- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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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.
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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.
“tHATs nOT tRuE the aRCHiteCTuRe iS cOmPlETlY dIffErEnT!!!1!11!!ONEONE!!!” <— Apple fanboys when this was predicted on launch of the M1 🤖
No you don’t understand the architecture is different and so the laws of physics don’t apply. Constantly energizing and de-energizing capacitors can only increase life expectancy, everyone knows that.
The only people more cultish than Apple fans are Tesla/Elongated Muskrat fans.
You don’t get the most valuable company by selling a SSD. So, yeah a new Mac of course.
Well they do charge particularly hard for SSDs as well. They’ve found a way to eat the cake twice.
I think SSDs are also soldered to the mainboard on most apple products.
The Mac Studio uses a standard NVMe SSD but if you replace it with anything that you didn’t buy from Apple with a 500%+ markup, the new drive simply won’t work.
Oh, my sweet summer child…
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
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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?
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.
Why not? There is a performance benefit to being closer to the CPU, and soldering gets you a lot closer to the CPU. That’s a fact.
Yeah but if you’re only putting 8 GB of RAM on then you’re also going to be constantly querying the hard drive. So any performance gain you get from soldering, is lost by going all the way to the hard drive every 3 microseconds.
It’s only better performance on paper in reality there’s no real benefit. If you can run an application entirely entirely within the 8 GB of RAM, and assuming you’re not running anything else, then maybe you get better performance.
And that’s the idea. Soldering memory is an engineering decision. How much to solder is a marketing decision. Since users can’t easily add more, marketing can upsell on more RAM.
It’s not “on paper,” the RAM itself is performing better vs socketed RAM. Whether the system runs better depends on the configuration, as in, did you order enough RAM.
I can’t tell if you’re a stooge or if you really think that. I hope you are stooge, because otherwise that’s a really stupid position you’ve decided to take and you clearly don’t actually understand the issue.
I’m pretty sure I do understand the issue. Here are some facts (and an article to back it up):
- putting memory closer to the CPU improves performance due to less latency - from 96GB/s -> 200 (M1) or 400 (M1 Max) GB/s
- customers can’t easily solder on more RAM
- Apple’s RAM upgrades are way more expensive than socketed options on the market
And here’s my interpretation/guesses:
- marketing sees 1 & 2, and sees an opportunity to do more of 3
- marketing probably asked engineering what the bare minimum is, and they probably said 8GB (assuming web browsing and whatnot only), though 16GB is preferable (that’s what I’d answer)
- marketing sets the minimum @ 8GB, banking on most users who need more than the basics to buy more, or for users to buy another laptop sooner when they realize they ran out of RAM (getting after-sale RAM upgrades is expensive)
So:
- using soldered RAM is an engineering decision due to improved performance (double socketed RAM w/ Intel on M1, quadruple on M1 Max)
- limiting RAM to 8GB is a marketing decision
- if you don’t have enough RAM, that doesn’t mean the RAM isn’t performing well, it means you don’t have enough RAM
Using socketed RAM won’t fix performance issues related to running out of RAM, that issue is the same regardless. Only adding RAM will fix those performance issues, and Apple could just as easily make “special” RAM so you can’t buy socketed RAM on the regular market anyway (e.g. they’d need a different memory standard anyway due to Unified Memory).
I have hated Apple’s memory pricing for decades now, it has always been way more expensive to add RAM to an Apple device at order time vs PC competitors (I still add my own RAM to laptops, but it’s usually way cheaper through HP, Lenovo, etc than Apple at build-time). I’m not defending them here, I’m merely saying that the decision to use soldered RAM makes a lot of engineering sense, especially with the new Unified Memory architecture they’re using in the M-series devices.
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?
Its not underpowered for average users, but it’s not meant for professional uses beyond basic office work.
Similar to the mini they offer the Studio which doesn’t have a monitor built in https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/compare/?modelList=Mac-studio-2023,Mac-mini-M2
Then for the higher end uses they offer a more typical tower format https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
But would an M1 Mini be similar to an M1 iMac?
As far as I understand, the Mac lineup don’t have screens, the IMacs are stationary and do have a screen, the MacBooks are the laptops.
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 don’t “struggle”. They are intentional and malicious decisions meant to drive revenue, as they have been since the beginning.
The E-Mac (looks like a toilet, sounds like a jet) came with 256 MB of RAM in one of the two slots, adding a 512MB stick was dirt cheap (everyone had at the very least 1GB on their PC), well it was dirt cheap except if you bought it from Apple…
It’s how Apple monetizes their customers. Figuring out an artificial shortcoming they can sell as an upgrade to them (check out dongles for example).
💸💸💸
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.
And if they raised the price to $250, they could go with a faster processor and better wifi!
And if they raised another 2000$, they could add an RTX 4090 graphics card
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.
Of course that notebook is bad but for the price point of shitty hardware, you get shitty hardware. Apple sells shitty hardware at the cost of premium hardware.
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
And it’s not on Linux! Wow. Sounds so horrible.
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
In addition to the raw compute power, the HP laptop comes with a:
- monitor
- keyboard/trackpad
- charger
- windows 11
- active cooling system
- enclosure
I’ve been looking for a lapdock [0], and the absolute low-end of the market goes for over $200, which is already more expensive than the hp laptop despite spending no money on any actual compute components.
Granted, this is because lapdocks are a fairly niche product that are almost always either a luxury purchase (individual users) or a rounding error (datacenter users)
[0] Keyboard/monitor combo in a laptop form factor, but without a built in computer. It is intended to be used as an interface to an external computer (typically a smartphone or rackmounted server).
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And worst part: they installed Windows on it.
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?
HP printer ink, that is their main source of revenue
I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D
And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…
4gb is acceptable. Some people just want a phone with a keyboard and bugger screen. Depends on the use case tho.
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.
I don’t consider that an “admission” at all…
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 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.
My main development machine has 8 GB, for what it’s worth. And most of the software in use nowadays was developped when 8GB was a lot of RAM
This. My Mac has 16GB but I use half of it with a Linux virtual machine, since I use my Mac to write Linux (server) software.
I don’t need to do that - I could totally run that software directly on my Mac, but I like having a dev environment where I can just delete it all and start over without affecting my main OS. I could totally work effectively with 8GB. Also I don’t need to give the Linux VM less memory, all my production servers have way less than that. But I don’t need to - because 8GB for the host is more than enough.
Obviously it depends what software you’re running, but editing text, compiling code, and browsing the web… it doesn’t use that much. And the AI code completion system I use needs terabytes of RAM. Hard to believe Apple’s one that runs locally will be anywhere near as good.
The lede by OP here contains this:
[…] addition to Xcode 16 […] 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
So either RecluseRamble meant that development with a feature like predictive code completion would work on 8 GB of RAM if you were using Linux or his comparison was shit.
That’s absolutely what I’m saying. Apple is just holding back that feature for upselling (as always) and because it’s hardly possible to debloat macOS.
Okay good, thanks for confirming. I remember Kate feeling very nice to use during my studies, more responsive than VS Code or Eclipse. But I also had 16Gigabytes of RAM, so I couldn’t be sure.
I don’t think anyone anywhere is claiming 8GB RAM is enough for software development
I do. GCC doesn’t need much. Vim/emacs work fine with 128 MB of RAM. With 1 GB you can run KDE and QtCreator instead of vim.
Macbook Pros aren’t really consumer grade hardware. Nor are they priced like consumer grade hardware.
Nor are they priced like consumer grade hardware.
Apple products in general aren’t.
That’s not true at all. Macbook Air starts at $900. You can even find a used M1 Air for cheaper. Absolutely was a steal compared to the budget thin laptops from Asus, Acer, etc. which start around $700. Once you go below $700 in laptop market, corners are cut. Perhaps Mediatek WiFi chips are used, laptop isn’t thin, touchpad is awful, screen colors are worse. Apple usually puts iPad + keyboard in that market segment instead.
Tl; dr: Apple products are more expensive than budget electronics but priced comparatively to items that compete with it. However, electronic prices in the high end tier are getting hirer.
So it’s more expensive than the competitors which also have real budget options at easily half the price but then “corners are cut”.
You know, I won’t even argue about the quality of Apple products - they are top tier. But calling the pricing “a steal” is just dishonest.
They have consistently been averaging at 150-200% the price of comparable hardware at least since the 90s. While there may be examples like yours where the gap is smaller, there are plenty of outrageous examples like the infamous monitor stand or some ridiculously priced chargers.
You are right about the accessories, horribly overpriced.
They have consistently been averaging at 150-200% the price of comparable hardware at least since the 90s
I used to fix laptops for a living. I worked at a place where we had used Apple products and stuff from other brands. Sure, you could buy a core i5 Toshiba laptop that had a similar Intel CPU (though Apple tended to use Intel chips with slightly more GPU performance) at a fraction of the price. The screen was garbage, the WiFi stalled, the touchpad was unusable, using the keyboard made the chassis flex, etc. The comparable products from Lenovo, Samsung, HP were similarly priced.
You can find some laptops with decent Intel or AMD chips for $600 these days. Usually they will be plastic or bricks. Which is fine of you don’t mind that. People want thinner products and that calls for a better design to (1) handle the heat or (2) buy the better binned CPU that operates better at lower frequencies.
Not only that but people were willing to buy the used Macbooks. Much better than the other brands where the plastic and PCBs were sent for recycling MUCH more often. Better for the environment.
Macbook Pros aren’t really consumer grade hardware.
They are even below 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.
I’ve run Plex servers on Mac Minis (M1). Docker on MacOS runs well finally — the issues that were everywhere a couple of years ago are resolved.
It ran very well on the hardware. The OP of this post is right, 8gb is not enough in 2024; however I would also wager that the vast majority of commenters have not used MacOS recently or regularly. It is actually very performant and has a memory scheduler that rivals that found on GNU/Linux. Apple’s users aren’t wrong when they talk about how much better the OS is than Windows at using memory.
Not sure about jellyfin, but I assume it uses ffmpeg? The M1 is fast enough that ffmpeg can re-encode raw video footage from a high end camera (talking file sizes in the 10s of gigabyte range) an order of magnitude faster than realtime.
That would be about 20W. Apparently it uses 5W while idle — which is low compared to an Intel CPU but actually surprisingly high.
Power consumption on my M1 laptop averages at about 2.5 watts with active use based on the battery size and how long it lasts on a charge and that includes the screen. Apple hasn’t optimised the Mac Mini for energy efficiency (though it is naturally pretty efficient).
TLDR if you really want the most energy efficient Mac, get a secondhand M1 MacBook Air. Or even better, consider an iPhone with Linux in a virtual machine - https://getutm.app/ - though I’m not sure how optimsied ffmpeg will be in that environment… the processor is certainly capable of encoding video quickly, it’s a camera so it has to be able to encode video well.
The M1 is fast enough that ffmpeg can re-encode raw video footage from a high end camera (talking file sizes in the 10s of gigabyte range) an order of magnitude faster than realtime.
Depending on codec and settings, this might be super fast and super slow.
No I do not, but I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t work though. I have PiHole, Apache, email, cups, mythtv and samba currently.
You can run Windows on 200 MB of RAM
I can run Arch Linux (BTW!) in a potato with starch RAM!
Honestly I have no qualms with MacOS. Probably the best OS. Problem is you can’t run it on anything that is repairable or upgradeable, and in 7 years it won’t be supported any longer. If they would just sell me a $500 lifetime license for MacOS that I could install on a Framework laptop, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. But they know they make way more money by not making that option available.
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As I said: feel free to upgrade your MacBook just don’t throw the one with a “meager” 8 gigs away since it’s totally usable with a non-bloated system.
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You replied, I replied back. That’s how public social media work. It’s unlikely we know each other.
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Do you actually want to run an application that doesn’t exist on Linux?
I use a virtual machines for the 2 or 3 times a year I need to use a couple garbage windows-only programs. Usually for configuring some arcane piece of proprietary hardware that people were getting rid of because it is incompatible with everything.
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“Disrespectful” would be telling you that you in particular should continue to use windows or mac, and avoid Linux like the plague.
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If I wanted your clothes, I wouldn’t have left them at goodwill.
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
Because that was what the article was about…I actually am a Linux user and fan, folks just misreading the intentions of my post.
I would genuinely love to see it, because I’m stuck on mac hardware to do my job and I really hope one day they get crucified for their anticompetative practices so I can freely choose the OS my business uses.
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.
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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.
Thanks for clarification.
I’ve never seen backbuffer called shadow copy.
And I have never heard it called “backbuffer”, so we are even.
I guess so.
Example: https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Default_Framebuffer#Double_buffering
EDIT: Wait. Do you have framebuffer at all? Because from sounds of it, you might not even have it at all. If you don’t store entire frame in RAM, then you don’t have framebuffer, not just backbuffer.
I never said anything about framebuffers. The 256x64 pixel display in 16 brightness levels probably has something comparable inside. I just tell it that i want to update a rectangle, and send it some data for that.
It should have.
Then, if you don’t store contents of entire screen in memory, which simple math says you can’t, I was partially wrong(depending on if you don’t count buffer in display as framebuffer) when interpreted “shadow copy” as backbuffer.
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…
NXP, fancy. I expected ST, AVR, nRF, WCH or some chinese cheaptroller.
Why them? Something to do with NFC?
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
The Voyager space probes disagree.
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
maybe in a browser using external resources. open some chrometabs to feel the pain. apple is a joke.
vscode + photoshop + illustrator + discord + arc + chrome + screen recording and still no lag
so not a single cool app and yet you own a computer
wtf does that mean
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
