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6mo ago

Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough

www.xda-developers.com Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough

Base-model Macs won't be able to take advantage of Apple's flagship Xcode 16 feature: Predictive Code Completion.

There were a number of exciting announcements from Apple at WWDC 2024, from macOS Sequoia to Apple Intelligence. However, a subtle addition to Xcode 16 — the development environment for Apple platforms, like iOS and macOS — is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple's claim that 8GB of unified memory was enough for base-model Apple silicon Macs, you won't be able to use it. There's a memory requirement for Predictive Code Completion in Xcode 16, and it's the closest thing we'll get from Apple to an admission that 8GB of memory isn't really enough for a new Mac in 2024.

Apple @lemmy.world

Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough

www.xda-developers.com /apple-finally-admits-that-8gb-ram-isnt-enough/

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224 comments

And now all the fan boys and girls will go out and buy another MacBook. That's planned obsolescence for ya
- Someone who is buying a MacBook with the minimum specs probably isn’t the same person that’s going to run out and buy another one to get one specific feature in Xcode. Not trying to defend Apple here, but if you were a developer who would care about this, you probably would have paid for the upgrade when you bought it in the first place (or couldn’t afford it then or now).
  
  Well no, not this specific scenario, because of course devs will generally buy machines with more RAM.
  But there are definitely people who will buy an 8GB Apple laptop, run into performance issues, then think "oh I must need to buy a new MacBook".
  If Apple didn't purposely manufacture ewaste-tier 8GB laptops, that would be minimised.
- And why they solder the RAM, or even worse make it part of the SoC.
  
  There are real world performance benefits to ram being as close as possible to the CPU, so it's not entirely without merit. But that's what CAMM modules are for.
  
  In this particular case the RAM is part of the chip as an attempt to squeeze more performance. Nowadays, processors have become too fast but it’s useless if the rest of the components don’t catch up. The traditional memory architecture has become a bottleneck the same way HDDs were before the introduction of SSDs.
  You’ll see this same trend extend to Windows laptops as they shift to Snapdragon processors too.
  
  BUT BUT you'll get 5% fasTEr SpeED!!! And MOrE seCuRiTy!!!
- And the apple haters will keep making this exact same comment on every post using their 3rd laptop in ten years while I’m still using my 2014 MacBook daily with no issues.
  Be more original.
  
  Nice attempt to justify planned obsolescence. To think apple hasn't done this time and time again, you'd have to be a fool
  
  This is pretty much it. People really just want to find reasons to hate Apple over the past 2 - 3 years. You're right, though, your Mac can run easily for 10+ years. You're good basically until the web browsers no longer support your OS version, which is more in the 12-15 year range.
  
  I still have a fully functioning Windows 95 machine.
  My daily driver desktop is also from around 2014.
- These were obsolete the minute they were made, though... So it's not really planned obsolescence. I got one for free (MacBook Air), and it's always been trash.
  
  I have an M2 MBA and it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned or used, second to the M3 Max MBP I get to use for work. Silent, battery lasts all week, interface is fast and runs all my dev tools like a charm. Zero issues with the device.

This isn’t a big deal.
If you’re developing in Xcode, you did not buy an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years.
If you are just using your Mac for Facebook and email, I don’t think you know what RAM is.
If you know what RAM is, and you bought an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years, then you are likely self-aware of your limited demands and/or made an informed compromise.
- If you know what RAM is, and you bought an 8GB Mac in the last 10-years, then you are likely self-aware of your limited demands and/or made an informed compromise.
  Or you simply refuse to pay $200+ to get a proper machine. Like seriously, 8GB Mac's should have disappeared long ago, but nope, Apple stick to them with their planned obsolescence tactics on their hardware, and stubbornly refusing to admit that in 2023 releasing a MacBook with soldered 8Gb of RAM is wholy inadequate.
  
  I get around this by simply not buying a Mac. Free's up so much money for ram.
  
  Yeah, the 8GB model's purpose is to make an "starting at $xxxx" price tag possible.
- I’m not gonna stand up and declare that 8gb is absolutely fine, because in very short order it won’t be. But yeah, currently for an average use case, it is.
  My work Mac mini has 8gb. It’s a 2014 so can’t be upgraded, but for the tasks I ask of it it’s ok. Sure, it gets sluggish if I’m using the Win11 VM I sometimes need, but generally I don’t really have any issues doing regular office tasks.
  That said, I sometimes gets a bee in my bonnet about it, so open Activity Monitor to see what’s it’s doing, and am shocked by how much RAM some websites consume in open tabs in Safari.
  8gb is generally ok on low end gear, but devs are working very hard to ensure that it’s not.
- Funny: knowing that you only get one shot, I bought 32GB of RAM for my Mac Mini like 1.5 years ago. I figured that it gave me the best shot of keeping it usable past 5 years.

imagine showing this post to someone in 1995
shit has gotten too bloated these days. i mean even in my head 8GB still sounds like 'a lot' of RAM and 16GB feels extravagant
- I still can't fully accept that 1GB is not normal, 2GB is not very good, and 4GB is not all you ever gonna need.
  If only it got bloated for some good reasons.
  
  I remember when I got my first computer with 1GB of RAM, where my previous computer had 64MB, later upgraded to 192MB. And there were only like 3 or 4 years in between them.
  It was like: holy shit, now I can put all the things in RAM. I will never run out.
  
  The moment you use a file that is bigger than 1GB, that computer will explode.
  Some of us do more than just browse Lemmy.
- I chalk it up to lazy rushed development. Good code is art.
- I have a VPS that uses 1GB of RAM, it has 6-7 apps running in docker containers which isn't the most ram efficient method of running apps.
  A light OS really helps, plus the most used app that uses a lot of RAM actually reduce their consumption if needed, but use more when memory is free, the web browser. On one computer I have chrome running with some hundreds of MB used, instead of the usual GBs because RAM is running out.
  So it appears that memory is full,but you can actually have a bit more memory available that is "hidden"
  
  Same here. When idle, the apps basically consume nothing. If they are just a webserver that calls to some PHP script, it basically takes no RAM at all when idle, and some RAM when actually used.
  Websites and phone apps are such an unoptimized pieces if garbage that they are the sole reason for high RAM requirements. Also lots of background bloatware.
  
  This is resource reservation, it happens at an OS level. If chrome is using what appears to be alot of ram, it will be freed up once either the OS or another application requires it.
  It just exists so that an application knows that if it needs that resource it can use X amount for now.
- Absolutely.
  Bad, rushed software that wires together 200 different giant libraries just to use a fraction of them and then run it in a sandboxed container with three daemons it needs for some reason doesn't mean "8 Gb isn't enough", it means write tighter, better software.
- You just have to watch your favorite tablet get slower year after year to understand that a lot of this is artificial. They could make applications that don't need those resources but would never do so.
- Guy from '95: "I bet it's lightning fast though..."
  No dude. It peaks pretty soon. In my time, Microsoft is touting a chat program that starts in under 10 seconds. And they're genuinely proud of it.
  
  And latency is more shit than it ever was
- We measure success by how many GB's we have consumed when the only keys depressed from power on to desktop is our password. This shit right here is the real issue.
- I once went for lower CAS timing 2x 128MB ram sticks (256 MB) instead of 2x 256s with slower speeds because I thought 512MB was insane overkill. Realized how wrong I was when trying to play Star Wars galaxies mmorpg when a lot of people were on the screen it started swapping to disk. Look up the specs for an IBM Aptiva, first computer my parents bought, and you'll understand how 512MB can seem like a lot.
  Now my current computer has 64 GB (most gaming computers go for 32GB) at the time I built it. My workstation at work has 128GB which really isn't even enough for some workloads we have that use a lot of in-memory cache.. And large servers can have multiple TB of RAM. My mind has been blown multiple times.

Opens chrome on a 8GB Mac. Sees lifespan of SSD being reduced by 50%. After 2-3 years of heavy usage SSD starts to get errors. Apple solution: buy a new one. No wonder they are 2nd/3rd wealthiest company on the planet.
- buy a new one.
  Buy a new SSD and swap out the old one?
  ...buy a new SSD, right??
  
  SSD is soldered to the board. With only 8GB you'll be using the swap partiton a lot so for anything exceeding 8GB of RAM you will be using the SSD as a slower "RAM" which will wear it's lifespan down by constantly writing/reading into it' s swap partition.
  
  Oh, my sweet summer child...
  
  You don't get the most valuable company by selling a SSD. So, yeah a new Mac of course.
  
  I think SSDs are also soldered to the mainboard on most apple products.
  
  Nah ur nat doin that with apple. Cmon just buy a new PC! Wa don car abt the env! Who cares anyway! Cmon not that expensive

They moved to on-die RAM for a reason: To nickel and dime yo ass.
I needed to expense a Mac Mini for iOS development, and everyone (Me, the company, our purchasing department) was baffled at how much it cost to get 16 GB. And they only go up to 24GB. Imagine how much they'll charge for 32 in a year!
- It's technically a bit faster, but yeah, I think charging more is the bigger motivation.
  
  Companies primarily make decisions to maximise the profitability of someone and it's never the consumer.
  
  It's a bit first but if their primary motivation was performance improvements they wouldn't be soldering 16 GB.
  If you're going to weld shoes to your feet, you better at least make sure that they're good shoes.
  
  Sounds like one of those rare cases where engineering and marketing might agree on something.
- Mac Mini is meant to be sort of the starter desktop. For higher end uses, they want you on the Mac Studio, an iMac, or a Mac Pro.
  
  I assumed that the Mini was the effectively a Mac without a monitor. Is it relatively underpowered too?

8GB of dedicated VRAM is hardly enough these days...
- Especially with 4k
  
  4k rendering or 4k textures?
- This is my biggest lament about getting a 2060 without knowing how important vram is. I can make it perform better and more efficiently a bunch of different ways, but to my knowledge, I can't get around the 6GB vram wall.

Why do they struggle so much with some "obvious things" sometimes ? We wouldn't have a type-C iphone if the EU didn't pressured them to do make the switch
- 💸💸💸
- They didn't have a reason to switch to USB-C, and several reasons to avoid it for as long as possible. Their old Lightning connector (and the big 30-pin connector that came before it) was proprietary, and companies had to pay a royalty to Apple for every port and connector they manufactured. They made a lot of money off of the royalties.

HP seems to think 4 GB is an acceptable amount of RAM to put in a modern notebook (although they don't charge even close to what Apple charges).
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Micro-edge-Microsoft-14-dq0040nr-Snowflake/dp/B0947BJ67M
Edit: Thinking about it, this is worse. Apple isn't targeting low-income people. This is HP selling the poor a computer that doesn't work properly.
- Shipping with Windows S. That's Microsoft's version of a Chromebook for some light web browsing for 188 dollars. I wouldn't buy it but this doesn't look like a rip off at this price point.
  
  They could just raise the prize to $198 and slap another 4GB of RAM on it.
  
  S mode does allow you to turn it off, so it's more like a hobbled version of home.
  The computer is as bad as one I saw several years ago with 64g emmc and "Quad core processor." not a quad core, it was literally the name that showed in system. It did have 4 cores: at 400Mhz, boosting to 1.1Ghz. Buyer changed their mind and we couldn't give it away.
- At a $188 price point. An additional 4GB of memory would probably add ~$10 to the cost, which is over a 5% increase. However, that is not the only component they cheaped out on. The linked unit also only has 64GB of storage, which they should probably increase to have a usable system ...
  And soon you find that you just reinvented a mid-market device instead of the low-market device you were trying to sell.
  4GB of ram is still plenty to have a functioning computer. It will not be as capable of a more powerful computer, but that comes with the territory of buying the low cost version of a product.
  
  If they wanted it to be as cheap as possible, they could have installed Linux on it.
  
  Now let me present you the laptops with 2GB of RAM still being sold here in Brazil: https://www.zoom.com.br/notebook/notebook-multilaser-legacy-cloud-pc132-intel-atom-x5-z8350-14-2gb-windows-10-bluetooth
  
  At that point you gotta wonder if it can keep up with an $80 Raspberry Pi, especially if HP tries to shoehorn Windows into that
- I was looking at notebooks at Walmart the other day, and I was amazed that they almost all had less or the same amount of RAM as my phone.
  
  Miniaturization is amazing. The limiting factor to how powerful we can make phones is not space to put in computational units (processors,ram,etc). It is the ability to deal with the heat they generate (and the related issue of rationing a limited amount of battery power)
- Sounds about right for HP.
  
  I don't even understand how HP still exists. Can anyone name a single product they've made in the last ~15 years that wasn't a complete piece of junk?
- And worst part: they installed Windows on it.
- 4gb is acceptable. Some people just want a phone with a keyboard and bugger screen. Depends on the use case tho.

8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment. Heck my M1 Macbook Air is even good with basic Photoshop/Illustrator work and light AV editing. I certainly prefer my PC laptop with 32GB and a dedicated GPU but its power adapter weighs more than a Macbook Air.
- 8GB would be fine for basic use if it was upgradable. With soldered RAM the laptop becomes e-waste when 8GB is no longer enough.
  
  Yeah, the soldering is outrageous. I miss the time when Apple was a (more) customer friendly company. I could open my Mac mini 2009 and just add more RAM, which I did.
- I mean I develop software on an 8GB laptop. Most of the time it's fine, when I need more I have a desktop with 128GB ram available.
  Really depends what type of software you're making. If you're using python a few TB might be required.
- 8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment.
  The thing is, basic office/school/work tasks can be done on any laptop that costs twice less than an 8GB MacBook.
  
  This is true for part time or casual use but for all day work use including travel you get better build quality and far less problems with a pro grade machine. We spend the same on a macbook, thinkpad, surface or probook for our basic full time users.
  While it may be a bit overkill for someone who spends their day in word, excel, chrome and zoom we save money in the long term due to reliability. There is far less downtime and IT time spent on each user over the life of the system (3-4 years). The same is true about higher quality computer accessories.

They should do 4Gb. I hear M3 mac's make it seem like 8Gb.
- If you allocate it right, you can add 200GB of swap space and then that 4GB of RAM will feel like 408GB!
- I think you mean gigabytes, not gigabits.
  8 Gb = 1 GB
  
  Darn you broadband
  
  You mean they can even make 0.5GB appear as 8GB?! That's 16x! That apple silicon is just something else!

Oh man, I remember so many people defended 8GB since the M1 first came out (and since).
I always argued it would significantly reduce the lifetimes of these machines if you bought one, not just because you’d be swapping a lot more on the (soldered in BTW) ssd, but because after a few years of updates it would become unbearably slow, or hardware would fail, or both.
Didn’t stop people constantly “tHe aRchITecTuRE iS cOmPlETelY diFFeRenT!!!”
Sure it’s different, but it’s still just a computer. A technical person can still look at the spec sheet and calculate effective performance accounting for bus widths etc.
Disclosure: I bought a top spec 16GB M1 Mac Air on launch and have been extremely happy with it - it’s still going strong.
- Didn’t stop people constantly “tHe aRchITecTuRE iS cOmPlETelY diFFeRenT!!!”
  Different Turing Machine on different math and alternative physics, I guess.
  I bought a top spec 16GB M1 Mac Air on launch
  My condolences.
  EDIT: do people geuenly belive that math doesn't apply to Apple's products or they just don't understand even such concentrated sarcasm?

I can't believe, there's no Linux reference yet!
Give your "8 gigs not enough" hardware to one of us and see it revived running faster than whatever you're running now with your subpar OS.
- Software and AI development would be hard with 8gb of RAM on Linux. Having you seen the memes on AI adding to global climate change? Not even Linux can fix the issues with ChatGPT...
  
  I don't think anyone anywhere is claiming 8GB RAM is enough for software and AI development. Pretty sure we're talking about consumer-grade hardware here. And low-end at that.
- I actually bought a m1 mini for a linux low power server. I was getting tired of the Pi4 being so slow when I needed to compile something. Works real well, just need the Asahi team to get TB working. And for my server stuff, 8gb is plenty.
  
  You wouldn't happen to run a jellyfin server on that mac mini would you? Currently looking to find something performant with small form factor and low power consumption.
- You can run Windows on 200 MB of RAM
- I can run Arch Linux (BTW!) in a potato with starch RAM!
- I'd love to see you run xcode 16 code completion on your superior OS. Send me a link once you've uploaded the vid.
  
  Why limit it to proprietary software? Almost every linux distro can run Github Copilot X and Jetbrains, which both have had more time to be publicly used and tested and work better in my opinion.
  Send me a video link of Mac having direct access to containers without using a VM (which ruins the point of containers). THAT is directly related to my actual work, as opposed to needing a robot to code for me specifically using Apple's AI
  
  Pls provide source code.
  
  There is a project being worked on called Darling, but it isn’t ready yet. The developers are making progress though.

For who? My mother who only use facebook, youtube and googling don't need 8gb
- Sounds like all she needs is a dirt cheap chromebook then
  
  That's what she has
  
  That all depends on how much work they want to put into troubleshooting it for her. I got my mom a Mac Mini when her PC needed to be replaced. It’s way less responsibility on my part. I mostly just answer the occasional how-to.
- I don't know what Xcode is so yeah, I haven't been found wanting with my 8GB M2. Videos, downloading, web browsing, writing, chat applications, some photo editing, games (what I can actually play on a Mac, anyway), all good here.
  16GB+ is obviously going to be necessary though, and not exactly that expensive to put into their base models so it should be put in soon.
- I had a laptop with 8GB. Doing one of those things was fine, but when you open up another program it takes forever to switch to the browser
  
  And then you have to activate linux app support for a thing she needs and can not do with chromebook and suddenly it is more complicated than macOS?

The Voyager space probes disagree.

To be fair there are only two reasons I hate it:
People incorrectly use term UMA
It's crApple
On Linux if you don't compile rust or firefox 8GB is fine. 4 is fine too.

I'd love to have 8GB of RAM. The SOC I'm working with has only 2K ;-)
- Bet your compiler isnt running on that hardware either ;-)
  
  Luckily, no ;-)
- 2 kilobytes?
  
  Yes. 2 kilobytes. Coincidentally, this is as big as the displays internal buffer, so I cannot even keep a shadow copy of it in my RAM for the GUI.
- Come on, man, AVR chips aren't SoCs except in the technical sense.
  
  No AVR, it's a small LPC from NXP. Chosen for the price, of course, but I have to somehow squeeze the software in it. At this point, even 8k would make me happy...
  
  Man, microcontrollers are namegivers of SoC.

I have everything from apple but I know that 8gb is basically planned obsolescence in disguise.
We pay serious extra cash for just a ‚notch’ more refined experience. However I had to try to buy every possible thing from apple at least once in my life to see if it is worth it and basically only M4 iPad Pro 13 is truly worth the money and irreplaceable for me.
Everything else is nice for someone who is super lazy like me but can be easily replaced with not much difference for cheaper shit

Every time I compare specs to prices on Apples website, I get irrationally angry.

My daily driver is an 8gb MacBook Air, I’m living pretty comfortably lol

I have a macbook air m2 with 8gb of ram and I can even run ollama, never had ram problems, I don't get all the hate
- Which model with how many parameters du you use in ollama? With 8GB you should only be able to use the smallest models, which ist faaaar from ideal:
  You should have at least 8 GB of RAM available to run the 7B models, 16 GB to run the 13B models, and 32 GB to run the 33B models.
  
  llama3:8b, I know it's "far from ideal" but only really specific use cases require more advanced models to run locally, if you do software development, graphic design or video editing 8gb is enough
  edit: just tried it after some time and it works better than I remembered showcase

For the record, on Windows 10, I'm using 9GB (rounded up from 8.something) to run Firefox and look at this website, can't forget Discord inviting itself to my party in the background, and the OS. I had to close tabs to get down here. Streams really eat the RAM up.
Throw a game in there, with FF open for advice and Discord running for all the usual gaming reasons, and yeah, way over.
Notice I haven't even touched any productivity stuff that demands more.
8? Eat a penis, Apple. Fuckin clown hardware.
- Also for the record, I have experienced an 8GB Mac Mini run Firefox with at least 20 tabs, Jetbrains Rider with code open and editable, Jetbrains DataGrip with queries, somehow Microsoft Teams, MS Outlook and didn’t seem to have a problem. Was also able to share the screen on a Teams call and switch between the applications without lag.
  Windows OS couldn’t handle your application load? Eat a penis, Microsoft. Fucking clown memory management.
- MacOS’s memory scheduler is leaps and bounds better than what Windows uses. It’s more apt to compare the RAM on a machine running MacOS to one running a common Linux distro. Windows needs more RAM than the other two by two to three times because it’s fuckterrible at using it.

Wake me up when phones have enough ram to run good voice to text engines on the phone itself
- We already have that since iOS 15 if you have a phone that released after the iPhone X. It's time to become woke, sheeple.
  
  So 8gb?
- How much do you need?
  
  Last check about 10GB for the model. Anything less doesn't translate my voice to text accurately
- 12 aint enough?
  
  Think you need 16

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