud, 128 GB was not even enough for that, and the 256 GB is still going to be a pain point even for many casual home users, and at the price point of Apple machines it's inexcusable to not add another $25 of flash

Both are disgusting for the price asked. It would be a lot easier to excuse all the other compromises if the base was 16/512, which would cost Apple like 50 bucks tops per machine. But greed is unlimited, I guess.

Most people that consider themselves "power users" aren't even power users, either. Like how being into cars doesn't make you a race car driver.

Race car drivers think they are pros and can't even rebuild the engine in their car.

There are different categories of "power users"

Race car drivers. They are pros. Professional drivers. They definitely know how to drive a car much more efficiently than I do, or anyone that’s just into cars. I assume the race car engineers are the pros at rebuilding engines.

And as for the parent comment’s point, being into cars doesn’t mean you’re as good as a professional race car driver.

Isn't this the "Pro" model?

I have a minimum of 64GB on my all my main developer machines (home, work, laptop), but I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM for lightweight travel.

Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine.

And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.

But why did you configure 3 machines with 64+ GB, if 8 GB RAM are "100% perfectly fine" for typical work tasks?

For me personally 16 or 32 GB are perfectly fine, 8 GB was too little (even without VMs) and I've never needed 64 or more. So it's curious to see you are pretty much exactly the opposite.

> But why did you configure 3 machines with 64+ GB, if 8 GB RAM are "100% perfectly fine" for typical work tasks?

Did you miss this part prefixing that sentence?

> I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course

For me personally, it’s not an issue of being out of touch. I did, in fact, use a 2014 Macbook with an i5 CPU and 16 GB of RAM for nearly a decade and know how often I hit swap and/or OOM on it even without attempting multicore shenanigans which its processor couldn’t have managed anyway.

It’s rather an issue of selling deliberately underpowered hardware for no good reason other than to sell actually up-to-date versions for a difference in price that has no relation to the actual availability or price of the components. The sheer disconnect from any kind of reality offends me as a person whose job and alleged primary competency is to recognize reality then bend it to one’s will.

I don't think we ever were at a point in computing were you could buy a high-end (even entry level macbooks have high-end pricing) laptop with the same amount of ram as you could 10 years earlier.

8 GB were the standard back then.

10 years the ago the default for macbook pros was 4GB, and those started showing their age very quickly for what was not a small amount of money.

I'm not sure that's true:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/111942

Hmm, unexpected. I was quite sure my partner's 2015 mbp was sitting at 4gb, but you win this one! ;)

Edit: I confirmed that I was indeed wrong, but the payoff isn't great anyway because that just means that yes in fact they've kept the exact same ram floor for 10 years. Insane.

I'm editing 4k video and thousands of big RAW images.

The used M1 MacBook Air I just bought is by far the fastest computer I have ever used.

Be honest, that 8GB computer isn't running MacOS, is it.

That’s the standard configuration of a MacBook Air.

That's all well and good but nowhere did OP mention that it was an Apple computer at all. All they mentioned was this:

>"I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM"

I have the base M2 air with 8gb ram, and it's really been perfect for working on. The only time things have become an issue is dual user accounts being logged in at the same time. Which is very preventable.

Problem is yes it does run but it's probably paging to disk more than you think. I wonder if that lowers both performance and battery life.

Half my organisation runs on 8GB Chromebooks. We were testing one of our app changes the other day and it performed better on the Chromebook than it did on my i7 machine with 32GB.

Fine just doesn't cut it for a premium machine you expect to last a few years at least. It's honestly just marketed so you want to spend extra and upgrade. Let's be real.

It will last more than a few years, AND it’s marketed so you want to spend extra.

I bought a second-hand office-grade PC recently, about a year ago. It was about $10 to $15, had no disks (obviously) and just 2 GB of DDR3 RAM. Also, an integrated GPU with some low-grade Intel CPU (Pentium, if I’m not wrong). Even the generation isn’t current, it’s about a decade old, a bit more.

I put a spare 120 GB SSD, a cheap no-name brand that was just lying around for some testing purposes. Found the similar off-the-shelf DDR3 2 GB RAM stick. I thought the RAM was faulty, turned out it’s in a working condition, so I put it there.

I need the computer for basic so-called office work (a browser, some messengers, email client and a couple of other utilities). I thought I’d buy at least two 4GB RAM sticks after I test it, so you know, 8 GB is just the bare imaginable minimum! I have my 16 GBs everywhere since, idk, maybe 2012 or something.

And you know what?! It works very well with 4 GB of RAM and default Fedora (it’s 40 now, but I started with 38, iirc). It has the default Gnome (also, 46 now, started with 44, iirc). And it works very well!

It doesn’t allow me to open a gazillion of browser tabs, but my workflow is designed to avoid it, so I have like 5 to 10 open simultaneously.

Before throwing Fedora at the PC, I thought I would just install a minimal Arch Linux with swaywm and be good. But I decided I don’t want to bother, and I’ll just buy 8 GB later on, and be done with it.

And here I am, having full-blown Gnome and just 4 GB of RAM. I don’t restrict myself too much, the only time I notice it’s not my main PC is when I want to do some heavy web-browsing (e.g. shopping on some different heavy websites with many tabs opened). Then it slows down significantly, till I close the unnecessary tabs or apps. All the software is updated and current, so it’s not like it’s some ancient PC from 00’s.

Also, I have my iPad Pro 12,9 1st Gen with just 4 GB of RAM too, and I never feel it’s slow for me.

I understand that some tasks would require a lot of RAM, and it’s not for everyone. Having a lot of RAM everywhere, I’m quite used to not thinking of it at all for a significant part of my career (for over a decade now), so I may have something opened for weeks that I don’t have any need for.

So, it’s 2024, and I’m surprised to say that 4 GB of RAM is plenty when you’re focused on some tasks and don’t multitask heavily. Which never productive for me at least. I even noticed that I enjoy my low-memory PC even more, as it reminds me with its slowdowns that I’m entering the multitasking state.

I use swaywm on my Arch Linux laptop, and most of the time it’s less than 3–4 Gb (I have 16 Gb).

> 8gb is actually 100% perfectly fine

Thus making your three other machines 400% perfectly fine?

> 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.

This argument is self defeating in the context of the M4 announcement. "Average consumers" who don't need 16 GB of RAM don't need an M4 either. But people who do need an M4 chip probably also need 16 GB of RAM.

I think actually more people need 16 GB of RAM rather than a top M4 chip. Having only 8 GB can be a serious limitation in some memory heavy circumstances, while having (say) an M2 SoC rather than an M4 SoC probably doesn't break any workflow at all, it just makes it somewhat slower.

> If these things will ever get MacOS support

The Macbook line will get iPadOS support long before they allow MacOS on this line. Full steam ahead towards the walled garden.

If the iPad could run Mac apps when docked to Magic Keyboard like the Mac can run iPad apps then there may be a worthwhile middle ground that mostly achieves what people want.

The multitasking will still be poor but perhaps Apple can do something about that when in docked mode.

That said, development likely remains a non-starter given the lack of unix tooling.

iOS has become such a waste of great hardware, especially in the larger form factor of the iPad.

M1 chips, great screens, precise pencil input and keyboard support, but we still aren't allowed a serious OS on it to protect the monopolistic store.

App Stores have beeen around long enough to prove that they're little more than laboratories in which to carry out accelerated enshittification experimentation. Everything so dumbed down and feature-light, yet demanding subscriptions or pushing endless scammy ads. And games that are a shameless introduction to gambling addiction, targeted at kids.

I feel sorry you got downvoted so much. But it looks like nowadays people don't like to hear the truth, at least when it comes to Apple stuff.

I feel bad about all this because I advised my mother to buy an iPad Pro as it was sold as a laptop replacement but it never materialized anywhere near expectations and ended being an expensive mistake that can only offer compromised workflows with limitations that do not even come close to a MacBook she was used to (even in Apple own apps, even something like the Page app, yes).

I think the iPad would be a fine device, if only they didn't try to upsell it and stopped pretending it is a "Pro" thing. If the whole lineup would get OLED displays, more RAM across the board and decent base storage for media at a more honest price it would be an easy recommendation.

As it is, the entry level is lackluster because of the display (if you only buy for content consumption it is better to go with an Android OLED options) and the high-end variant are just stupid expensive for what they will actually allow you to do.

But too many Apple customers have drunk the Kool-Aid so they don't have to care much about the reality and we just get expensive bullshit.

People always complain dev should write more efficient software, so maybe that’s one way!

At least, chrome wouldn’t run that many tabs on iPad for sure if it used the same engine as desktop chrome

These specific model of tablets won't ever get MacOS support. Apple will tell you when you're allowed to run MacOS on a tablet, and they'll make you buy a new tablet specifically for that.

Why can't they just make it 12gb? It will sell far easier. It's all soldered on anyway.

It probably has a 128 bit buswidth. You need 32 bit per memory chip, so you end up with 4 chips.

3 GB ram chips probably exist, but are definitely not common.

The point is: 8GB of RAM is really, really cheap. Like $20 retail.

Unlike seemingly everyone making this claim, I have used an M1 Mac mini with 8GB RAM. It's fine, and certainly not useless.

Is the base M1 Macbook Air "useless"?