I’m a web developer but I also do tons of work with large files being transferred across the network, I do some CPU intensive tasks from time to time, run Docker containers, etc. all on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM.
Well it’s 2024 now and the thing still screams. So what I don’t understand is: why are there suddenly so many enraged tech news websites bashing on the 8GB base RAM?
I get it that some people need more than just 8GB, but for the cliche web browsing, email and social media user it’s not adding up to me why anyone is so enraged about this.
Suddenly? They have been bashing it for years, right from the start.
Context is important.
If you’re running a single app that has low requirements 8gb is quite usable. For my mom using. browser and email it’s fine. For my kids doing school work it’s fine.
For me working in 4K video and photoshop it’s not.
But that’s why you can add more. The whiners are just noise.
💯
8GB was already too low for what is positioned as a premium machine. RAM is a pretty cheap part of the whole computer, so it’s completely unnecessarily small. I’m also a software engineer and the 16GB in my work MBP M1 is not even enough at times.
The big thing that’s caused Apple to stop completely fleecing the people buying the low end option: AI. If you or Apple want to run local models on a machine with only 8GB of RAM, you probably won’t have much left over for anything else.
I should say that the MacBook Air in question is a personal device. My work MacBook Pro with something like 32GB of RAM can’t keep up sometimes with all the trash apps we have to use at work: Slack, Teams, VS Code. I very much wish we’d go back to native UI and stop using these insane memory hog apps.
Yeah I don’t think the Air is really the premium Apple laptop by any stretch.
Not to be an evangelist; but on my M1 Air I found VS Code to be a pig (plus I had to run both universal and native M1 versions) so much that it was finally motivation to try neovim like I kept seeing all these people promoting. Wouldn’t say i’ve gotten as used to it as quickly as others, but I can argue that its at least extremely lightweight in comparison, plus i’m not working under the license VSCode has.
I use Smultron for personal work, and both Smultron and VS Code for work. There are things I like/dislike about each, but my main gripe with VS Code is that it is way, way harder on resources than it should be.
I used Smultron for yonks as well; very good app.
One thing I like about neovim (and its taking me ages to learn & improve) is being keyboard first and having less time with fingers away on mouse etc, its helped my concentration, as has full screening my terminal session and not having anything pop up in eye lines!
While 8GB can be enough to operate simple stuff, it can slow some other stuff does. I saw someone post a FinalCut benchmark and it took 3 times longer on the 8GB machine.
And because the memory is shared with the gpu, it is limiting games from being ported to the platforms. The only console with less is the 7 year old switch. The Xbox series s has 10 and it is holding back the xbox platform against the ps5 which has 16.
It is really holding back what developers can do on the platforms.
PCs are moving towards 32GB now.
Yeah I understand for things like Final Cut Pro memory is way more important, but that’s not what I was getting at. For day to day activity, 8GB has served me well.
PCs are moving towards 32GB now.
Windows PCs.
I’m not going to pretend that more RAM isn’t just automagically better, because it is. But 8GB RAM on a 2020 Lenovo Windows build feels and performs much worse than 8GB in a 2020 M1 Macbook Air.
8GB was so unusable in my work* (IT Pro for large corporate) laptop that they eventually agreed that we were “power users” and so could have an upgrade to 16GB RAM. But it still feels a bunch worse than my M1 due to all the additional sludge that gets lumped on top for corp reasons.
*Just to describe what I do, I have browsers open, MS Teams and then spend my day in SSH sessions to linux based servers, so realistically there was nothing “power” user about what I was doing, it was just that our corp Windows build & laptops are that awful. And now we’ve been 11’d, ugh.
Windows users complaining about low RAM in a UNIX environment make me laugh more than anything
It’s definitely not enough for a lot of different use-cases. But whatever, if it works for you, then good.
PS: I am a Unix user, not Windows.
It is more than a little silly that I need 16GB of RAM to make my work windows laptop functional in order to administer a bunch of 4GB linux VMs ;)
8 is way too low for desktop going into 2025. Your machine might scream a lot more with 16- you probably have a lot of memory pressure which means your Mac is compressing ram a lot and maybe paging in and out of disk a lot. Does newer Apple hardware do this well? Sure, but not having to do it at all is way faster and more efficient. Since an extra 8 gigs is cheap (probably like $10-$20) to apples bottom line, it’s kinda lame for it not to be a default, especially since shitty low end machines from other vendors do it.
I have 32 gigs on an m3 and kinda wish I went with 64 :/
My MacBook Air is a personal machine and I don’t run the crazy stuff we have to use at work like Slack, Teams, VS Code. All those apps are memory hogs and the M3 MacBook Pro I use for work has memory issues related to running these apps. They should be lightweight but no one wants to use native UI APIs these days.
When buying a computer, most people want it to last several years, with most PCs you can upgrade the RAM during the lifetime of the device. If you buy a modern Mac, you can’t.
As time goes on new software will need more and more ram, but on a Mac you are stuck with what you got.
Sure, Apple uses a different way of managing RAM than windows, but that can only do so much. Sooner or later you will get to a point where it just isn’t enough anymore. With eight gigs you will get there sooner than with 16.
Regarding your usecase, one thing you need to consider is that CPU intensive tasks does not equal RAM intensive tasks.
Copying a file is neither CPU nor RAM intesive, so it is a rather pointless test.
Docker instances depend highly on what they actually do for work weather or not they will use a lot of RAM, so it is a very inacurate test.
Web development is not as resoruce intensive as say video editing or running simulations.
For you 8GB RAM is fine, for an engineer, video editor, or even a finance analyst, 8GB is putiful.
Then we need to talk about value, I can get an Asus ExpertBook B1 B1402CVA for less than an M2 MacBook Air.
The ExpertBook is slightly heavier with slightly larger screen (but with lower resolution), it has 16GB RAM and 512GB storage space, both of which can be upgraded as the user’s needs change.
The ExpertBook costs slightly less than the MacBook, so tell me, why should I pay more to get less?
Now, I realize it isn’t that simple, both computers are suitable for different tasks, they run completely different OSes, and have different types of CPUs.
Thanks to ram and ssd upgrade I still use my laptop that’s going a decade now for basic web browsing and videos. Best way to show the green initiative would be to provide people upgrade paths that doesn’t lead to ewaste so their devices can be used a few years longer than it would without it.
But, only green initiative that is the concern is stock prices.
Because RAM is cheap and really helpful. If you have a Desktop, you can buy 16GB DDR4 RAM for ~30€ and 32GB for ~60€. That’s retail with VAT - Apple itself will get much better prices and so there is no reason why their expensive devices are shipped with 8GB RAM.
That is a great argument — I can fathom anger toward this.
Not that this changes anything really, but the memory apple is using is much faster than DDR4 you can buy retail, they’re not really comparable. The closest thing would be the new DDR5 CAMM modules, but even these are not quite the same thing. Again, none of this invalidates the basic principle that Apple charges way too much for memory upgrades.
Apple uses bog standard LPDDR5-6400. LPDDR5 is a low power variant of DDR5. 32GB of DDR5-6400 is about $90 USD.
The only thing special about the Apple RAM configuration is the larger than normal bus on the CPU die.
I think it has to do with Apple Intelligence that requires 16GB.
This makes a lot of sense. I remember there was tons of speculation about AR/VR around 2020 and Apple was preparing their machines to support that if necessary.
If that was the case, then yeah 8GB is crazy low.
My 10 year old Dell laptop is still pretty useful and I plan on using it for a few more years. You might not still be happy with your 8gb of ram in 2030. If the M1 laptops were upgradable people would have less of an issue.
I guess we got used to massive ram increase/requirements in the past few years due to x86/64 architecture and such, that 8GB now seems completely obsolete. ARM works differently and more efficiently which would explain the lower specs for same or better results.
That’s how I see it at least.
I am sorry, but you are confidently incorrect.
It is absolutely true that x86_64 and ARM are two different CPU architectures, this does not mean that RAM usage differs hugely between them, that has more to do with the OS.
If you want to load a 20MB raw image into ram to edit it, it will take 20MB of ram regardless of CPU arcitecture.
The reason we are used to using so much ram is that as hardware capabillities have increased, so have software requirenments.
The processor architecture does not influence RAM usage. (At least not if both architectures are 64-bit)
As everyone is saying, 8gb is not much and ram is cheap. What I find unforgivable is the pricing on upgrading the ram. $200 for 16gb is just completely unacceptable, I would actually call it discusting. Also the ram is not user replaceable unless you are into micro-soldering, so they’ve basically got you by the balls. 8gb will much sooner be limiting than the cpu performance on these laptops in the future. Overall, very sleazy, anti-consumer tactic.
8GB is just too low and was too low in 2020. It gets shared with GPU and once you swap you decrease lifespan of a soldered SSD. It’s okay for light use but let’s not kid ourselves that even if it was passable in 2020 it would be enough for much longer.
It got bashed for low RAM by everyone except mainstream tech „reviewers”. Tech media are glorified advertisements these days so the only thing that happened between then and now is that they switched from selling you that new shiny M1 MacBook to selling you that new shiny OpenAI model.
I’m not going to bash M1 MacBook Air. It’s awesome, the CPU was ahead of time and I knew it would last me years. That’s why I got 16GB one.
Mac is generally really good at handling memory, including compressing it on the fly. My guess is anyone complaining is looking at it through the lens of Windows, where 8GB is not enough for a lot of tasks.
Edit: here’s an article about it, https://www.lifewire.com/understanding-compressed-memory-os-x-2260327
⬆️ This
Apparently people don’t like hearing that. xD
I use all three, Mac, Linux, and Windows, all the time. Mac is the only one I’m ok with having 8GB of RAM. At least 12 on the other two, unless you use zram swap on Linux, then you can get away with 8. Afaik, Windows doesn’t have anything like that, so 16 is best, but 12 is ok.
I don’t really understand why people would downvote that.
I realized recently that my Raspberry Pi 4 has just 4GB of RAM, but while syncing huge files to Storj I’ve noticed it doesn’t fill up whatsoever (even with slow spinning hard drives).
I’m starting to think for most things I do CPU is more important than having tons of memory.
If you’re transferring files over a socket (like through SMB or SFTP), the receiving end usually has a small buffer, like 64KB. It’ll just pause the stream if it’s receiving data faster than it can push it to disk and the buffer gets full. So usually a file transfer won’t use much memory.
There is some poorly written software that doesn’t do that, though. I ran into a WebDAV server that didn’t do that when I was writing my own server. That’s where you could run into out of memory errors.
That lines up with what I know about networking, but on the software side I figured it would chew through memory quick (especially because it’s encrypting it on the fly).
I also have a Raspberry Pi with 4G and it handles its load perfectly fine.
BUT lack of memory is a well known bottleneck so when I got a Raspberry Pi 5 with double the processing I also doubled the memory to keep it fed. While I haven’t really found a good niche for the new beast yet, if I’m spending money on a faster processor, faster board, why would I limit it by cheaping out on memory.
While we know that Apples memory is much faster than anyone else’s, we also know the entire system is outstanding. If I spend so much on a system with such high throughput, why would I want to cripple it by cheaping out on memory to save a relatively small cost? It’s not that I really have a need but that I’m paying for a beast so it better be able to go beast mode
