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.