8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests
8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests
8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests::Apple's new MacBook Pro models are powered by cutting-edge M3 Apple silicon, but the base configuration 14-inch model starting at $1,599...
For $1,599 you'd at least expect 16GB+ RAM given how cheap RAM is...
Apple loves under ramming (to give a word a new meaning) and forcing everyone to pay for upgrades. The problem is there are always people that buy the base.
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I think the point is to squeeze out a couple extra hundred dollars from customers.
Apple has long done price anchoring with their products just like in this case.
At this point I'm pretty sure the ram costs more than the rest of the laptop.
Apple's RAM isn't as cheap as you might think, because it's all built directly onto the CPU die. That's part of what makes its computers so fast.
It's iRAM!
The people to whom this discussion ought to matter (the prospective buyers of an 8GB RAM machine) are utterly oblivious to this discussion. They’ll continue to walk into an Apple Store and buy these machines. We are like body builders arguing about how obese people should stop eating shit.
Maybe we should all start calling it the "MacBook Semi-Pro".
8gb ram has been common for over a decade now. It's what I would expect in a sub-$400 laptop.
Or a raspberry pi.
$75, 8gb, and this isn't even the latest model. https://www.microcenter.com/product/622539/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-8gb-ddr4
The MacBook amateur. They should be called out on a viral scale.
It’s hard to take the Mac seriously. This is even more dumbfounding because they have an excellent processor. Then they pair it with anemic RAM and make demonstrably false statements about the system’s performance. I don’t get it.
Ah it's cool, you can just open the little door in the back and upgrade the RAM anytime you want.
Right??
Sir, this is apple.
Gotta buy their apple 5 point screwdriver
Open back
Remove adhesive & battery
Dismount motherboard and keyboard
Find out it's soldered ram
Kill self
With a hot air rework station anything is upgradable, laptops, phones, babies... ok not babies, but like lots of other stuff.
Maybe, in the future, lamps will be permanently wired into house walls. Who even needs outlets? Just buy a new house if you don't like the lamp anymore.
It's Apple so they probably do some kind of bullshit key pairing nonsense to prevent you being able to upgrade the RAM even with the soldering iron.
I really wouldn't be surprised if it's not actually possible
My four year old phone has more RAM than an expensive macbook? LMFAO 🤭🤭🤭
Um actthually mac is so oPtimized so 1gb mac = 12.3gb windows 🤓
STFU it physically has less ram than a potato while costing the price of a nasa rocket
Also Apple™ RAM costs like 4 to 8 times as much. Being $200 for 8GB. So assuming fantasy land Apple™ iMagic™ means 8GB = 16GB it's still a minimum of twice the cost per dollar
Who mentioned Windows??
Did you watch the video? The 8GB model is like 1/4 the speed of the 16GB model.
It's a bottleneck, clear as day. I just thought it was funny that Apple is so stingy that they'd even consider putting an offensive 8GB of ram on this laptop.
Apple had to know these reviews were coming. A new iteration on their custom SOC is obviously going to make every tech site go bananas benchmarking and their claim that 8GB = 16GB is going to make them punish the machine even harder.
It's like they decided a few bad reviews would cost them less than cutting their markup on RAM to make a 16GB entry level Pro machine for less than $2k.
What's worse is that their "8GB = 16GB" claim has a tiny bit of truth in it: many apps that are GPU-accelerated usually load/generate stuff on host RAM and then transfer it to the GPU RAM to launch some shaders/kernels on it and they do this repeatedly. The idea with Apple (also AMD when you consider APUs) is that since the RAM is "unified" you just have one RAM and you probably don't have that redundancy anymore if those apps are built with that in mind, so in a sense if previously you had a 1GB buffer that had to live on both CPU and GPU RAM, this time it will only live in as a single 1GB buffer on Apple's "unified" RAM. That's still very different from the "8GB = 16GB" deceptive marketing by Apple.
You don't have to put unified in quotes, it's the proper term for an SoC that shares the same memory between the CPU and GPU.
The major advantage of unified memory is that it doesn't have the copy overhead. When using a discrete GPU you need to load data onto the host and then copy it over to the GPU. And then if data on the GPU needs to be processed separately by the CPU (saved to a file, sent over the network, etc) you incur more overhead again. And let's ignore more specific technologies like Direct I/O and io_uring for this discussion.
On an SoC with unified memory you don't have this overhead. The CPU can (in theory) access the same memory space as the GPU with zero overhead, and it makes the performance hit from shuttling the data back and forth non-existent.
But there's a massive downside, and it's that it drastically cuts down your available memory, because now the CPU and GPU have only a single 8GB pool to use for both. Whereas in a system without unified memory and a discreet GPU would have the 8GB for the CPU in addition to whatever the GPU has. They don't step on each other's toes.
For example, if I use a system with 8GB of host RAM and a GPU with 6GB of VRAM to run a model of some kind (let's say stable diffusion), it will load the model into the VRAM and not clog up the host RAM. Yes, the host will initially use system RAM to load the file descriptors and then shuttle the data to the GPU, but once that's done the model isn't kept on the host.
On a Mac it would load it onto the only memory available and the CPU would not have the full 8GB available to it the way an x86 system would have.
The point I'm making is that because of the unified architecture the 8GB is effectively even less than 8GB in a discrete GPU system. It's worse.
The worst part is that in many retail chains like Costco, you can only get the 8GB version. I suspect the review reading segment of the population is smaller than we’d expect for such an expensive purchase. Previously they’ve crippled M1 machines that have 256Gb storage, only including one controller instead of two as in the 512+ machines. It’s a shame for MacBook Air, but totally unacceptable for a computer marketed as “Pro”
Not a pro cpu, just a pro chassis.
"Pro"
Ahem. Yeah right
Macbooks are both fit and pro at the same time
Bravo 👏🏼
It looks like the 24 GiB (?) real-Pro MacBook.
The cpu is the M3, the same one they'll put in the air. NOT a "pro" cpu, just a "pro" chassis.
With all the ports a pro needs, right. Right? 😅
I tell you what, i do love my lenovo x1 carbon. I used to have a real macbook pro from back in the day. Loved it. Upgradable, ports everywhere. Fast. Beautiful.
I had to move to Linux and a machine like the lenovo as i was not going to put up with 1 port and a fuck you very much.
However, they also have soldered in parts now, so next machine will be something else.
With that kind of memory swapping, the soldered ssd gonna be toasts within 1 or 2 yrs. Its already a known problem in previous macbooks, where people runs memory intensive programs and find thier mac book dead after even 6 months to 1 yr
Does it swap to the SSD or does it use a compressed area of RAM?
From what i read the previous cases it uses the ssd. Thus the ssd write cycle maxed out after 6 months leaving the mac dead. And then Apple sent a replacement, the guy use it as he usually did, and in 6months dead again.
Pretty sure it just doesn't do anything. I'm not going to get one and test it because I'm not insane but from the performance specs of people are putting out it looks like it just maxes out the ram and then does nothing.
I was saying this when the M2 was first announced. It's impressive for what it is, but what it is, is actually kind of crap.
I think selling an 8GB laptop with a Pro moniker is a terrible move. But you'll need to cite examples (more than one, because sometimes components just fail under the best of circumstances).
My 350€ three-year old phone has an SoC with 12GB of RAM.
And then wonder why Mac sales tanked 27% in their last financial report. Selling 8Gb laptops is an offence.
And seriously for their price, I would much prefer a laptop like Framework that I know I can easily swap components and make it workable even after a while.
They'll still sell like hot cakes 😂
Apple is the proof Marketting >> Quality.
They sell the premium dream making the user think it's the best.
Perhaps with an SSD, memory swapping is less intrusive, hence you won't noticed any performance issues. This is referring to the vast majority of users. At least for a few years. They will have an intolerable machine later though, when the OS becomes more bloated, and they can't figure out how to upgrade those soldered RAM modules.
SSDs are far slower than RAM. And adds extra wear on the SSD.
And in the case of these Macs, the SSD is also soldered. So you're screwed when you wear it out with the excessive swapping.
You missed the point of my statement. SSDs are far faster than physical HDDs, therefore you can get away with providing less RAM. And the lifespan of a modern SSD is the same as a HDD. But yes, they are cheaping out by providing only 8GB, unless you pay hundreds more.
This is referring to the vast majority of users. At least for a few years
The “vast majority of users” do not know what RAM is and they don’t know what expandable memory means. Nor will they ever open their own laptops. If the laptop is slow after a few years they will just get a new one.
My current phone, and my last phone both had more ram. For significantly less money.
100 percent in agreement that apples ram pricing is lunacy
But my brother. Wtf do you need that much ram in a phone for lol. Mine has 6gb (12 pro lmao) and that causes me zero issues. Granted, I don’t game on my phone. But is phone gaming really eating that much ram these days?
I also have 12 GB. There are usage patterns where additional RAM wull be useful or even necessary on a phone. When you have more RAM, the phone can sleep tasks and leave background apps alone without having to discard their contents from RAM. This means fewer cold startups. Also, more contents can be cached, which means faster app startups. Both of these techniques also reduce CPU usage and improve battery life. You can also achieve more tabs in your browsers and more and bigger apps running at the same time. More RAM also means fewer situations where swapping is done or needed, so additional CPU and disk cycles are saved and battery usage is reduced. Some apps will actually require more RAM or spin more when memory is scarce. Examples can be advanced content creation apps in audio, video, or picture/photography. Also, some games, especially in high settings.
Are these additional GBs necessary? No. And most people would not notice them, as even 6 GB is overkill for quite a number of peoples' usage patterns. Your phone does maybe 95% of what it does just about as well, even when you have a low-midrange CPU and GPU that is from a few years ago, and just 4 or 6gb of RAM.
This holds true for iOS and Android. They've both done a fair bit of housekeeping and software improvements to reel in excessive resource usage gen over gen. I think Android was doing some catch-up here for a while, but I don't know how they go toe to toe on this anymore, and it's difficult to empirically compare the two in this area.
Ok but……who the hell runs blender and FFP in 8GB?
The vast majority of users are NOT running pro apps like that.
It’s just a name. If you’re actually running pro stuff, you’d be an idiot to run that on 8Gb no matter what machine.
Apple’s argument that it’s the same as 16gb is dumb, but anyone actually using pro apps on 8Gb is dumber. The majority of browser(with sane numbers of tabs)/iPhoto/office users really are probably not gonna notice.
If it wasn't $1600 maybe I could buy that. But at that price I am expecting a little bit more and only including 8 gb is pathetic.
No one is running those apps in 8gb, the point was is to prove that you will now need to buy a model up instead of the base model. Proving Apples BS marketing wrong
Unfortunately a lot of consumers don't understand this. Even if they use "pro" apps daily. These same people will fall for Apples marketing tricks here regardless.
Well if that's the argument then they are also not gonna notice the M1 or M3 under the hood. Both chips are pretty good.
Heck even an older Intel chip should work fine in 2023 under those workloads.
Imagine buying a $1600 US laptop to use blender.
My laptop can't run blender anymore. But, it's 12 years old.
I don't have an Mac. How much RAM does it use just to turn it on? Windows 10 needs an astounding 4 GB just to see the desktop.
At least 4GB, my previous employer was a young guy that was an Apple simp. He bought a bunch of Mac minis as desktop computers and they only had 4GB of RAM. They were the most garbage piece of shit computer I have ever had the displeasure of being forced to use. It really wasn't even usable, it would lock up just trying to open any web browser or even the file explorer (or whatever Apple calls it). It really amazes me how Apple continues to shit in their customers mouths, tell them it's chocolate ice cream and they believe them
Windows doesn't use it all to load the desktop. It caches the rest so the files and software you use often loads faster. There's also the reserved RAM for the hardware...
Every os uses certain % of ram to preload services and applications. So that when you launch them they open faster. And when they aren't needed and you want to do ram intensive task, those unnecessary processes are killed.
I got gifted an old MacBook (I never thought of buying one myself) and started using it mainly because I liked the UI, but I'm generally speaking a windows user at work and Linux sysadmin at home.
When I checked up the MacBook systems, I see it has 4 GB of RAM and I thought "that's pathetic!"
But surprisingly enough, the Mac OS handled everything I throw at him with decent performance and I've never felt the OS was overwhelmed.
I don't know if this is a testament of how well integrated and optimised Mac OS is (after all, it's still BSD) or how bad Windows is.
But still, for the price they're charging for these machines, adding at least a couple of gigs of RAM would be expected!
I think Unix got a smidge better and windows got insanely bad.
Money is the bottleneck.
What level of greed are you comfortable with?
You should get that model
I have a 2015 Macbook for work reasons and I have no problem with it other than the battery being mostly kaput and that's replaceable if I feel like paying someone to do it. When Apple stops supporting it, I'll install Linux on it. When I finally have to buy another machine, I'll probably just get a $300 Chromebook because I have another computer to run the work software and this Mac is now just a glorified web browser. But I'm sure as fuck not buying a Macbook.
The sheer idea of selling a 8gb machine in 2023 is kinda wild
8 gigs of ram for some shitty laptop is fine. Like the air shipping with 8 gigs of ram is fine (not great, but fine)
But for a "Pro" machine, let alone a 1600 dollar computer is insane.
MacBook Air is a $1000 computer too though :/ I bought a Thinkpad t480s with 8gb of (upgradable) ram for less than that back in 2019. currently running it with 24gb.
My kid grabbed an 8/256 M2 Air when they first launched last year, and is still overjoyed with its performance. He has a PS5 for gaming, so the Mac is for uni work and downloading shit. 8gb RAM isn't inherently bad.
It's just as you said though; it's bad for a "Pro" machine.
What is someone likely to use a shitty laptop for? Open a web browser to run ~1080p video?
Maybe you’re not supposed to do any pro stuff with it. Just watch youtube videos and browse FB or whatever it is that grandmas do these days. Many apple products don’t really feel as pro as you’re lead to believe by the marketing team.
Just today I ran into a strange issue with the iMovie on iOS. You literally can’t edit a vertical video in any sensible way. Either you shoot horizontal video or you don’t shoot at all. These are the only options Apple gives for you.
This is the same as the air, but with a better screen (basically).
The M3 Pro MacBook Pro has a minimum of 18GB of ram.
I've been using an 8GB laptop for a few years now and don't feel the need to have more. But if I'm paying that much I'd expect at least 16GB.
That's my problem with the 8GB. I even have the Air with that much memory. It's fine... but I also got it secondhand. For new, I can't pay that much money for entry level RAM specs.
Yeah I have 8GB of RAM on my Macbook Air and it works fine, I just need to manage my browser tabs and restart Chrome sometimes. But if I was paying $1600 or more for a "Pro" laptop......the fuck?
My company computer had 4 GBs of RAM... And an HDD with Windows 11, the worst fucking experience.
HDD in 2023? Why?
I open the two essential Excel tools that we use all day + teams and outlook and I'm at 10gb of memory usage...
No doubt. Even wilder to me is the idea of buying a Mac with 8GB in 2023, speaking as a long time Mac owner. Mine is from several years ago. I wonder if Apple execs ever pull their heads out of their asses. This feels like the late 90s all over again.
Don’t tell that to Nvidia.
Same with NVIDIA, who are stubbornly refusing to give their overpriced GPUs the VRAM they deserve.
I bought a Dell 6core AMD laptop on some sale and it was little 345 after tax and shipping. Then I immediately replaced the nvme with a 1tb one for another 70? I think. Laptop is really nice for the price.