8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro ‘Analogous to 16GB’ on PCs, Claims Apple::Following the unveiling of new MacBook Pro models last week, Apple surprised some with the introduction of a base 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 chip,…
I think they simply mean analogous in price.
What, no! 8 GB Apple RAM costs 4 times that of 16 GB regular DDR4 RAM module.
Edit: 5 times.
The interviewee seems to be meaning it as memory usage (quote from them): "Comparing our memory to other system’s memory actually isn’t equivalent, because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture.
Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently."
I mean, i played with memory compression on linux too, but it’s not a factor x2 and you trade that with more CPU utilization/less battery life. And even though software is not worse in efficiency on this side, webbrowsers, VMs and games still need the RAM.
I’ve seen this a lot on this thread, but this is Apple we’re talking about. They have billions of dollars to throw at making their memory compression far better than what’s on Linux. I still regularly use an 8gb ddr3 apple macbook air from 2017. It’s not as fast at computing as my 32gb windows laptop, but it feels more snappy. I also have a 16gb desktop, also windows, and the macbook feels just a little slower than that. A little. And it’s ddr3 vs ddr4
Ok, honestly, snappyness is mostly the duration of animations, hard to judge from that. Billions for better compression is a mixed bag; it must be cheaper than more RAM in manufacturer prices. And, atleast in Linux, you can choose the compression algorithm, while lz4 has almost memory speed.
Now i’m curious, are there memory load tests for Linux aswell as Mac?
If anything the memory being unified between the GPU and CPU makes it even less than 8GB equivalent
Wait, unified VRAM? This is even worse. I thought that they meant all CPU cores share same bus.
They were making a joke about it being expensive
because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory,
Do they use below 24 megs of RAM in console? Or below 500 megs in GUI? Well, 500 megs is upper bound, I should probably compare to something less bloated than KDE.
and we have a unified memory architecture.
Really? They still doing UMA?
It’s all unified: CPU, GPU, RAM and SSD as far as I remember.
RAM is RAM. If you’re able to manage it better, that’s nice, but programs will still use whatever RAM they were designed to use. If you need to store 5 GiB of something in memory, what happens with the other 2.5 GiB, if they claim that it’s 2x as “efficient?”
Definitely true, but I will say Mac has pretty decent compression on RAM. I’m assuming that’s why they feel this way. My old MBP 2013 had 8, and I used it constantly until earlier this year when I finally upgraded. It was doing pretty well all things considered, mostly because of on the fly RAM compression.
Lower end macs tend to have slower SSDs so this could be a double whammy on these machines.
I’m specifically talking about the in memory compression, not swap.
But memory compression works the same way swap works. When memory is needed LRU page is
written on diskcompressed, and where application needs to read data from compressed page it generates pagefault and OS loads(decompresses) page in memory. That’s it.It can be compressed in RAM, too.
Thanks, cap, this is what I said.
Pretty sure windows has been doing some pretty efficient RAM compression of its own since 98SE or something
They actually just it in Windows 10. There were third party add ons to do so prior to then, but they had marginal impact from my experience.
Did you know that you could do RAM compression on “old” MBP 2013? All you had to do is install Linux and enable memory compression.
RAM is not RAM though. If a RAM is twice as fast than some other RAM, then it can swap shit back and forth really fast, making it more efficient per size. Because Apple is soldering ram next to the chip, it enables them to make their RAM a lot faster. M3 max’s ram has 6x more bandwidth than ddr5 and a lot lower latency too.
Also macos needs less ram in general. Is 8gB ram enough? No. But i would bet money on 12gB m3 over 16gB pc to have fewer ram issues and faster performance.
Most of the things that “use” ram on every day pc use, dont need ram. It is just parked assets, webpages, etc. Things that if you have a really fast ram, can be re-cached to ram pretty fast, especially if your storage is also really fast.
RAM transfer rate is is not important when swapping as the bottleneck will be storage transfer rate when reading and writing to swap.
Which I doubt Apple can make as fast as DDR4 bandwidth.
I have a tank that can hold 500 gallons of water. It’s connected to a pumping system that can do 1000 gallons a minute on the discharge side. So it’s just as good as a 2000 gallon tank!
What do you mean incoming water? Look at my discharge rate!
Because Apple is soldering ram next to the chip, it enables them to make their RAM a lot faster.
What a bullshit I see.
Of all the points in their blatantly wrong comment, this probably wasn’t the one to single out. The reason for the soldered RAM is due to speed and length of traces. The longer the trace, the more chance there is for signal loss. By soldering the Ram close to the cpu the traces are shorter, allowing for a minuscule improvement in latency.
To be clear, I don’t like it either. It’s one of the major things holding me back from buying a MacBook right now.
Same way itx boards are preferred for ram oc. But i doubt apple is pushing crazy timings and clocks.
Exactly. There is an actual, tangible benefit of doing it that way. I don’t like it, as it creates situations where you’re unable to upgrade your own hardware, but it does make sense for the 95% of the population who has never opened a laptop, let alone tried to replace ram
The longer the trace, the more chance there is for signal loss.
While this is true on paper, we don’t need to pretend that this is an unsolved problem in reality. It’s not like large-scale motherboard manufacturers simply refuse to put their RAM closer to the CPU, and it’s littered with data loss. Apple also didn’t do anything innovative by soldering the RAM onto their motherboards. This is simply bootlicking Apple for what’s actually planned obsolescence.
I can’t speak for this particular instance but the reason swappable RAM sticks aren’t “littered with data loss” is because they are designed not to. I.e. Only rated up to a certain speed and timings. Putting RAM physically closer to the CPU does allow you to utilize the RAM better. It’s physics.
Personally, I’d rather take a performance hit than be stuck with a set amount of RAM unless there was some ungodly performance gain.
Putting RAM physically closer to the CPU does allow you to utilize the RAM better. It’s physics.
If the RAM was 3x closer, would it somehow be faster? I’m looking for metrics. With the same stick of any given DDR5, how much performance loss is there on a few example motherboards of your choice?
My point, again, is that yes, on paper, shorter wires means less opportunity for inductance issues, noise, voltage drop, cross-talk, etc. But this is all on paper.
It’s not like every motherboard manufacturer doesn’t know what they’re doing and Apple’s brilliant engineers somehow got a higher clock speed than what the RAM is rated for because… shorter wires?
Case in point: DDR4 is meant to operate at a maximum clock speed per the specs of DDR4. However, on plenty of motherboards that are overclock-capable will support memory that is more than 3x the clock of what DDR4 should be capable of. How does this work with memory that is not soldered into the motherboard?
Additionally, without overclocking, the memory is designed to operate at a clock speed. Will shorter traces to the RAM magically increase the capable clock speed of the RAM? Are these the “physics” you’re referring to?
I know I’ve seen something about this topic. I want to say it was from LTT but I can’t find the video.
I didn’t say anything about it being faster. I said utilize it better. Lower latency can be a big help as it allows quicker access. Think of HDD vs SSD. The biggest advantage in the beginning was the much lower latency SSDs provided. Made things a lot snappier even if the speed/throughput wasn’t all that different.
I don’t know what kind of difference we’re taking about here, or how much real world preformance benefits there are but there’s a reason CPUs have caches on the die.
And that doesn’t include whatever other benefits shorter traces provide. Less voltage drop might be helpful.
But, flexibility must still be better than those gains else most manufacturers would have switched. At some point you start running out of better ways to improve performance though. That’s why things are going back to being integrated with the CPU again.
My dick is 2 inches long. That’s analogous to 10 inches on Mars.
Enough with this Martian slander
Holy crap, apple charges $200 to add 8GB of RAM. I just bought 32GB of DDR5 for the Framework I have on order for $95.
And now look at the actual chip prices and you’ll know, why apple is so fucking rich
They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.
Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
The infamous Apple Water…
They’d call it the AppleZeus
That might be true but it’s also embarrassing for all pc brands who get slaughtered by apples performance as soon as they actually attempt to make things. For example there isn’t a single laptop in the windows world that can match anything apple does
Any laptop with a recent GPU will beat an Apple Laptop for performance. Some higher end CPUs too.
Apple has really good power efficiency, which is great when unpluged, but plugged in laptops with 200 to 300W TDPs are still better.
lol sure if you don’t mind an aircraft carrier and mini oven on your legs. Trust me I used to use one of those 200W laptops and honestly I didn’t even need a blanket in the winter because they run SO hot. not to mention odds are it will last a lot longer not running at those insane temps (which literally approach the max safe operating temp of the CPU on some laptops)
So? I know they get hot, that’s what 200-300W means. But when you said “there isn’t a single laptop in the windows world that can match anything apple does”, you were wrong. Laptops with GPUs still win in performance.
Stop moving the goalposts.
Looks like you need to go back to school because that wasn’t even me LMAO, you don’t even know who you’re responding to.
Stop being so bad at reading.
I know that there are several Windows laptops that can match M-series performance or even beat it but there are 0 laptops on the market that can do everything better the MacBooks can. With windows you choose between portability, performance, and power usage. You don’t have to sacrifice any on a MacBook.
Hahahahaha
I have friends who spec for their clients every day (I only do it occasionally). Mac laptops cost anywhere from 50% to 100% more than equivalent Dell and Lenovo laptops (ignoring the even less-costly brands, because none of us spec those).
They all have access to the same hardware. And MacOS, despite the gaslighting in this article, isn’t any more performant on the same hardware in the real world.
They all have access to the same hardware. And MacOS, despite the gaslighting in this article, isn’t any more performant on the same hardware in the real world.
Ah yes please tell me which PC OEMs are using the M-series chips 🙄
Also AFAIK no other company makes their laptop top case/lid and hinges out of a single piece of metal. ALL other laptops glue/epoxy the hinges to the lid and they will (sooner rather than later) break. So if durability is what you’re looking for Mac’s are still built better than all other laptops.
What a strange boogeyman here. I have a 15 year old HP that was $400 when I bought it and the hinges are still fine.
Literally a lottery. I used to do laptop repair for my job. HP makes the shittiest computers I have EVER seen so you’re extraordinarily lucky.
I lost count of how many HP laptops with broken hinges came across my desk. Too many. If you don’t know this issues exists it’s willful ignorance
Try buying laptops at same price as MacBooks. Of course they’ll break if you buy a 100$ laptop from wish. Try galaxy books or Lenovo yoga
Have you ever actually seen a laptop lid just break off because the epoxy failed, or is this just a hypothetical? I used my last laptop for around 8 years, I took it with me to college every day in a backpack, on public transit. It got thrown around, scratched up, but the hinges didn’t break lol
Have you ever actually seen a laptop lid just break off because the epoxy failed
I have tbh
It was a shitty gaming laptop, but the hinges broke within a couple years. Still cost me nearly $2k at the time. I highly regret not buying the equivalent MacBook I was offered
Yes, several. Acer Nitro, Dell Inspiron 7000 series, several Lenovo Yogas, too many HPs to even keep track… If you have done laptop repairs at all for work in your life it’s honestly not even an uncommon sight.
Now in the last generation of MacBook apple made it so that the flex cables were too short and flexing the hinge back and forth over time would cause the screen to go, but I’ve never seen a MacBook with broken hinges from normal use.
Other brands do not do this because it is cheaper. Most do not pass those savings off to customers.
Ah yes please tell me which PC OEMs are using the M-series chips 🙄
RP2040. Cortex M-series. :wheeze:
hinges out of a single piece of metal.
I’m trying to imagine hinge that is one solid object. I guess you bend you laptop to close it.
I’m trying to imagine the mental gymnastics you must have gone through to conjure that up :wheeze:
Circumstances outside gaming where any high end laptop isn’t good enough is pretty niche and I don’t think this really matters to most consumers. I would prefer to run Linux but at work, my options are Windows or MacOS. It’s a pretty easy choice. Apple products are great when someone else is paying for them.
This is mainly due to Windows being incompetent getting an ARM version of Windows in a usable state.
Snapdragon claims to have a M2 level ARM chip for desktop/laptop. It will likely be pretty comparable to the M2, but what OS will it run? Not Windows. In fact at the enterprise level, Lenovo is selling laptops with Android in desktop mode.
So, once that chip is released, I am guessing you will see great options with Linux and Android. Who knows, maybe Microsoft will surprise us with an update that lets Windows run reasonable well on ARM.
Won’t someone please consider that Apple has to spend all the extra effort soldering the ram to the motherboard?? Only $200 extra is a steal!
They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.
Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.
Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.
Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
Lol no. My poor linux kernel barely keeps everything stable in 8GB and even then by shoving stuff into swapon zram.
I can just barely run a game and have a ton of FF tabs open + an IDE + discord + multiple desktops
WIndows basically dies once you hit the swap, and it usually starts at like 2GB used.
I’m assuming MacOS lies between Linux and Windows in memory management and performance, so it’ll definitely start lagging if you open too much.
And this is all ignoring the fact that this is a scam statement that should be struck down by the FTC. You can’t call an 8 gallon gas tank equivalent to a 16 gallon gas tank even if your car has better MPG. In that case you advertise the MPG. And in Apple’s case, it would be something like “X% less RAM usage per system process” which we all know doesn’t actually exist because its snake ass Apple.
And this is all ignoring the fact that this is a scam statement that should be struck down by the FTC. You can’t call an 8 gallon gas tank equivalent to a 16 gallon gas tank even if your car has better MPG.
lol good luck when Tesla literally charges $12k for “full self driving” software that does not do what’s advertised nor do what was promised over the last 10 years the CEO has been selling it. FTC and other orgs are toothless when it comes to false advertising, they’ll do nothing.
What helps these machines are built-in SSDs that operate at about 2 GB/s. If swapping out 2 GB of background tabs you’re not looking at when you switch to your IDE takes a second, you’re not really going to notice it. Only if you’re actually trying to operate with all the memory at the same time (big Kubernetes test suites or something) is when the swapping becomes noticeable.
My 0.7l wine bottle can fit in 3l of water
Absolutely hilarious. But I’ve heard MacBoys parrot this exact same line of propaganda for years now.
16GB are totally enough! Apple will manage my 20GB of required RAM in such a way that it’ll fit in my 16GB (actually ~15)
I have not. As someone in the Mac community I can tell you that Apple enthusiasts are Apple’s harshest critics. They are the type of people who care a lot about details like this, and have been criticizing Apple for years on the amount of RAM in entry level systems, as well as the absolute rip-off prices they charge for RAM upgrades.
If they are rip-off prices and bad RAM, then why continue buying them? Doesn’t that imply getting ripped off?
When I argued that for the money you shell out for a mac, you could get a machine with 1.5-2x the specs, the constant thing I heard was “yeah, but you can’t compare a SoC with a normal laptop/PC”. Then came the argument about RAM not mattering, CPU speed not mattering, and so on. It would be cheaper for companies to give devs linux machines than macs, but they don’t want to hear it because macs are now the table tennis tables, pool tables, arcade machines, avocado toast, and “we’re a family” of companies.
the mac community
holy fuck i hate consumerism why don’t you just kick me in the nuts instead of burning my eyes out like this
Yes, which is why anyone spending anywhere close to this on a laptop gets 32 GB RAM
So are they going to make the software smaller? What about iOS? Physically how does 8GB = 16GB? Can’t wait to see Photoshop open a RAW and run out of memory. I will say the M2 CPU was pretty slick and if I got one cheap I’d throw Linux on there.
This ^
Architecture changes can happen as much as they want, but there’s certain tasks that require a fixed amount of memory, and between that and poor developer optimization I doubt these improvements will be seen by the end user.
The CPUs really are great. It’s hard to want any other laptop when the performance/battery life are so great on the M series
I find it pretty easy to want other laptops because I don’t use Apple stuff because I dislike their UX. I know I’m weird but if I never have to get close to OSX or iOS I’m pretty happy.
Thanks for saying this, it’s such an unpopular opinion.
I got a Mac Mini last year and it was dreadful. I used nothing but the Mac for 2 months and still couldn’t get used to it. Half the things required the use of birth mouse and keyboard, neither is sufficient on its own for the most basic of things. Finally sold it off and went back to my PC with dual boot of windows and Ubuntu.
To be fair, the Mac mini is the worst way to experience macOS. macOS works much better with a trackpad and Apple keyboard, which eliminates a lot of your problems I think.
I also have a Mac mini and it barely gets used because it’s a shitty experience to use with a typical windows based mouse and keyboard.
Why don’t you use an apple kbd/mouse/trackpad with your macmini?
Honestly just because I didn’t have one and didn’t want to spend another ~$250 for the combo. I had spare windows keyboards already, so didn’t feel the need to replace them.
If I was to seriously use it again, I’d probably get one, but it’s more likely I’ll sell it to fund a new MacBook Pro
But how is that a criticism of the Mac mini? All it does is give you purchasing flexibility (eg if you already own Apple kbd/mouse). It is like you are implicitly arguing that they should raise the price and include those components. But that would be bad for some consumers that already have those items and would help nobody because you can already buy those separately.
I would definitely agree to that. Even as I used it, I could see certain elements designed in a way that would suit a trackpad better.
The worst part was the scrolling experience. It was either too slow or too fast. Could never scroll at a comfortable speed. Never feel this way when I sometimes use my colleagues’ macbooks (my company provides Macs, but I need certain applications which necessitate a Windows machine for me).
Yep, scroll speed is always wrong on a regular mouse from my experience.
Can’t blame you for not liking it, they really do somewhat punish you for using accessories outside their ecosystem.
It’s good at what it does, it certainly isn’t perfect. I have a mix of all 3 major OS’s running at most times and don’t really hold any loyalty to any one of them besides what’s easiest to do a current task with.
I call BS. My 8gb Mac Mini is terrible and constantly running out of memory.
I’m in need of a new laptop, but the lack of upgradeable RAM in these has really made it hard to justify. A minimum of 32gb, preferred 64gb (photographer working with very large files) costs hundreds extra and can’t be done by myself anymore. It’s also hard to find these ones used as the people who buy them have a specific use case and don’t replace them often.
Same here with my M1 MBA. Simply opening a browser with a bunch of tabs + a couple of productivity apps eats up your RAM.
Thanks for sharing. I was eyeing the M2 MBA for my wife because I’m pretty satisfied with my work M1 MBP (32GB RAM), but it seems even apple silicon won’t really do much with just 8GB RAM anyway.
I’m in need of a new laptop, but the lack of upgradeable RAM in these has really made it hard to justify.
Framework. Framework or desktop computer.
Framework doesn’t fit the usecase, and I’m not running Linux or windows on a laptop
I need a laptop with specifically huge battery life, a mainstream OS and Adobe compatibility.
Edit: You really shouldn’t be downvoted for suggesting Framework. For anyone who wants a decently powerful windows or Linux laptop, it’s a great product, it just unfortunately doesn’t fit the use case that I have in mind for a laptop.
Is it an M3?
M1, but same idea. One app can take 8gb of RAM easy on it. No matter the improvements to the architecture, they’re not going to be able to solve for poor implementation on the dev side
Just waiting for Apple to just start trademarking and “inventing” units…
Our new Mac has the highest amount of “Rapid Storage Blocks ™” of any Mac ever! Enough to run 30 “Safari Experiences ™”.
Check out their “SSD”:s, hard drives with SSD cache memory.
Not a bad idea (if made correctly and not creating two failur points) but it was so ridiculously small, both of them, like 32GB SSD for 1TB DD when 1TB SSD was for like 200€…
They haven’t sold FusionDrives in years.
You can’t play games so you won’t be able to notice the difference.
Tell that to my Ableton Live copy and all the plugins.
Ok this is completely valid. Those plugins suck the jooce.
Softwares and large files need ram too
But apple says Mac will get AAA games
Thanks to RAM Doubler and DoubleSpace you won’t feel the difference.
Edit: I had forgotten that it was first called Stacker before MS copied/reverse engineered it and sold it as DoubleSpace.
Downloadmoreram.com is going to get a lot more traffic
