I upgraded my 2018 Mac mini to 64 GB and realized that all my performance problems immediately disappeared. Everything is instant. CPU and GPU are totally meaningless for my use case, but RAM is massively important.
I don’t do anything fancy, just kind of standard home office stuff- photos, music, email, Evernote, OneNote, etc. But I have large databases in each. I use up most of a 3TB RAID. I regularly cross the 32gb threshold in memory use.
I could get by with 32gb if I wouldn’t mind tolerating some throttling, but 8-16gb is off the table entirely. Even my little 16 gb macbook I just use to screw around on while I watch tv can’t keep up with just doing email, some text editors and browsers without bogging, sometimes massively.
It’s getting to the point where Macs are just becoming unusable due to this nonsense, and I’ve never been more motivated to leave the platform. I can’t pay $3000 for every computer or just live with bog slow computers.
You sure about that?
I got my work to buy me a new one very recently because I need a new one for testing stuff (my main machine runs Windows). I choose the cheapest one available, because I don’t need a Pro model or anything. I also prefer a light computer since I often carry around both the Mac and my Windows machine in my backpack.
The cheapest M2 or M3 MacBook Air I could find had 16 GB RAM and 256 GB of storage. It’s only 999 USD which is quite cheap compared to my Windows laptop. Not cheap but not bad compared to normal business laptops.
Where do you get your numbers from?
P.S. it’s really fucking stupid that the MacBook Air can’t do more than one external display. Even the more barebone laptop available the decade should handle at least two displays. Hell even the Pi 4 can do 2 4K displays (at 30 FPS iirc but still)
Maybe they started to include 16gb this year, but I can assure you that the basic model recently came with only 8gb ram. I’ve had dozens of students with those in the past couple of years. Right now, a basic M3 on Apple.ca is 1449$ CAD. .
There was a recent Lemmy post saying Apple had just raised their minimum RAM specs to 16 GB. I think I came across this in the last couple weeks. I didn’t do more than skim the comments since I don’t have any products from them.
Compare the experience on that with any Mac (even an old intel one) with 64gb and you will understand instantly how important it is. Now go look at the 1000%+ markup they put on their ram and disk and you will see the problem.
But the change to a base 16gb only happened in 2024 so there’s no conflict between your two observations.
My personal PC has 64 GB, my work PC has 16 and the new work PC will have 32 GB.
8 GB is absolutely too little and apple absolutely charges way too much for more storage and ram.
I was just doubting their observation that new MacBooks from 2024 had 8 GB of ram. (They edited their comment. It said 2024 originally)
Btw, 256 GB is not that bad if all you do on your laptop is normal office work. When I looked for a new laptop this week, I had a fairly hard time finding a laptop which filled all of our requirements and had 1 TB of storage. Which is pretty insane considering that 1 TB is really cheap but I guess most don’t need it.
Are you sure they’re not just slacking off and claiming the computer is slow?
Sure, you’re not running multiple CAD programs on a base model Air, but it’s a perfectly capable machine for web browsing, Electron apps, Citrix, MS Office, PDFs, usual desktop stuff.
And the base model Air is less than a grand - if you’re spending $1.5k, you’re getting more than 8GB RAM.
Yes, I should specify. Macbook Air are perfectly capable of meeting all basic needs. I teach in music tech, we use software that can be asking (plugin, etc.) but nothing like serious video editing etc., and I’ve seen that several of these machines quickly struggle with heavy Pro-tool sessions. I’m not an Apple detractor on the hardware side (my m1 max is by far the best laptop I’ve ever had) but let’s be serious, 8gb of ram is 2012 standard, not 2024. Also I’m in Québec, I meant CAD dollars but it’s true that I might have exaggere a little bit lol.
If you run one application and no browser you can make 16gb work. Or if you don’t mind constant bogging I guess you can use 8gb, but to me at that point you don’t really have a usable computer any more.
Some of my student had brand new 2023 Macbook Air with an amazing 8gb ram!! Those 1.5k$ computers struggle to do anything serious lol.
I upgraded my 2018 Mac mini to 64 GB and realized that all my performance problems immediately disappeared. Everything is instant. CPU and GPU are totally meaningless for my use case, but RAM is massively important.
I don’t do anything fancy, just kind of standard home office stuff- photos, music, email, Evernote, OneNote, etc. But I have large databases in each. I use up most of a 3TB RAID. I regularly cross the 32gb threshold in memory use.
I could get by with 32gb if I wouldn’t mind tolerating some throttling, but 8-16gb is off the table entirely. Even my little 16 gb macbook I just use to screw around on while I watch tv can’t keep up with just doing email, some text editors and browsers without bogging, sometimes massively.
It’s getting to the point where Macs are just becoming unusable due to this nonsense, and I’ve never been more motivated to leave the platform. I can’t pay $3000 for every computer or just live with bog slow computers.
You sure about that? I got my work to buy me a new one very recently because I need a new one for testing stuff (my main machine runs Windows). I choose the cheapest one available, because I don’t need a Pro model or anything. I also prefer a light computer since I often carry around both the Mac and my Windows machine in my backpack.
The cheapest M2 or M3 MacBook Air I could find had 16 GB RAM and 256 GB of storage. It’s only 999 USD which is quite cheap compared to my Windows laptop. Not cheap but not bad compared to normal business laptops.
Where do you get your numbers from?
P.S. it’s really fucking stupid that the MacBook Air can’t do more than one external display. Even the more barebone laptop available the decade should handle at least two displays. Hell even the Pi 4 can do 2 4K displays (at 30 FPS iirc but still)
Erm, actually, the Pi 5 can do 6 monitors with a dGPU attached. Jeff Geerling just did a video about using AMD cards with the PI.
Maybe they started to include 16gb this year, but I can assure you that the basic model recently came with only 8gb ram. I’ve had dozens of students with those in the past couple of years. Right now, a basic M3 on Apple.ca is 1449$ CAD. .
There was a recent Lemmy post saying Apple had just raised their minimum RAM specs to 16 GB. I think I came across this in the last couple weeks. I didn’t do more than skim the comments since I don’t have any products from them.
Yes they did but that’s only because now 16gb is equally as bad an experience as 8gb used to be due to the ram needs of their new AI chip.
Again, wouldn’t know. I haven’t used an Apple computer for more than 20 years.
Compare the experience on that with any Mac (even an old intel one) with 64gb and you will understand instantly how important it is. Now go look at the 1000%+ markup they put on their ram and disk and you will see the problem.
But the change to a base 16gb only happened in 2024 so there’s no conflict between your two observations.
I’m not denying that 8 GBs of RAM is too little.
My personal PC has 64 GB, my work PC has 16 and the new work PC will have 32 GB.
8 GB is absolutely too little and apple absolutely charges way too much for more storage and ram.
I was just doubting their observation that new MacBooks from 2024 had 8 GB of ram. (They edited their comment. It said 2024 originally)
Btw, 256 GB is not that bad if all you do on your laptop is normal office work. When I looked for a new laptop this week, I had a fairly hard time finding a laptop which filled all of our requirements and had 1 TB of storage. Which is pretty insane considering that 1 TB is really cheap but I guess most don’t need it.
Are you sure they’re not just slacking off and claiming the computer is slow?
Sure, you’re not running multiple CAD programs on a base model Air, but it’s a perfectly capable machine for web browsing, Electron apps, Citrix, MS Office, PDFs, usual desktop stuff.
And the base model Air is less than a grand - if you’re spending $1.5k, you’re getting more than 8GB RAM.
Yes, I should specify. Macbook Air are perfectly capable of meeting all basic needs. I teach in music tech, we use software that can be asking (plugin, etc.) but nothing like serious video editing etc., and I’ve seen that several of these machines quickly struggle with heavy Pro-tool sessions. I’m not an Apple detractor on the hardware side (my m1 max is by far the best laptop I’ve ever had) but let’s be serious, 8gb of ram is 2012 standard, not 2024. Also I’m in Québec, I meant CAD dollars but it’s true that I might have exaggere a little bit lol.
If you run one application and no browser you can make 16gb work. Or if you don’t mind constant bogging I guess you can use 8gb, but to me at that point you don’t really have a usable computer any more.